She would remain to deliver the goods, of course.
"Well, then, Sandy, as our enterprise is handsomely and successfully ended, I will go home and report; and if ever another one--" "I also am ready; I will go with thee." This was recalling the pardon.
"How?
You will go with me?
Why should you ?" "Will I be traitor to my knight, dost think?
That were dishonor.
I may not part from thee until in knightly encounter in the field some overmatching champion shall fairly win and fairly wear me.
I were to blame an I thought that that might ever hap." "Elected for the long term," I sighed to myself.

"I may as well make the best of it." So then I spoke up and said: "All right; let us make a start." While she was gone to cry her farewells over the pork, I gave that whole peerage away to the servants.

And I asked them to take a duster and dust around a little where the nobilities had mainly lodged and promenaded; but they considered that that would be hardly worth while, and would moreover be a rather grave departure from custom, and therefore likely to make talk.

A departure from custom--that settled it; it was a nation capable of committing any crime but that.

The servants said they would follow the fashion, a fashion grown sacred through immemorial observance; they would scatter fresh rushes in all the rooms and halls, and then the evidence of the aristocratic visitation would be no longer visible.
It was a kind of satire on Nature: it was the scientific method, the geologic method; it deposited the history of the family in a stratified record; and the antiquary could dig through it and tell by the remains of each period what changes of diet the family had introduced successively for a hundred years.
The first thing we struck that day was a procession of pilgrims.
It was not going our way, but we joined it, nevertheless; for it was hourly being borne in upon me now, that if I would govern this country wisely, I must be posted in the details of its life, and not at second hand, but by personal observation and scrutiny.
This company of pilgrims resembled Chaucer's in this: that it had in it a sample of about all the upper occupations and professions the country could show, and a corresponding variety of costume.
There were young men and old men, young women and old women, lively folk and grave folk.