occupied with that garment and
its inmate till they had disappeared; and sometimes for a good while
after.

He often put Gerard to the blush by talking his amazing German to such
females as he caught standing or sitting indoors or out, at which they
stared; and when he met a peasant girl on the road, he took off his cap
to her and saluted her as if she was a queen; the invariable effect of
which was, that she suddenly drew herself up quite stiff like a soldier
on parade, and wore a forbidding countenance.

"They drive me to despair," said Denys. "Is that a just return to a
civil bonnetade? They are large, they are fair, but stupid as swans."

"What breeding can you expect from women that wear no hose?" inquired
Gerard; "and some of them no shoon? They seem to me reserved and modest,
as becomes their sex, and sober, whereas the men are little better than
beer-barrels. Would you have them brazen as well as hoseless?"

"A little affability adorns even beauty," sighed Denys.

"Then let these alone, sith they are not to your taste," retorted
Gerard. "What, is there no sweet face in Burgundy that would pale to see
you so wrapped up in strange women?"

"Half-a-dozen that would cry their eyes out."

"Well then!"

"But it is a long way to Burgundy."

"Ay, to the foot, but not to the heart. I am there, sleeping and waking,
and almost every minute of the day."

"In Burgundy? Why, I thought you had never--"

"In Burgundy?" cried Gerard contemptuously. "No, in sweet Sevenbergen.
Ah! well-a-day! well-a-day!"

Many such dialogues as this passed between the pair on the long and
weary road, and neither could change the other.

One day about noon they reached a town of some pretensions, and Gerard
was glad, for he wanted to buy a pair of shoes; his own were quite worn
out. They soon found a shop that displayed a goodly array, and made up
to it, and would have entered it, but the shopkeeper sat on the doorstep
taking a nap, and was so fat as to block up the narrow doorway; the very
light could hardly struggle past his "too, too solid flesh," much less a
carnal customer.

My fair readers, accustomed, when they go shopping, to be met half way
with nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles, and waved into a seat, while
almost at the same instant an eager shopman flings himself half
across the counter in a semi-circle to learn their commands, can best
appreciate this mediaeval Teuton, who kept a shop as a dog keeps a
kennel, and