"Now, my son, let us consider. You heard what Christian said but now of the need of the House of Anjou for faithful service. A trouvère can go where others cannot. He knows what others dare not ask. He can say what others cannot. Were it not for that prince of mischief and minstrelsy, Bertran de Born, Henry and his folk would have been at peace long ago. Know men's hearts, and though you are a beggar in the market-place, you can turn them as a man turns a stream with a wooden dam. You shall go with Christian to Troyes and thence to Tours, and I will keep your little friend here until he is restored, and bring him to you when I come to that place. If search is made for you it will be made in Venice, where they think you have gone." Ranulph, with the aid of his new friends, went forth with proper harp and new raiment a day or two afterward, and repaid the loan of old Tomaso when he met the latter in Tours some six months later. He did not give up his studies in the Grasshoppers' Library, but the lean years were at an end both for him and for Zipero. THE WOOD-CARVER'S VISION The Hounds of Gabriel racing with the gale, Baying wild music past the tossing trees, The Ship of Souls with moonlight-silvered sail High over storm-swept seas, The faun-folk scampering to their dim abode, The goblin elves that haunt the forest road, With visage of the snake and eft and toad,-- I carve them as I please. Bertrand's gray saintly patriarchs of stone, Angelo the Pisan's gold-starred sapphire sky, Marc's Venice glass, a jeweled rose full-blown,-- Envy of none have I. Mine be the basilisk with mitered head, And loup-garou and mermaid, captive led By little tumbling cherubs who,--'tis said,-- Are all but seen to fly. Why hold we here these demons in the light Of the High Altar, by God's candles cast? They are the heathen creatures of the night, In heavenly bonds made fast. They are set here, that for all time to be, When God's own peace broods over earth and sea, Men may remember, in a world set free, The terrors that are past. V THE BOX THAT QUENTIN CARVED HOW QUENTIN OF PERONNE LEARNED HIS TRADE WHEN A BOY IN AMIENS Any one who happened to be in the market-place of Amiens one sunshiny summer morning in the last quarter of the twelfth century, might have seen a slim, dark, dreamy-eyed boy wandering about with teeth set in a ripe golden apricot, looking at all there was to be seen. But the chances were that no one who was there did see him, because people were very busy with their own affairs, and there was much to look at, far more important and interesting than a boy. In fact Quentin, who had come with his father, Jean of Peronne, to town that very morning, was not important to any one except his father and himself.