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"Your uplifted voice comes from an unexpected quarter, minstrel," said a melodious voice, and the maiden whom he had encountered in the wood stood before him. "What crime have you now committed?" "An ancient one. I presumed to raise my unworthy eyes "

It was like a garden in which Lalla Rookh might have wandered by moonlight talking sentimental philosophy with her minstrel prince under old Fadladeen's chaperonage, or a garden that Boccaccio might have peopled with his Arcadian fine ladies and gentlemen. It was emphatically a poet's or a painter's garden, not a gardener's garden.

And yet many a gaily-dressed bark stopped at the shore, there was no lack of minstrel bands, grand processions passed on to the western heights; but the Nile boats bore the dead, the songs sung here were songs of lamentation, and the processions consisted of mourners following the sarcophagus. We are standing on the soil of the City of the Dead of Thebes.

It was a new song; every Saturday the Minstrel came with fresh verses in honor of the daughter of the house. The charm of wild and barbarous music, admired since childhood, compelled all to listen. The sacred emotion of poesy made these simple souls thrill in advance. The poor consumptive began to sing, accompanying each verse with a final clucking which shook his chest and reddened his cheeks.

What did the immortal poet of France say of the bird in his garret, in 'L'Oiseau de Mon Crenier'? What did he say: 'Sing me a song of the bygone hour, A song of the stream and the sun; Sing of my love in her bosky bower, When my heart it was twenty-one. "Come now, who will renew his age or regale her youth with the divine notes of nature's minstrel?

"I understand," said the minstrel, "that you intend to inflict upon me a punishment which is foreign to the genius of the English laws, in that no proof is adduced of my guilt.

Story-tellers had generally much the same stock-in-trade stories of Arthur, Charlemagne, Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of Southampton, and so on. If a minstrel had skill of his own, he would invent some new episode, and so, perhaps, turn a compliment to his patron by introducing the exploit of an ancestor, at the same time that he made his story last longer.

"Yet I would fain hear," answered the knight, "your own minstrel account of those legends which have induced you, for the amusement of future times, to visit a country which, at this period, is so distracted and perilous."

Then she seemed to me to be jesting, like that scribe who told me of Krophi and Mophi; for Rhodopis lived in the days of King Amasis and of Sappho the minstrel, and was beloved by Charaxus, the brother of Sappho, wherefore Sappho reviled him in a song. How then could Rhodopis, who flourished more than a hundred years before my time, be living yet?

In the garden below, a minstrel was making hay in the sun of the royal glance by a rapid improvising of flattering verses which he was shouting lustily to his twanging harp, but now the King's hand rose curtly. "Your imagination has no small power, friend, yet save some virtues in case you should want to sing to me again," he advised as he tossed down a coin and turned away.