d my dream of things past,
present, and to come, as I said: "Now hearken a tale, since ye will
have it so. For last autumn I was in Suffolk at the good town of
Dunwich, and thither came the keels from Iceland, and on them were some
men of Iceland, and many a tale they had on their tongues; and with
these men I foregathered, for I am in sooth a gatherer of tales, and
this that is now at my tongue's end is one of them."

So such a tale I told them, long familiar to me; but as I told it the
words seemed to quicken and grow, so that I knew not the sound of my
own voice, and they ran almost into rhyme and measure as I told it; and
when I had done there was silence awhile, till one man spake, but not
loudly:

"Yea, in that land was the summer short and the winter long; but men
lived both summer and winter; and if the trees grew ill and the corn
throve not, yet did the plant called man thrive and do well. God send
us such men even here."

"Nay," said another, "such men have been and will be, and belike are
not far from this same door even now."

"Yea," said a third, "hearken a stave of Robin Hood; maybe that shall
hasten the coming of one I wot of." And he fell to singing in a clear
voice, for he was a young man, and to a sweet wild melody, one of those
ballads which in an incomplete and degraded form you have read perhaps.
My heart rose high as I heard him, for it was concerning the struggle
against tyranny for the freedom of life, how that the wildwood and the
heath, despite of wind and weather, were better for a free man than the
court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich to give to the
poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and not the will of
another man commanding him for the commandment's sake. The men all
listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a couplet at the
end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not unmusical voices.
As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by me, as they were
indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and tangled
thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn under the morning sun, and
dreary with the rising of the evening wind and the drift of the
night-long rain.

When he had done, another began in something of the same strain, but
singing more of a song than a story ballad; and thus much I remember of
it:

The Sheriff is made a mighty lord,
Of goodly gold he hath enow,
And many a sergeant girt w