ets of a company of Free Companions. He could have told how seven
gentlemen that were named Staupitz, Faenza, Saldagno, Pepe, Pinto, Joel,
and AEsop had been sent to dwell and travel in Spain at the free charges
of Prince Louis de Gonzague, with the sole purpose of finding a man and a
child who so far had not been found, though it was now seventeen years
since the hounds had been sent a-hunting.

But though a year may seem long in running, it runs to its end, and
seventeen years, as any school-boy will prove to you, take only seventeen
times the length of one year to wheel into chaos. So these seventeen
years had been and had ceased to be, and it was again summer-time, when
many people travelled from many parts of the world for the pleasure of
visiting Paris, and some of those travellers happened to come from Spain.

X

A VILLAGE FAIR

It was a custom of old standing in the little village of Neuilly to hold
a fair every year in the full flush of the spring. The custom of this
fair went back for ages; antiquarians declared that they could find
traces of it so far off as the reign of the good King Dagobert of the
yellow hair, who had, as immortal song has consecrated, a trifling
difficulty with his smallclothes; at least, it was certain that it dated
from a very long time, and that year by year it had grown in importance
with the people who go to fairs for the purposes of business, and in
popularity with the people who go to fairs for the purposes of pleasure.
Hither came half the tumblers, rope-walkers, contortionists, balancers,
bear-leaders, puppet-players, wrestlers, strong men, fat women, bearded
ladies, living skeletons, horrible deformities, lion-tamers, quack
doctors, mountebanks, and jugglers who patrolled Europe in those days,
and earned a precarious living and enjoyed the sweets of a vagabond
freedom in the plying of their varied trades.

At one time the fair of Neuilly had attracted only the humbler folk from
Paris to taste of its wares, but as it had gradually grown in importance,
so, accordingly, it had increased the number of its clients. First, the
humbler burgesses came with their wives to gape and stare at the marvels
it displayed; then their example was followed by the wealthier of their
kind, and fur and velvet moved freely among the rabble of the fair. Now,
in the year with which we deal, it had been for some little time the
fashion for gentlefolk to drift in merry parties to Neuilly and e