When Conon decides to add a tourney as a climax to his fête, a score of carpenters are hired down from Pontdebois to help out the levy of peasants in preparing the lists and lodges. Some of the guests have already come to the wedding and the adubbement, but many more arrive merely for the knightly contests. For these, of course, the baron affords only limited hospitality--a good place to pitch their tents, water and forage, with perhaps an invitation to the castle hall at dinner time to certain leaders. Many visitors can get accommodation in the better houses in the village, or at the monastery; but, the weather being fine, the majority prefer to set out their pavilions by the Claire, and the night before the sports begin there seem to be tents enough for an army. [Sidenote: The Lists and the Lodges] The visitors come in their best bliauts and armor. Certain powerful counts collect as many lesser nobles as possible, even making up bands of twenty knights, twenty squires, a great number of ladies and waiting women, also some hundreds of ignoble servitors. Except for the presence of the women and the omission of military precautions, you might think them going to an ordinary muster for war. Meantime, in the wide exercise ground where Sire Aimery had been dubbed, the special lists are made ready. These are simple affairs, something like a race course of other days. Two pairs of strong wooden palisades are erected. The outer line is shoulder high; the inner is lower and has many openings. Between the two lines is the space for spare horses, squires, attendants, and heralds; also for privileged spectators. The humbler onlookers will peer standing over the outer palisade, but behind and above this rise the series of lodges, shaded with tentlike canopies, floored with carpets, and gay with pennons. In them will be stationed the ladies and the older, less martial knights. The space within the lists is some hundred yards long by fifty wide. That evening Conon and Sire Eustace survey the decorations, the forest of banners waving over the colored pavilions of the visitors, and listen complacently to the glad hum of voices and the jongleur's chants everywhere arising. "Ah, fair Baron," says the seneschal, "all France will talk of this spear breaking until Christmas! It will be a great day for St. Aliquis." At gray dawn the heralds from the castle go through the avenues of tents, calling, monotonously: "Let the jousters make ready! Let the jousters make ready!"