We may form some idea of the practical jests of those days, from an anecdote told by Froissart. Gaston de Foix had complained, one cold day, of the scanty fire which his retainers kept up in the great gallery. Whereupon one of the knights descended to the court-yard, where stood several asses laden with wood. One of them he seized, wood and ass together, and staggering up-stairs into the gallery, flung the whole, the ass heels uppermost, on to the fire. “Whereof,” says Froissart, “the Earl of Foix had great joy, and so had all they that were there, and had marvel of his strength, how he alone came up all the stairs with the ass and the wood on his neck.” Gaston was but a lazy knight. It was high noon, Froissart tells us, before he rose from his bed. He supped at midnight; and when he issued from his chamber to proceed to the hall where supper was laid, twelve torches were carried before him, and these were held at his table “by twelve varlets” during the time that supper lasted. The Earl sat alone, and none of the knights or squires who crowded round the other tables dared to speak a word to him unless the great man previously addressed him. The supper then must have been a dull affair. The treasurer of the Collegiate Church of Chimay relates in a very delicate manner how Gaston came to murder his little son. Gaston’s wife was living apart from her husband, at the court of her brother, the King of Navarre, and the “little son” in question was residing there on a visit to his mother. As he was on the point of returning, the king of Navarre gave him a powder, which he directed the boy to administer to his father, telling him that it was a love-powder, and would bring back his father’s affection for the mother. The innocent boy took the powder, which was in fact poison; and a night or two after his return to Ortez, an illegitimate son of Gaston found it in the boy’s clothes. The base-born lad informed against his brother, and when Gaston had given the powder to a dog, which immediately died, he could scarcely be kept from poniarding his son upon the spot. The poor child was flung into a dungeon, where, between terror and despair, he refused to take any food. Upon being told of this, the earl entered the chamber in which the boy was confined, “he had at the same time a little knife in his hand, to pare withal his nails.... In great displeasure he thrust his hand at his son’s throat, and the point of his knife a little entered into his throat into a certain vein; and the earl said, ‘Ah, traitor, why dost thou not eat thy meat?’ and therewith the earl departed without any more doing or saying.” Never was brutal murder more daintily glozed over, but Froissart is so afraid that he may not have sufficiently impressed you with a conviction of its being a little accident, that he goes on to say “The child was abashed, and afraid of the coming of his father, and was also feeble of fasting, and the point