"Muirtown Races 'ill be nothing to it," said Ritchie. "I'll lay anybody a shilling that Speug coups (capsizes) Dunc the first meeting; but"--feeling as if it were almost too good to be true--"I dinna believe a word o't. Nestie is a fearsome liar." And after the school had spoken of nothing else for a day, Dunc Robertson asked the Count boldly whether such things were true. "_Mon ami_," said the Count, who had tasted Nestie's romance with much relish, "you will pardon me, but it is a _banalité_, that is what you call a stupidity, to ask whether so good a _jeu d'esprit_ is true. True? Truth is a dull quality, it belongs to facts; but Nestie, he does not live among facts, he flies in the air, in the atmosphere of poetry. He is a _raconteur_. A tournament with knights on the North Meadow--good! Our little Nestie, he has been reading _Ivanhoe_ and he is a troubadour." And the Count took off his hat in homage to Nestie's remarkable powers as an author of fiction. "But yes, it will be a tournament; but not for the body, for the mind. My dogs are jolly dogs; they can run, they can leap, they can swim, they can kick the ball; now they must think, ah! so deep. They must write their very best words, they must show that they have beautiful minds; and they will do so, I swear they will, in the tournament, which will not be on the meadow--no; too many cows there, and too many washers of clothes--but in seclusion, in the class-room of that brave man called the Bulldog. It will be a battle," concluded the Count with enthusiasm, "of heads: and the best head, that head will have the prize, _voilà_." "Silence!" and Bulldog brought his cane down upon his desk that Wednesday afternoon when the whole upper school was gathered in his class-room, bursting with curiosity. "The Count has a proposeetion to lay before you which he will explain in his own words and which has the sanction of the Rector. Ye will be pleased to give the Count a respectful hearing, as he deserves at yir hands." And Bulldog was there to see that the Count's deserts and his treatment strictly corresponded.