He set out in high spirits with a chosen band of followers,
and beat up all the country far and wide around both the Ouse
and the Trent; but fortune did not seem disposed to second
his diligence, for no vestige whatever could he trace of the earl.
His followers, who were only paid with the wages of hope,
began to murmur and fall off; for, as those unenlightened
days were ignorant of the happy invention of paper machinery,
by which one promise to pay is satisfactorily paid with another
promise to pay, and that again with another in infinite series,
they would not, as their wiser posterity has done,
take those tenders for true pay which were not sterling;
so that, one fine morning, the knight found himself sitting
on a pleasant bank of the Trent, with only a solitary squire,
who still clung to the shadow of preferment, because he did
not see at the moment any better chance of the substance.
The knight did not despair because of the desertion of his followers:
he was well aware that he could easily raise recruits if he could
once find trace of his game; he, therefore, rode about indefatigably
over hill and dale, to the great sharpening of his own appetite
and that of his squire, living gallantly from inn to inn when
his purse was full, and quartering himself in the king's name
on the nearest ghostly brotherhood when it happened to be empty.
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