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These mantles were seldom worn by either sex during the heat of the day, when the exposure of their persons was at first very revolting to a civilized eye. Towards evening several of the partners and clerks went on shore, where they were well received and hospitably entertained.

Coming down the street of the village was a procession. At its head walked two persons, evidently of high rank. They wore mantles, falling from their shoulders nearly to the ground, ornamented with designs executed in brightly colored feathers. They had circlets of gold round their heads, and heavy necklaces and bracelets of the same metal.

In the eyes of the French strangers it was all very marvellous the beautiful city with its stately palaces and hospitals, and the fair churches with their Gothic spires and pinnacles, their slender creamy shafts and deep red terra-cotta mouldings; the Milanese ladies with their jewelled robes and mantles embroidered with cunningly wrought devices, the flowering lilies and the garlands of laurel and myrtle all seen under the radiant sunshine and the deep blue of the Italian skies.

We knew how the great elms and the poplars and the birches clinging to the snowy sides interlaced their bare boughs into a network of bewildering complexity, and how the cedars and balsams and spruces stood in the bottom, their dark boughs weighted down with heavy white mantles of snow, and how every stump and fallen log and rotting stick was made a thing of beauty by the snow that had fallen so gently on them in that quiet spot.

The helmets and short mantles which Cook and King have described as worn by this people, were introduced by these white strangers. At first, the kings only appeared in this costume; but in Cook's time it was common also among the Yeris. Now that European fashions have quite banished those of the original inhabitants, it is only preserved and shown to strangers as a relic of the past.

And he has friends, too, dear to his heart Messer Jacopo, and the wise Lorenzo da Pavia, that master of organs whose hands were as deft in fashioning lyres and viols as in drawing out sweet sounds, with whom he loved to commune of musical instruments and eternal harmonies, and the boy Andrea Salai, with the beautiful curling hair, whom he loved to dress up in green velvet mantles, and shoes with rose-coloured ribbons and silver buckles.

Behind him his two girls, in short-skirted costumes, white stockings, and low shoes, their heads powdered and earrings sparkling in their ears, huddled together behind their father, wrapped up in their light mantles. One had kept her little black mask on her face, the other held hers in her hand.

The black vestments of secular justice, the white and black robe of Jean Blouyn, the silk symars, the red woollen mantles, the scarlet chaperons lined with fur, seemed faded and common. The Bishops seated themselves in the front row, surrounding Jean de Malestroit, who from a raised seat dominated the court. Under the escort of the men-at-arms Gilles entered.

At the feet of these noble ladies reclined a number of young seigneurs, dangling their little hats surcharged with plumes, while their mantles of silk and gold were spread loosely on the floor. And there, in more grave attire, were the professional litterateurs, such as Balzac, Voiture, Menage, Scudery, Chaplain, Costart, Conrad, and the Abbe Bossuet. The Cupid of the hotel was strictly Platonic.

As the night wore deeper into the dark hours these intervals of waking were rarer. Tscholens, muffled in bed draperies of otter furs and feathered mantles, his cane-wrought couch softened with panther and wolf skins, heard the wind going its rounds, and he realized that the direction of the currents of the air had veered and it came straight from the north. With the mere suggestion his heart sank.