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 knights—or what was left of them—would thank each other for a good fight. Those were days of lamentable darkness, when the last thing a gentleman craved was the privilege of dying in his bed by some slow and agonizing process, the gift of nature, and gratefully designated as "natural." The headsman for the noble, the hangman for the churl, and the fortunes of war for everybody, made death so easy to come by, and so inexpensive, that there was a great deal of money left for the pleasures of living. That stout-hearted Earl of Northumberland who thanked God that for two hundred years no head of his house had died in bed, knew what his progenitors had been spared. Even in the soberly civilized eighteenth century there lingered a doubt as to the relative value of battle-field, gallows and sick-chamber.