When the Paladin presently came sauntering indolently in, he was received with a cheer, and the barber hustled forward and greeted him with several low and most graceful and courtly bows, also taking his hand an touching his lips to it.  Then he called in a loud voice for a stoup of wine for the Paladin, and when the host’s daughter brought it up on the platform and dropped her courtesy and departed, the barber called after her, and told her to add the wine to his score.  This won him ejaculations of approval, which pleased him very much and made his little rat-eyes shine; and such applause is right and proper, for when we do a liberal and gallant thing it is but natural that we should wish to see notice taken of it.

The barber called upon the people to rise and drink the Paladin’s health, and they did it with alacrity and affectionate heartiness, clashing their metal flagons together with a simultaneous crash, and heightening the effect with a resounding cheer.  It was a fine thing to see how that young swashbuckler had made himself so popular in a strange land in so little a while, and without other helps to his advancement than just his tongue and the talent to use it given him by God—­a talent which was but one talent in the beginning, but was now become ten through husbandry and the increment and usufruct that do naturally follow that and reward it as by a law.

The people sat down and began to hammer on the tables with their flagons and call for “the King’s Audience!—­the King’s Audience! —­the King’s Audience!” The Paladin stood there in one of his best attitudes, with his plumed great hat tipped over to the left, the folds of his short cloak drooping from his shoulder, and the one hand resting upon the hilt of his rapier and the other lifting his beaker.  As the noise died down he made a stately sort of a bow, which he had picked up somewhere, then fetched his beaker with a sweep to his lips and tilted his head back and rained it to the bottom.  The barber jumped for it and set it upon the Paladin’s table.  Then the Paladin began to walk up and down his platform with a great deal of dignity and quite at his ease; and as he walked he talked, and every little while stopped and stood facing his house and so standing continued his talk.

We went three nights in succession.  It was plain that there was a charm about the performance that was apart from the mere interest which attaches to lying.  It was presently discoverable that this charm lay in the Paladin’s sincerity.  He was not lying consciously; he believed what he was saying.  To him, his initial statements were facts, and whenever he enlarged a statement, the enlargement became a fact too.  He put his heart into his extravagant narrative, just as a poet puts his heart into a heroic fiction, and his earnestness disarmed criticism—­disarmed it as far as he himself was concerned.  Nobody believed his narrative, but all believed that he believed it.