down" fare -- I mean rob the company.

There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn't
in some useful employment. They were going from
end to end of the country in all manner of useful
missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering,
and their experience in it, made them altogether the
most effective spreaders of civilization we had. They
went clothed in steel and equipped with sword and
lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn't persuade a
person to try a sewing-machine on the installment
plan, or a melodeon, or a barbed-wire fence, or a
prohibition journal, or any of the other thousand and
one things they canvassed for, they removed him and
passed on.