Meanwhile the milkmaid looked at Florian. She smiled, and her naturally high coloring was heightened. “—So I do not pause for frivolous reasons. I pause because one must be logical. For, now that I think of it, to rescue people from enchantment is a logical proceeding only when one is certain that this rescuing involves some positive gain to the world. Do you drive on a little way, and wait for me,” said Florian, aloud, to his hirsute attendants, “while I discover from this enticing creature what sort of persons we have resurrected.” The hairy servants of Janicot obeyed. Florian, very spruce in bottle-green and silver, dismounted from his white horse, and in the ancient roadway now overgrown with grass, held amicable discourse with this age-old milkmaid. She proved at bottom not wholly unsophisticated. And when they parted, each had been agreeably convinced that the persons of one era are much like those of another. Florian thus came to the gates of Brunbelois logically reassured that he had done well in reviving such persons, even at the cost of destroying charming monsters and of the labor involved in removing so many heads. He counted smilingly on his finger-tips, but such was his pleased abstraction that he miscalculated, and made the total eight. He found that, now the enchantment was lifted, Brunbelois showed in every respect as a fine old castle of the architecture indigenous to fairy tales. Flags were flying from the turrets; sentinels, delightfully shiny in the early morning sunlight, were pacing the walls, on the look-out for enemies that had died many hundred years ago; and at the gate was a night-porter, not yet off duty. This porter wore red garments worked with yellow thistles, and he seemed dejected but philosophic. “Whence come you, in those queer dusty clothes?” inquired the porter, “and what is your business here?” “Announce to King Helmas,” said Florian, as he brushed the dust from his bottle-green knees, and saw with regret that nothing could be done about the grass-stains, which, possibly, had got there when he knelt to cut off the tarandus’ head,—“announce to King Helmas that the lord of Puysange is at hand.” “You are talking, sir,” the porter answered, resignedly, “most regrettable nonsense. For the knife is in the collops, the mead is in the drinking-horn, the eggs are upon the toast, the minstrels are in the gallery, and King Helmas is having breakfast.” “None the less, I have important business with him—” “Equally none the less, nobody may enter at this hour unless he is the son of a king of a privileged country or a craftsman bringing his craft.” “Parbleu, but that is it, precisely. For I bring in that wagon very fine samples of my craft.” The porter left his small grilled lodge. He looked at the piled heads of the monsters, he poked them with his finger, and he said mildly, “Why, but did you ever!” Then he returned to the gate.