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 enjoy the fun of the fair as frankly as any sober burgess or loose-tongued clerk. This year, however, a greater honor still was in store for the fair and its fellowships of vagrant playmakers. It was known to a few, who were privileged to share the secret, and also privileged to share the enjoyment with which that secret was concerned, that his Sovereign Majesty Louis of Bourbon, thirteenth of his name of the kings of France, intended to visit incognito the fair at Neuilly. He was to go thither accompanied by a few of the choicest spirits of his court, the most excellent of the rakes and libertines who had been received into the intimacy of the king's newly found liberty, and those same rakes and libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king