King—­and there were always near him men skilful in the working and making of engines.  One would show him some new thing pictured upon paper; another would bring a little image, so to speak, of an engine, made in wood or iron.  Never was a child more occupied with a toy than was King Richard with these things.  I am myself no judge of such matters, but I have heard it said by men well acquainted with them, that the King had a marvellous understanding of such contrivances.  But these cares were a great hindrance to recovery.  So at least I judged, and doubtless it had been thus in the case of most men.  But the King was not as others, and, as it seemed to me, he drove away his disease by sheer force of will.

On a certain evening when King Richard was mending apace of his fever one carne to his tent—­an English knight, Hugh Brown by name—­ who brought the news that the King of the French had commanded that a general assault should be made on the town the very next day.  The King would fain know the cause of this sudden resolve.  “Well,” said the English knight, “it came about, as I understand, in this fashion.  The Turks have this day destroyed two engines of King Philip on which he had spent much time and gold.”  “Aye!” said King Richard, “I know the two; the cat and the mantlet.  They are pretty contrivings the both of them, but I set not such store on them as does my brother of France.”  And here I should say that the cat was like to a tent made of hides long and narrow and low upon the ground, with a pointed end as it might be a ploughshare, which could be brought up to the walls by men moving it from within, and so sheltered from the stones and darts of the enemy.  As for the mantlet, it was made in somewhat the same fashion, only it was less in size, nor was it to be brought near to the wall.  King Philip loved dearly to sit in it, cross-bow in hand—­the French, I noted, like rather the cross-bow, the English the long-bow—­and would shoot his bolts at any Turk that might show himself upon the walls.

But to come back to the knight’s story.  “An hour or so after noon, when the cat had been brought close to the wall, and the mantlet was in its accustomed place, some fifty yards distant, the Turks made an attack on both at the same moment of time.  On to the cat they dropped a heavy beam; and when this with its weight had broken in the roof, or I should rather say the back of the cat, a great quantity of brushwood, and after the brushwood a whole pailful of Greek fire [Footnote:  A composition, supposedly of asphalt, nitre and sulphur.  It burnt under water.]—­the machine was over near to the wall, so that these things could be dropped on it from above.  At the mantlet they aimed bolts from a strong engine which they had newly put in place, and by ill luck broke it through.  And verily before the nimblest-tongued priest in the whole realm of England could say a hunting-mass, both were in a blaze.”

What the man might mean by the priest and the hunting-mass I knew not then, but heard after, that when a noble will go forth hunting, the service which they call the mass is shortened to the utmost, and the priest that can say it more speedily than his brethren is best esteemed.