g a
rest, for already his worshipers in the tap-room were so infatuated with
the great tale of the Royal Audience that they would have nothing else,
and so besotted with it were they that they would have cried if they
could not have gotten it.

Noel Rainguesson hid himself and heard it, and came and told me, and
after that we went together to listen, bribing the inn hostess to let us
have her little private parlor, where we could stand at the wickets in
the door and see and hear.

The tap-room was large, yet had a snug and cozy look, with its inviting
little tables and chairs scattered irregularly over its red brick floor,
and its great fire flaming and crackling in the wide chimney. It was a
comfortable place to be in on such chilly and blustering March nights
as these, and a goodly company had taken shelter there, and were sipping
their wine in contentment and gossiping one with another in a neighborly
way while they waited for the historian. The host, the hostess, and
their pretty daughter were flying here and there and yonder among the
tables and doing their best to keep up with the orders. The room was
about forty feet square, and a space or aisle down the center of it had
been kept vacant and reserved for the Paladin's needs. At the end of
it was a platform ten or twelve feet wide, with a big chair and a small
table on it, and three steps leading up to it.

Among the wine-sippers were many familiar faces: the cobbler, the
farrier, the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the armorer, the maltster, the
weaver, the baker, the miller's man with his dusty coat, and so on; and
conscious and important, as a matter of course, was the barber-surgeon,
for he is that in all villages. As he has to pull everybody's teeth and
purge and bleed all the grown people once a month to keep their health
sound, he knows everybody, and by constant contact with all sorts of
folk becomes a master of etiquette and manners and a conversationalist
of large facility. There were plenty of carriers, drovers, and their
sort, and journeymen artisans.

When the Paladin presently came sauntering indolently in, he was
received with a cheer, and the barber hustled forward and greeted him
with several low and most graceful and courtly bows, also taking his
hand and touching his lips to it. Then he called in a loud voice for a
stoup of wine for the Paladin, and when the host's daughter brought it
up on the platform and dropped her courtesy and departed, th