The men stood prepared to fight, if necessary; the bolts were withdrawn, and out came the knights, as merry as larks, making the air resound with their laughter. The farmer and his friends were still more amazed, as, for their very souls, they could see nothing in discomfiture and imprisonment to make any man laugh. But the fact was now certain, that the prisoners were right glad and hearty; and the sincerity of their good humour was to be tested in a manner that seemed as extraordinary as anything that had yet been witnessed on this eventful evening. Not one of them ever mentioned the beggar or the loss of the horse--a circumstance remarkable enough; and, not contented with this scrupulous regard of the treaty, the chief of them, slapping the farmer on the back, proposed that, as they had so unceremoniously broken up the sports of the evening, they should not depart till they saw the dancing again commenced, and till they each and every man of them should dance a reel with the blooming maidens they had seen on their entry. This request, though as remarkable as the former proceedings, was received with loud applause. The parties were again collected; Tam the piper again took his seat; the ale flowed in its former abundance; and in a short time the brave knights were seen tripping it gaily through the mazes of the merry dance. This was another change of the moral peristrephic panorama of that extraordinary evening; and, as the farmer looked at the merry knights with their surtouts of green, and their buff baldricks and clanging swords, busy dancing in that very barn where they had, a few minutes before, been fighting like Turks, he held up his hands in wonder, and would have moralised on the chances and changes of life, if a barn had been a proper place, a Maiden a proper occasion, and the hour of relief from a great evil a proper time for the indulgence of such fancies.
The knights danced only for a very short time; and there can be no doubt that they did their best to please themselves, and to exhibit to their host and his friends the greatest triumphs of the gay art; but all their efforts only tended to bring into higher contrast their best and most intricate evolutions, their highest and most joyous humours, their pleasantest and merriest tricks, with the devil-daring, jumping, roaring, laughing, kissing, and hugging of the jolly gaberlunzie, who outran all competitors in the production of fun, as much as ever did an Arab steed the plough-nag at a fair gallop. There was not a knight among them that could, as the saying goeth, "hold the candle to him;" and as for the private opinions of the "damysells," the very best judges of the properties of man, they would not have given one hair in the beard of the jolly gaberlunzie for all the short crops of the chins of all the knights put together. His thefts and vagaries were lost, like spots on the sun, in the blaze of his convivial splendour; and, coming and flying off like a comet, as he had done, he had left them in a darkness which all the tiny lights of the good-natured crew of bannerets could not illumine beyond the twinkle that only served to exhibit more clearly their gloom. _Sic transit gloria mundi!_--they might never see his like again.