The dryad : $b a novel

Simon of Rouen—Simon, the soldier of fortune—trampled the grass of the Eleusinian wood with a heart as light as his wallet. His garments were wrecks of former splendor, degraded now by the tramping of high-road by day and the sleeping beneath hedge by night; but Simon carried himself as if he bobbed on the high tide of prosperity. A great sword clung to his thigh; his right hand brandished a massive oaken cudgel; a rusty iron lantern hung from his girdle, incongruous enough. He whistled as he went a tripping tune, and now and then he shouted some words to it: "When I was no more than a span, Honey and gingerbread pleased me highly." That was the beginning of it, and, for much of the journey, was the middle of it and the end of it as well, for it was Simon's own song, and Simon's first adventure in the lyrical, and Simon was but a child at rhyming. He had a grudge against the world, and he wanted to sing his grievance the better to blow it abroad, but he would have given any man his fist in the face who dared to call him poetical. It was naught to him that the ground he covered was sown with splendid memories. Truly he knew nothing about them, but he would have cared as little for the condition of his journey had he been wiser. To the mind fanciful those memories might seem as many as the leaves that year by year had greened and withered and fattened the forest soil through long generations of men. Greek gods, Greek kings, Greek heroes, beautiful Greek women, had been the children of that magic land. But Simon, the soldier of fortune, whistling as he fared, cared no jot for his lack of knowledge. Though he had left behind him the land of Agamemnon, and was setting his face steadily towards the city of Theseus, for him Peloponnesus was the place where the French noble dwelt who called himself Duke of Corinth, against whom he nursed his grudge; for him the capital of Attica was the city where the French noble reigned who called himself Duke of Athens, from whom he hoped to gain favor. For Simon, the soldier of fortune, flourished in the dusk of the thirteenth and the dawn of the fourteenth centuries of the world's age since the