“It is here,” said Sir Dinadan.
“Farewell, my child,” said the Professor to Miss Baffin, making a futile attempt to bend his elbows so that he could embrace her. “Farewell!” and the Professor tried to kiss her, but he merely succeeded in injuring her nose with the visor of his helmet.
“O pa!” said Miss Baffin, weeping, “if you should be killed.”
“No danger of that love, none at all. I am perfectly safe. I feel exactly as if I were a cooking-stove, to be sure; but you may depend upon my giving a good account of myself. And now, dear, adieu! Ho, there!” exclaimed the Professor, with faint reminiscences of the tragic stage coming into his mind. “Bring me my steed!”
The determined efforts of four muscular men were required to mount the Professor upon his horse. And when he was fairly astride, with his lance in his hand, he felt as if he weighed at least three thousand pounds, and the weapon seemed quite as large as the jib-boom of the “Morning Star.”
The warrior did his best to sit his horse gracefully; but the miserable beast pranced and curveted in such a very unreasonable manner that his spectacles were continually shaking loose, and in his efforts to fix them, and at the same time to hold his horse, he lost control of his lance, and came near impaling two or three of the spectators.
Sir Dinadan’s own groom then took the bridle-rein, and leading the horse quietly to the jousting-ground put him in place directly opposite to Sir Bleoberis, whose lance was in rest, and who evidently intended to spit the Professor through and through at the first encounter.
The Professor really felt uncomfortably at a disadvantage in his iron-clad condition, and he began to think that the sports and combats of the olden time were perhaps not so interesting after all, when brought within the range of practical experience.
Suddenly the herald’s trumpet sounded a blast. The Professor had not the least notion of the meaning of the sound, but Sir Bleoberis started promptly towards him, and the Professor’s horse, trained at jousting, also started. The Professor was not quite ready, and he pulled the rein hard while trying to fix his lance in its rest. This caused the horse to swerve sharply around, whereupon the warrior’s spectacles came off, and the horse dashed at full speed to the side of the jousting-ground, bringing the half-blinded Professor’s lance up against a tree, into which the point stuck fast. The Professor was hurled with some violence to the ground, and the horse ran away.
When they picked him up and unlatched his helmet, he was bleeding at the nose.