CHAPTER X.
THE BATTLE OF THE BOWMEN.
Although there lay an immense number of castles and abbeys between Windeck and Cleves, for every one of which the guide-books have a legend and a ghost, who might, with the commonest stretch of ingenuity, be made to waylay our adventurers on the road; yet, as the journey would be thus almost interminable, let us cut it short by saying that the travellers reached Cleves without any further accident, and found the place thronged with visitors for the meeting next day.
And here it would be easy to describe the company which arrived, and make display of antiquarian lore.

Now we would represent a cavalcade of knights arriving, with their pages carrying their shining helms of gold, and the stout esquires, bearers of lance and banner.

Anon would arrive a fat abbot on his ambling pad, surrounded by the white-robed companions of his convent.

Here should come the gleemen and jonglers, the minstrels, the mountebanks, the party-colored gipsies, the dark-eyed, nut-brown Zigeunerinnen; then a troop of peasants chanting Rhine-songs, and leading in their ox-drawn carts the peach-cheeked girls from the vine-lands.

Next we would depict the litters blazoned with armorial bearings, from between the broidered curtains of which peeped out the swan-like necks and the haughty faces of the blond ladies of the castles.