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'Who in turn taught it to you, cried Saxon triumphantly. 'I have no great store of metal with me, good sir, but there are my head-piece, back and breast-plate, taslets and thigh-pieces, together with my sword, spurs, and the buckles of my harness.

Bayard kept his presence of mind, and in order to escape instant death, slipped gently from his horse, cast off his helmet and the thigh-pieces of his armour, and then managed to creep on hands and knees along a ditch until he reached his own people.

A hundred steps farther on they came upon the few poor archers on the watch, who fled, crying, "Alarm! Alarm!" But they were so hotly pursued that the foe was at the barriers as soon as they were. The Good Knight, who in such danger never slept without his steel gauntlets and thigh-pieces, with his cuirass by his side, was soon armed, and mounted his horse, which was already saddled.

Many warriors were thereto attracted by courage as much as by desire; but all idly and perilously wasted their pains. Ragnar, learning from men who travelled to and fro how the matter stood, asked his nurse for a woolen mantle, and for some thigh-pieces that were very hairy, with which he could repel the snake-bites.

A pair of taslets or thigh-pieces, with guards for the upper arm and gauntlets, were all borrowed from the old Parliamentary equipment, together with the heavy straight sword and pair of horse pistols which formed the usual weapons of a cavalier. My father had chosen me a head-piece in Portsmouth, fluted, with good barrets, padded inside with soft leather, very light and yet very strong.

Thigh-pieces of steel, then termed taslets, met the tops of his huge jack-boots, and completed the equipage of a well-armed trooper of the period. The appearance of the horseman himself corresponded well with his military equipage, to which he had the air of having been long inured.

The palmer wore his headpiece over his hood, and, with his breast-plate over his gown, which, tucked up with more than John Chandos' prudence, but half revealed the thigh-pieces beneath it, he was equally conspicuous and grotesque. A body of mounted men could now be plainly seen rapidly advancing.

Dragging along his ponderous boots, encumbered with thigh-pieces, gauntlets, corslet, and back-piece, not to mention the buff jerkin which he wore under all these arms, talking of his former exploits the whole way, though Ranald paid not the slightest attention to him, Captain Dalgetty contrived to follow his guide a considerable space farther, when the deep-mouthed baying of a hound was heard coming down the wind, as if opening on the scent of its prey.

The sun shone down on their steel caps, their breastplates and thigh-pieces, and made their swords glitter like silver. They formed a pretty picture, with their gay flags and fluttering pennons, and they rode with all the confidence of victors. From a trot they broke into a gallop, and we held our breath as, gathering momentum, they swept proudly down on our right wing.

There was great determination about the mouth, and about the physiognomy generally, while at the same time there was something of the wildness of fanaticism in his looks. He was habited in a buff jerkin, with a brown, lackered, breast-plate over it, thigh-pieces of a similar colour and similar material, and stout leathern boots.