would have availed him little in the circumstances; for his horse, as if
in league with the disaffected, ran full tilt towards the solemn equipage
of the Duke, which the projecting lance threatened to perforate from
window to window, at the risk of transfixing as many in its passage as
the celebrated thrust of Orlando, which, according to the Italian epic
poet, broached as many Moors as a Frenchman spits frogs.

On beholding the bent of this misdirected career, a panic shout of
mingled terror and wrath was set up by the whole equipage, insides and
outsides, at once, which had the happy effect of averting the threatened
misfortune. The capricious horse of Goose Gibbie was terrified by the
noise, and stumbling as he turned short round, kicked and plunged
violently as soon as he recovered. The jack-boots, the original cause of
the disaster, maintaining the reputation they had acquired when worn by
better cavaliers, answered every plunge by a fresh prick of the spurs,
and, by their ponderous weight, kept their place in the stirrups. Not so
Goose Gibbie, who was fairly spurned out of those wide and ponderous
greaves, and precipitated over the horse's head, to the infinite
amusement of all the spectators. His lance and helmet had forsaken him in
his fall, and, for the completion of his disgrace, Lady Margaret
Bellenden, not perfectly aware that it was one of her warriors who was
furnishing so much entertainment, came up in time to see her diminutive
man-at-arms stripped of his lion's hide,--of the buff-coat, that is, in
which he was muffled.

As she had not been made acquainted with this metamorphosis, and could
not even guess its cause, her surprise and resentment were extreme, nor
were they much modified by the excuses and explanations of her steward
and butler. She made a hasty retreat homeward, extremely indignant at the
shouts and laughter of the company, and much disposed to vent her