25 Chapters
I took lodgings that evening with some rough soldiers who kept guard over the town gate, and slept as soundly by their watch-fire as though my country clothes were purple, and a stony bench in an ang…
Now, when that fair young English girl, at her father’s voice, turned to acknowledge my presence—thinking it was some other new knight of the many who came there every hour, she lifted her eyes to mi…
Grim and angry, all that night I chewed the bitter cud of my rejection, and before the new day was an hour old determined life was no longer worth the living in that place. I determined to leave thos…
Strange, eventful, and bloody, were the incidents that followed. King Edward, burning for glory, had landed in Normandy a little time before, had knighted on these yellow beaches that gallant boy his…
Such sights and scenes as these will show the chivalrous army with whom I served in but an indifferent light. And ill it would beseem me, who remember this time with pride, and the gloomy pleasure of…
A volume might well be written on what I must compress into this chapter. On the narrow canvas of these few pages must be outlined the crowded incidents of that noble fight above Crecy, whereof your …
Unwashed, unfed, my dinted armor on me still—battle-stained and rent—unhelmeted, ungloved, my sword and scabbard cast by my hollow shield in a dark corner of the tent, I watched, tearless and stern, …
I cannot say, distinctly, what roused me next morning. My faculties were all in a maze, my body cramped and stiff as old leather—no doubt due to the wetting of the previous evening, or my hard couch—…
You—happy—across whose tablets a kind fate draws the sponge of oblivion even while you write, who leave the cup half emptied, and the feast half finished; you, from whose thoughts ambition passes in …
I slept all that night a deep, unbroken slumber, waking with the first glimpse of morning, calm and refreshed, but very sleepily perplexed at my surroundings. It was only after long cogitations that …