"Let them love Jesus!" replied the warrior. "But this is what I heard last evening, when I was about to fight the Lion."
"I pray you," said Gottfried, do not talk any more now; it will increase your sufferings."
"I do not suffer," replied the chevalier, "This leg is very painful, it is true; but it is only a leg," added he, smiling. "Ought I to make myself uneasy about it?"
"You fought with a lion, then, last evening?" asked Erard, with curiosity, "Was he very large and strong?"
Gottfried would have sent Erard away, for he feared for him the story of the chevalier; but the latter asked that he might be allowed to remain. "Erard must become a man," added he. "My children know what a battle is. Let Erard then not be afraid at what I am about to say.
"My name is Theobald," continued the chevalier, "and from my earliest youth I was surnamed the iron-hearted, because I never cried at pain, and never knew what it was to be afraid. My father, one of the powerful noblemen of Bohemia, accustomed me, from my earliest years, to despise cold, hunger, thirst and fatigue; and I was scarcely Erard's age when I seized by the throat and strangled a furious dog that was springing upon one of my sisters.
"War has always been my life. This has now lasted nearly four years, and my sword has not been idle. The Hussites and the Calixtans[[2]] have felt it."
At these words Erard, who was sitting beside the bed of the chevalier, rose and went to a window, at the farther end of the room.
"I had spent some weeks with my family, when I learned that the enemy was approaching, and that one of their principal chiefs had just joined them. This chief was the Lion."
Erard, rising. Grandpapa, perhaps it was----.