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“O pa!” said Miss Baffin, weeping, “if you should be killed.”

“No danger of that love, none at all. I am perfectly safe. I feel exactly as if I were a cooking-stove, to be sure; but you may depend upon my giving a good account of myself. And now, dear, adieu! Ho, there!” exclaimed the Professor, with faint reminiscences of the tragic stage coming into his mind. “Bring me my steed!”

The determined efforts of four muscular men were required to mount the Professor upon his horse. And when he was fairly astride, with his lance in his hand, he felt as if he weighed at least three thousand pounds, and the weapon seemed quite as large as the jib-boom of the “Morning Star.”

The warrior did his best to sit his horse gracefully; but the miserable beast pranced and curveted in such a very unreasonable manner that his spectacles were continually shaking loose, and in his efforts to fix them, and at the same time to hold his horse, he lost control of his lance, and came near impaling two or three of the spectators.