Halting outside the inn, Bloodworthy relates that his Majesty was immediately struck by a winsome face at an upper window. "Lud!" he cried laconically, and dismounted, taking several dogs from his hat as he did so, and one from his pocket; for he was devoted to animals, Bloodworthy goes on to say, and often spent days stroking their soft ears abstractedly.

Look at the portrait of her, painted by Coddle at the height of her amazing beauty: note the sensitive nostrils, the delicate little mouth, and those eyes the gayest, merriest eyes that ever charmed a king's heart; and her hair that "mass of waving corn," as Bloodworthy describes it in his celebrated book of "International Beauties."

Sarah a rose-leaf, a crumpled atom, dropped as it were from some heavenly garden into the black times of the Merry Monarch when, according to Bloodworthy, virtue was laughed to scorn and evil went unpunished; when, according to Follygob, virginity was a scream, and harlotry a hobby; and when, according to Sheepmeadow, homeliness was sin, and beauty but a gilded casket concealing vice and depravity unutterable.

Bloodworthy describes for us the plan by which Lord Ffraddle was to acquaint the village with the sex of the child. If it were a boy, red fire was to be burnt on the south turret, and if a girl, green fire was to be burnt on the north turret; but unfortunately, he goes on to tell us, owing to some misadventure blue fire was firmly burnt on all the turrets.