ht.

"Why, our cook here is Moorish; the best singers in London are Moors.
Look yonder! see those grave comely Saracens!"

"Comely, quotha, burnt and black as a charred pine-pole!" grunted Vebba;
"well, who are they?"

"Wealthy traders; thanks to whom, our pretty maids have risen high in the
market." [143]

"More the shame," said the Kent man; "that selling of English youth to
foreign masters, whether male or female, is a blot on the Saxon name."

"So saith Harold our Earl, and so preach the monks," returned Godrith.
"But thou, my good friend, who art fond of all things that our ancestors
did, and hast sneered more than once at my Norman robe and cropped hair,
thou shouldst not be the one to find fault with what our fathers have
done since the days of Cerdic."

"Hem," said the Kent man, a little perplexed, "certainly old manners are
the best, and I suppose there is some good reason for this practice,
which I, who never trouble myself about matters that concern me not, do
not see."

"Well, Vebba, and how likest thou the Atheling? he is of the old line,"
said Godrith.

Again the Kent man looked perplexed, and had recourse to the ale, which
he preferred to all more delicate liquor, before he replied:

"Why, he speaks English worse than King Edward! and as for his boy Edgar,
the child can scarce speak English at all. And then their German carles
and cnehts!--An I had known what manner of folk they were, I had not
spent my mancuses in running from my homestead to give them the welcome.
But they told me that Harold the good Earl had made the King send for
them: and whatever the Earl counselled must, I thought, be wise, and to
the weal of sweet England."

"That is true," said Godrith with earnest emphasis, for, with all his
affectation of Norman manners, he was thoroughly English at heart, and
now among the staunchest supporters of Harold, who had become no less the
pattern and pride of the young nobles than the darling of the humbler
population,--"that is true--and Harold showed us his noble English heart
when he so urged the King to his own loss."

As Godrith thus spoke, nay, from the first mention of Harold's name, two
men richly clad, but with their bonnets drawn far over their brows, and
their long gonnas so worn as to hide their forms, who were seated at a
table behind Godrith and had thus escaped his attention, had paused from
their wine-cups, and they now listened with much earnestness to the
conversatio