Scott's The Talisman - condensed Author:Walter Scott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. IT was on the decline of a Syrian day that Richard lay on his couch of sickness, loathing it as much in his mind as his illness made it irksome to... more » his body. His bright blue eye, which at all times shone with uncommon keenness and splendour, had its vivacity augmented by fever and mental 5 impatience, and glanced from among his curled and unshorn locks of yellow hair, as fitfully and as vividly as the last gleams of the sun shoot through the clouds of an approaching thunder-storm, which still, however, are gilded by its beams. His manly features shewed the progress of wasting illness, 10 and his beard, neglected and untrimmed, had overgrown both lips and chin. Beside his couch stood Thomas de Vaux, a giant in stature, one of the chief champions of England on the Scotch border. 15 " So thou hast no better news to bring me from without, Sir Thomas?" said the king, after a long and perturbed silence, spent in the feverish agitation which we have endeavoured to describe. " All our knights turned women, and our ladies become devotees, and neither a spark of 20 valour nor of gallantry to enlighten a camp which contains the choicest of Europe's chivalry. Ha!" "The truce, my lord," said De Vaux, with the same patience with which he had twenty times repeated the explanation—" the truce prevents us bearing ourselves as 25 men of action ; and, for the ladies, I am no great reveller, as is well known to your Majesty, and seldom exchange steel and buff for velvet and gold. But thus far I know, that our choicest beauties are waiting upon the Queen's Majesty 30 and the Princess, to a pilgrimage to the convent of.Engaddi, to accomplish their vows for your Highness's deliverance from this trouble." "And is it thus," said Richard, with the impatience of indi...« less