The place which Duke Baldwin had appointed for the holding of the tournament was excellently well chosen. One of the greenest meadows of the Athenian plain facing the sea, with the Acropolis for a background, had been enclosed with great hoardings of painted wood, red and white, the duke's own colors. Under the shadow of the Acropolis a great gallery had been erected, glittering with gilding and brilliant with silk, to form a bower from which the Duchess of Thebes and the fair ladies of Baldwin's court might witness the encounters. Behind these, still within the enclosures, were two pavilions set apart, one for the use of the Duchess of Thebes and the other for Duke Baldwin, who took no part in that day's sport save as on-looker and arbiter. The pavilions of the knights were ranged inside the lists, and at the door of each a page in some fantastic habit stood holding his master's shield. Here and there in the wooden barrier encircling the lists were apertures guarded by mighty men-at-arms, brothers in size and strength to those that wardered the door of the ducal court-yard. At each of these doorways a herald was stationed to make sure that none entered the lists unprivileged. The Duke Baldwin was a great stickler for custom, past-master of punctilio. He knew all that there was to know of the laws that had hitherto governed the gentle art of tourney, and thinking that nothing in the world exists so good that it could not be bettered, especially by Duke Baldwin of Athens, he had devised many novel regulations in gracious methods for mimic combat, which pleased him highly the more they rendered complicated and intricate the laws of the royal sport. He rejoiced to invent some new rule for the disqualification of a combatant who might to the unconcerned eye of the actual spectator appear to be the victor. His opponent might, indeed, lie sprawling on the grass, fairly pushed from his horse by the heavy impact of the blunt-headed spear, but if that spear had not struck in precisely the right place permissible at that very moment of the play, according to the laws of Duke Baldwin, or had struck in some place not permissible, again according to the laws of Duke Baldwin, it was the sprawler on the ground who received the laurel and not he who rode his horse victoriously amid the cheers of the multitude. It followed, naturally enough, that Duke Baldwin's regulations were not always and altogether popular with the knights who encountered under his eyes. But the duke was so deeply versed in the whole history of his sport, and always so readily recited precedents from this great tournament here and that noble jousting there, that it would have been difficult, even had it been profitable or even advisable, to argue a point with him, and as he was autocrat of Athens, strong of hand and choleric of nature, few ever did venture to argue with him.