"Not so," said the other. "If I had not been looking for you, you never would have found me. Things often happen in that manner. If what we are looking for does not look for us, we never find it. But what is this about your mother and a letter? Sit down here, in this bit of shade, and make these things plain to me." Louis accepted this invitation, for the sun was beginning to be warm, and he sat down by the man, at the foot of a tree. "I do not believe you are Jasto," he said, looking at his companion. "Your clothes are not torn. I was told to look for a man with torn clothes." [Illustration: LOUIS FINDS ONE OF THE HIGHWAYMEN A GOOD-NATURED FELLOW.] "Torn clothes!" exclaimed the other. "What are you talking of? Not torn? Why, boy, my clothes are more torn and are worse torn and have staid torn longer than the clothes of any man in all our goodly company. But they have been mended, you see, and that is what makes them observable among so many sadly tattered garments." Louis looked at the coarse jerkin, breeches, and stockings of the man beside him. They were, certainly, torn and ripped in many places, and the torn places were of many curious shapes, as if the wearer had been making a hurried journey through miles of bramble bushes; but all the torn places were carefully mended with bright-red silk thread, which made them more conspicuous than if they had not been mended at all. "I see that they have been torn," said Louis, "but they are not torn now." "A great mistake, my good sir page—a great mistake," said the other; "once torn, always torn. If my clothes are mended, that but gives them another quality. Then they have two qualities. They are torn and they are mended. If one's clothes are torn, the only way to have clothes that are not torn is to have new ones. Think of that, boy, and make no rents in yourself nor in your clothes. Although mending can be done very well," he added, looking complacently at his breeches, "the evil of it is, though, that it always shows." "I could mend better than that," said Louis. "That is to be hoped; it is truly to be hoped," said the other, "for you have had better chances than I. This red silk, left in our hands by a fair lady, who was taking it to waste it in embroidery in some friend's castle, was all the thread I had for my mending. Now, you could have all things suitable for your mending, whether of clothes or of mind or of body, if it should so happen that you should have rents in any of these. But tell me, now, about your letter." "There is nothing to tell," said Louis, "excepting that your Captain wishes me to write a letter to my mother, urging her to send good ransom for me, and that he said you could give me pen and ink and something to write upon."