“Dare I!” blustered the King, “and why not, pray?  If there be more to say, tell it,” he commanded the mountebanks.

“Ay,” they answered eagerly, “we can indeed prove that the boy is ours.”

“Tell how you came by him,” interrupted the Hermit, in a tone not to be disobeyed.

Tonio answered sullenly:—­

“We have told already.  We bought him for a gold piece, of a fisherman on a distant coast.  He had found the babe, nearly dead with cold and hunger, floating in a basket on the sea.  It was a castaway, a foundling; no one wanted it.  We took it away with us, and had hard work to make it live.”

“Is that all?” asked the Hermit.  “Was there nothing to prove that this is the same child?” He said this in a loud voice so that every one could hear.

“Proof!” cried Tonio, shaking his fist at John fiercely.  “Who can mistake him in that suit, the very one we gave him?  Look at his mop of yellow tow and his eye with the brown spot over it.  No one who has seen it could forget that spot.  Ay, there is still another way to prove him ours.  I see the gleam of silver around his neck.  He still wears the chain and the bit of silver which he dares not remove, because there is magic in it, they say.  It was on his neck when the fisherman found him.  Look, and see if we do not say truth!”

John still stood motionless, looking in the Hermit’s face.  But at these last words the old man stepped behind him and drew the silver talisman from the boy’s breast, laying it out on his green silk bosom, where it glittered for all to see.

Cecco and Tonio and the Giant gave a cry of triumph.  But from the crowd behind them rose a murmur of different meaning.  Men began to crowd forward eagerly.

“Yes, look!” cried the Hermit, pointing at the medal.  “The Cross of the good man John, the friend of King Cyril!  Which of you does not know and love it?”

The murmur of the crowd swelled into a shout,—­“Who is he?  Who is the lad?  We will know!”

“Who but John,” answered the Hermit, with kindling eyes.  “Who but John, the good man’s son,—­my brother’s son.  I know, for I christened the child, and I saw the King hang this Cross about the baby’s neck, a Cross like the one he had given John himself.  This is the child who disappeared fourteen years ago.  The King sent him away to be killed.  But the servant to whom the task fell was less cruel.  The child was set adrift on the ocean, and escaped as you have heard.  Will you let him be lost again?”

“No!  No!” roared the crowd.  “He shall not go!  He shall not go!” And they seized the three mountebanks and hustled them away.

With a shout the King’s own guards rushed forward to help in this matter.  There was a cry at the back of the platform.  The King had fallen in a fit.  But few at the moment were thinking of him.  The people were throwing up their caps and dancing joyously.