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One morning, still in the month of July, I broke away from the charms of Ambialet, and shouldering again my old knapsack which, by travelling hundreds of miles in all weathers, had become disgracefully shabby, but which was a friend too well stitched together to be thrown aside on account of ill-looks I continued my journey up the valley of the Tarn.
But the way thou camest was with a greedy face set towards Ambialet, and so will we send thee back. "As the Viscount promised so they did, my children; strapping Master Tibbald with his face to the mule's rump, and with a merry crowd speeding him from the frontier." Brother Marc Antoine lay back against his apple-tree, laughing.
This man, having arrived at Ambialet in the dusk, had no sooner sought out an inn than he inquired, 'Who regulated this feast? The innkeeper directed him to the place, where he found the King of Youth setting up a maypole by torchlight; whom he plucked by the sleeve and drew aside for a secret talk.
'Take him to the window. "So to the window they led him. And I leave you, my children, to guess if he rubbed his eyes as they looked out upon the market-place of Ambialet, and upon his own mules standing ready-caparisoned before the door of the Council-house, and, beyond them, upon the tall Maypole, and the King of Youth, with his officers, fitting their ribbons upon it in the morning sunlight.
"Beyond doubt, my daughter, it would have countenanced no such invention; for the town held its charter from the Viscounts of Beziers and Albi, and might consume only such corn and wine as were grown in the Viscounty." "Parbleu!" the baker shrugged his shoulders "in the matter of wine we should fare well nowadays under such a rule!" "In these times Ambialet grew its own wine, and by the tun.
The castle was soon afterwards the meeting-place of De Montfort and Raymond VI.; but the interview, which it was hoped would lead to peace, had no such result, and the war was carried on in Languedoc and Guyenne with renewed fury. Ambialet was enjoying comparative freedom and self-government in an age when many a town was still in the midnight darkness of feudal servitude.
"The pity of it the treat you are missing!" but Zephirine snored on, contemptuous. After this had lasted, as I say, some ten minutes, Pere Philibert held up a hand. "I was about to tell you," said he, "something of this Ambialet of which you two are citizens.
"This Tibbald, then, having drawn the King aside, began cautiously and anfractuously and per ambages to unfold his plan. The same he had smuggled into Ambialet after dusk, covering his mules' panniers with cloths and skins of Damas and Alexandria, and it now lay stored in the stables at the back of his inn.
After flowing about two miles round a high promontory, where dark crags jut above the dark woods, the stream returns almost to the spot from which it was compelled to deviate, and the lower water is only separated from the upper by a few yards of rock. There are several similar phenomena in France, but there is none so remarkable as that at Ambialet.
"Seems a funny thing," mused the Elder; "an' you at this moment owin' me no less than seventy-five pound!" Sam Tregenza settled himself down in his chair and nodded as he lit pipe. "Nothin' like friendship, after all," he said. "Now you're talkin' comfortable!" Playing truant. He who has not seen Ambialet, in the Albigeois, has missed a wonder of the world.
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