At any other moment, the young lieutenant would have been amused at the enthusiasm and tactics of the veteran of the Indian wars; but this was not a moment for jest. He rode forward, hailing the Captain by name; and the old soldier soon forgot his rage and his followers together, to weep in the arms of his recovered child. CHAPTER XI. _2d Clown_. But is this law? _1st Clown_. Ay, marry is 't; crowner's-quest law. HAMLET. We draw a curtain over the scene of distress displayed in Gilbert's Folly, when the body of Henry Falconer, late the gayest of its inmates, was laid at the feet of his father and sister; and pass to that which followed, when a justice of the peace, acting in the place of a coroner, assembled a jury of inquest around the bloody couch, to determine from the melancholy story of the dead, the fatal responsibility of the living. The official was a personage who exercised, along with the duties of a magistrate, the equally dignified functions of mine host of the Green Tree Tavern; and was, indeed, no less a man than that rival of Elsie Bell, whose formidable opposition, many years before, had completed the downfall of the Traveller's Rest. He was now a man of substance, portly in person, and inflated by the dignity of office into a certain dignity of manner; his step was like the roll of a ship, and when he breathed, it was with a forcible and majestic expiration of breath, like the snort of a war-horse. He had been noticed, as he advanced in the world, for the independence,--or, to speak more strictly, the tyranny with which he conducted himself among his guests; not, indeed, that he ever beat, or even committed them, as, in virtue of his office, he might have done; but because, as he said, he heartily 'despised peing pottered mit 'em.' He was not austere or quarrelsome of disposition, but he was a lover of his ease in his inn; and his despotism was shown less in violent opposition than in contemptuous indifference of all humours save his own. He abhorred all fault-finding, but as he equally detested the trouble of reprehending it, he devised a scheme by which discontent was either nipped in the bud, or severely reproved as soon as made manifest, and all without any labour on his own part. He caused to be painted on his sign-board, having daubed off the green tree to make room for it, the following cabalistic legend,-- _Der ist glücklich, welcher zufrieden ist._ which he was accustomed to translate, _viva voce_, to all incapable of understanding it, in a quaternion as remarkable for its expressive simplicity as for its philosophic comprehensiveness: He vich is vise Neffer grumples nor cries; He vich is neither vise nor ciffil May go to the diffil.