distinct, and full, as with the
vigour of youth restored. All turned their eyes, appalled; all stood
spell-bound.

There sate the King upright on the bed, his face seen above the kneeling
prelates, and his eyes bright and shining down the Hall.

"Yea," he said, deliberately, "yea, as this shall be a real vision or a
false illusion, grant me, Almighty One, the power of speech to tell it."

He paused a moment, and thus resumed:

"It was on the banks of the frozen Seine, this day thirty-and-one winters
ago, that two holy monks, to whom the gift of prophecy was vouchsafed,
told me of direful woes that should fall on England; 'For God,' said
they, 'after thy death, has delivered England into the hand of the enemy,
and fiends shall wander over the land.' Then I asked in my sorrow, 'Can
nought avert the doom? and may not my people free themselves by
repentance, like the Ninevites of old?' And the Prophets answered, 'Nay,
nor shall the calamity cease, and the curse be completed, till a green
tree be sundered in twain, and the part cut off be carried away; yet
move, of itself, to the ancient trunk, unite to the stem, bud out with
the blossom, and stretch forth its fruit.' So said the monks, and even
now, ere I spoke, I saw them again, there, standing mute, and with the
paleness of dead men, by the side of my bed!"

These words were said so calmly, and as it were so rationally, that their
import became doubly awful from the cold precision of the tone. A shudder
passed through the assembly, and each man shrunk from the King's eye,
which seemed to each man to dwell on himself. Suddenly that eye altered
in its cold beam; suddenly the voice changed its deliberate accent; the
grey hairs seemed to bristle erect, the whole face to work with horror;
the arms stretched forth, the form writhed on the couch, distorted
fragments from the lips: "Sanguelac! Sanguelac!--the Lake of Blood,"
shrieked forth the dying King, "the Lord hath bent his bow--the Lord hath
bared his sword. He comes down as a warrior to war, and his wrath is in
the steel and the flame. He boweth the mountains, and comes down, and
darkness is under his feet!"

As if revived but for these tremendous denunciations, while the last word
left his lips the frame collapsed, the eyes set, and the King fell a
corpse in the arms of Harold.

But one smile of the sceptic or the world-man was seen on the paling lips
of those present: that smile was not on the lips of warrio