He bent and extinguished the fire of sticks. The two went on together, the sun behind them.... Once Vulcan had had a stithy in this country. Masses of dark rock were everywhere, old, cooled lava, dark hills, mountains and peaks. Chestnut and oak ran up the mountain-sides, the valleys lay sunken, there was a silver net of streams. Hamlets hid beneath hills, village and middling town climbed their sides, castles crowned the heights, in vales by the rivers sat the monasteries. The region was divided between smiling and frowning. Its allegiance was owed to a lord of storms, who, in his nature, showed now and then a broad golden beam. At present no wild beast from without entered the region to ravage; there it smiled secure. But Duke Richard drained it of money and men; its own kept it poor. He drained all his vast duchy and fiefs of his duchy, as his brothers drained their lands and his father drained England. They were driving storms and waters that whirled and drew; one only was the stagnant kind that sat and brewed poison. This region was a corner of the great duke’s wide lands, but the duke helped himself from its purse, and the larger number of its men were gone to his wars. But for all that, the jongleur and the herd-girl met a many people and saw towns that to them from Roche-de-Frêne seemed at ease, relaxed, and light of heart. Baron and knight and squire and man were gone to the wars, but baron and knight and squire and man, for this reason, for that reason, remained. Castle drawbridges rested down, portcullises rusted unlowered. The roads, bad though they were, had peaceful traffic; the fields had been harvested, and the harvest had not gone to feed another world. The folk that remained were not the fiercer sort, and they longed for amusement. It rested not cold, and folk were out of doors. The country-side, mountain and hill and valley, hung softened, stilled, wrapped in a haze of purple-grey. Jongleur’s art, human voice at its richest, sweetest, most expressive—such was wanted wherever now they went. They had jongleur’s freedom in a singing time. Travelling on, they made pause when they were called upon. The jongleur sang the heart out of the breast, the water into the eyes, high thoughts and resolves into the upper rooms of the nature. The dark-eyed, still girl, his companion and _mie_, sat on doorstep, or amid the sere growth of the wayside, or stood in castle hall or court, or in the market-place of towns, and listened with the rest to the singing voice and the song that it uttered. The few about them, or the many about them, sighed with delight, gave pay as they were able, and always would have had the jongleur stay, sing on the morrow, and the morrow’s morrow. But jongleurs had license to wander, and no restlessness of theirs surprised. Day by day the two were able, after short delays, to take the road again. They came to Excideuil. “Is the duke here?” “No. He was here, but he has gone to Angoulême.”