carried on the game among themselves, with shouts of not too
boisterous amusement; the sport continuing till the flight of the
ball could no longer be traced along the dusky aisles.

Though the home of his childhood was but a humble one--one of those
little cliff-houses cut out in the low chalky hillside, such as are
[59] still to be found with inhabitants in certain districts of
France--there were some who connected his birth with the story of a
beautiful country girl, who, about eighteen years before, had been
taken from her own people, not unwillingly, for the pleasure of the
Count of Auxerre. She had wished indeed to see the great lord, who
had sought her privately, in the glory of his own house; but,
terrified by the strange splendours of her new abode and manner of
life, and the anger of the true wife, she had fled suddenly from the
place during the confusion of a violent storm, and in her flight
given birth prematurely to a child. The child, a singularly fair
one, was found alive, but the mother dead, by lightning-stroke as it
seemed, not far from her lord's chamber-door, under the shelter of a
ruined ivy-clad tower.

Denys himself certainly was a joyous lad enough. At the cliff-side
cottage, nestling actually beneath the vineyards, he came to be an
unrivalled gardener, and, grown to manhood, brought his produce to
market, keeping a stall in the great cathedral square for the sale of
melons and pomegranates, all manner of seeds and flowers (omnia
speciosa camporum), honey also, wax tapers, sweetmeats hot from the
frying-pan, rough home-made pots and pans from the little pottery in
the wood, loaves baked by the aged woman in whose house he lived. On
that Easter Day he had entered the [60] great church for the first
time, for the purpose of seeing the game.