my birth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descent from a king’s leman, acquired at second-hand from the slums of London, was a better man than I was. Such a personage was fawned upon in Arthur’s realm and reverently looked up to by everybody, even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence, and his morals as base as his lineage.

There were times when he could sit down in the king’s presence, but I couldn’t. I could have got a title easily enough, and that would have raised me a large step in everybody’s eyes; even in the king’s, the giver of it. But I didn’t ask for it; and I declined it when it was offered. I couldn’t have enjoyed such a thing with my notions; and it wouldn’t have been fair, anyway, because as far back as I could go, our