No More Learning

In one he found the three knights with their squires, all red
with revelling, and all asleep, in the second he saw the girls with
their scornful smiles frozen stiff in slumber, and in the third lay
Gawain with Ettarre, the golden crown he had won for her at the joust on
her forehead, both sleeping.

Pelleas drew back as if he had touched a snake.

"I'll kill them just as they lie," he cried in a passion. "O! to think
that any knight could be so false! "

But he was too manly to kill anyone in sleep, so he just laid his sword
across their throats and passed out to his horse, crushed his saddle
with his thighs, clenched his hands together and groaned.

"I loathe her now just as much as I loved her! " he cried, and dashing
his spurs into his horse he bounded out into the darkness and never came
back.

Meanwhile Ettarre, feeling the cold sword on her neck, awoke.

"Liar! " she cried to Gawain, as she saw that it was the sword of
Pelleas, "you haven't killed Pelleas, for he's been here and could have
killed us both just now. "

And ever after that, as those who tell the story say, the proud and
scornful Ettarre sighed for Pelleas, the one true knight in the world,
her only faithful lover, and at last pined away because he never came
back.




THE LAST TOURNAMENT.


One day while King Arthur and Sir Lancelot were riding far, far beneath
a winding wall of rock they heard the wail of a child.

A half-dead oak tree climbed up the sides of the rock and up in mid-air
it held an eagle's nest.
Through its branches rushed a rainy wind and
through the wind came the voice of a little child. Lancelot sprang up
the crag and from the nest at the tree-top he brought down a baby girl.
Round her neck was twined a necklace of rubies, wound round and round
three times.

Arthur took the baby and gave it to Queen Guinevere, who soon loved it
very tenderly and named her "Nestling. " But Nestling had caught a
terrible cold in her strange little home in the wild eagle's nest and
died. And after that whenever the Queen looked at the ruby necklace it
made her very sad so she gave it to Arthur and said:

"Take these jewels of our Dead Innocence and make them a prize at a
tournament. "

"Just as you wish," cried the King, "but why don't you wear the diamonds
that I found for you in the tarn, which Lancelot won for you at the
jousts? "

"Don't you know that they slipped out of my hands the very day that he
gave them to me, while I was leaning out of the window to see Elaine in
the barge on the river? But these rubies will bring better luck than
that to the lady who gets them, for they didn't come from a dead king's
skeleton, but from the body of a sweet baby girl. Perhaps, who knows,
the purest of your knights will win them at the jousts for the purest of
my ladies. "

So the great jousts were proclaimed with trumpets that blew all along
the streets of Camelot and out across the faded fields to the farthest
towers, and everywhere the knights armed themselves for a day of glory
before the king.

But just the day before they were to be held, as King Arthur sat in his
great hall, a churl staggered in through the door; his face was all
striped with the lashes of a dog whip, his nose was broken, one eye was
out, a hand was off and the other hand dangled at his side with
shattered fingers.

"My poor Churl," cried the king, full of indignant pity, "what beast or
fiend has been after you? Or was it a man who hurt you so? "

"He took them all away," sputtered the churl, "a hundred good ones. It
was the Red Knight.