As damnable treason as ever I heard whispered! I congratulate you, sir, on your boldness.

As for you,' he continued, turning with an ugly sneer to the landlord, 'I shall know now the company you keep! I was not aware that my wine wet whistles to such a tune!' But if he was startled, the innkeeper was furious, seeing his character thus taken away; and, being at no time a man of many words, he vented his rage exactly in the way I wished, raising in a twinkling such an uproar as can scarcely be conceived.

With a roar like a bull's, he ran headlong at the table, and overturned it on the top of me.

Fortunately the woman saved the lamp, and fled with it into a corner, whence she and the man from the Chateau watched the skirmish in silence; but the pewter cups and platters flew spinning across the floor, while the table pinned me to the ground among the ruins of my stool.

Having me at this disadvantage--for at first I made no resistance the landlord began to belabour me with the first thing he snatched up, and when I tried to defend myself, cursed me with each blow for a treacherous rogue and a vagrant.