NOW WHEN WE LEFT SIR Launcelot he was living like a beast in the wild, and though he had lost his weapons and armor he was yet the most formidable man in the world, and when he was attacked by lions and boars and great serpents he destroyed them with his bare hands or he crushed them with great trees which he tore up by the roots, and then he ate these creatures raw. And it may well have been that, as some have written, he did lose his reason for a while, yet never could he forget Guinevere, in which feeling he was like Tristram with regard to Isold, but also he hated Guinevere for evoking it from him, whereas Sir Tristram did never hold hatred in his heart for anybody. Now not even the great Launcelot had the kind of constitution which would sustain him in this sort of life forever, and eventually he fell into a faint on the floor of the forest and he lay there so long that the dead leaves of autumn did cover him up and then the first snows of winter, and no doubt he would have been dead by Christmas had not a party of poachers come there, looking for a bear in hibernation, the which they might unearth while he lay helplessly sleeping and take him captive and sell him to be tortured for the public entertainment of children at Yuletide, than which nothing would provide more merriment, especially when the savage beast had been blinded and was then whipped while bound in chains.
