resistance of Elmet, the district about Leeds; he
was master of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles
of Anglesea and Man. South of the Humber he was owned as overlord by the
five English states of Mid-Britain. The West-Saxons remained awhile
independent. But revolt and slaughter had fatally broken their power when
Eadwine attacked them. A story preserved by Baeda tells something of the
fierceness of the struggle which ended in the subjection of the south to
the overlordship of Northumbria. In an Easter-court which he held in his
royal city by the river Derwent, Eadwine gave audience to Eumer, an envoy
of Wessex, who brought a message from its king. In the midst of the
conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger from his robe, and
rushed on the Northumbrian sovereign. Lilla, one of the king's war-band,
threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin; but so furious was the
stroke that even through Lilla's body the dagger still reached its aim.
The king however recovered from his wound to march on the West-Saxons; he
slew or subdued all who had conspired against him, and returned
victorious to his own country.

[Sidenote: Conversion of Northumbria]

Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its King's daughter as a wife,
a step which probably marked political subordination; and with the
Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine's followers, whose tall
stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin
worn face, were long remembered in the North. Moved by his queen's
prayers Eadwine promised to become Christian if he returned successful
from Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on
the new faith to which he bowed. To finer minds its charm lay then as now
in the light it threw on the darkness which encompassed men's lives, the
darkness of the future as of the past. "So seems the life of man, O
king," burst forth an aged ealdorman, "as a sparrow's flight through the
hall when one is sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm fire
lighted on the hearth but the icy rain-storm without. The sparrow flies
in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the
hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other vanishes into the
darkness whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of man in our
sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not. If this new
teaching tell us aught certainly of these, let us follow it." Co