“No, it isn’t. You’ve opened your house to Jones and me in the most generous way; Jones was remarking upon it today, just before you came back from the village; for although he wouldn’t be likely to say such a thing to you—because Jones isn’t a talker, and is diffident in society—he has a good heart and a grateful, and knows how to appreciate it when he is well treated; yes, you and your wife have been very hospitable toward us—”
“Ah, brother, ’tis nothing— such hospitality!”
“But it is something; the best a man has, freely given, is always something, and is as good as a prince can do, and ranks right along beside it—for even a prince can but do his best. And so we’ll shop around and get up this layout now, and don’t you worry about the expense. I’m one of the worst spendthrifts that ever was born. Why, do you know, sometimes in a single week I spend—but never mind about that—you’d never believe it anyway.”
And so we went gadding along, dropping in here and there, pricing things, and gossiping with the shopkeepers about the riot, and now and then running across pathetic reminders of it, in the persons of shunned and tearful and houseless remnants of families whose homes had been taken from them and their parents butchered or hanged. The raiment of Marco and his wife was of coarse tow-linen and linsey-woolsey respectively, and resembled township maps, it being made up pretty exclusively of patches which had been added, township by township, in the course of five or six years, until hardly a hand’s-breadth of the original garments was surviving and present. Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on account of that swell company, and I didn’t know just how to get at it—with delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had already been liberal in inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it would be just the thing to back it up with evidence of a substantial sort; so I said: