And the ambassador, craving permission to retire, hastened to translate his benevolence into action.
Farini was still unconscious when the ambassador and his attendants reached him; but the French nobleman proved as good as his word, for he had the injured man, whose thigh-bone was broken, conveyed in a litter to Leith, and from there shipped to France. But it was many a day before the Scottish nobles ceased to deplore the untimely departure of their gold-maker.
The King A-Begging
“The King had composed a poem in thirteen stanzas, entitled ‘The Beggar Man.’”
Literary ambition has before now led men into difficulties. The king had completed a poem in thirteen stanzas entitled “The Beggar Man,” and the prime requisite of a completed poem is an audience to listen to it. In spite of the fact that he wrote poetry, the king was a sensible person, and he knew that if he read his verses to the court, the members thereof were not the persons to criticise adequately the merits of such a composition; for you cannot expect a high noble, who, if he ever notices a beggar, merely does so to throw a curse at him, or lay the flat of his sword over his shoulders, to appreciate an epic which celebrates the free life led by a mendicant.