? Will it not shelter us from the eyes of the
victims?"

Then the men laughed, and shouting, they went their way adown the
forest.

When they were gone Morven cautiously descended, and, striking into a
broad path, hastened to a vale that lay between the forest and the river
in which was the city where the chief of his country dwelt.

As he passed by the warlike men, giants in that day, who thronged the
streets (if streets they might be called), their half garments parting
from their huge limbs, the quiver at their backs, and the hunting spears
in their hands, they laughed and shouted out, and, pointing to him,
cried:

"Morven, the woman! Morven, the cripple! what dost thou among men?"

For the son of Osslah was small in stature and of slender strength, and
his step had halted from his birth; but he passed through the warriors
unheedingly.

At the outskirts of the city he came upon a tail pile, in which some old
men dwelt by themselves, and counseled the king when times of danger,
or when the failure of the season, the famine, or the drought, perplexed
the ruler, and clouded the savage fronts of his warrior tribe.

They gave the counsels of experience, and when experience failed, they
drew, in their believing ignorance, assurances and omens from the winds
of heaven, the changes of the moon, and the flights of the wandering
birds. Filled (by the voices of the elements, and the variety of
mysteries which ever shift along the face of things, unsolved by the
wonder which pauses not, the fear which believes, and that eternal
reasoning of all experience, which assigns causes to effects) with
the notion of superior powers, _they assisted their ignorance by the
conjectures of their superstition_. But as yet they knew no craft
and practiced no _voluntary_ delusion; they trembled too much at the
mysteries, which had created their faith, to seek to belie them. They
counselled as they believed, and the bold dream had never dared to cross
men thus worn and grey with age, of governing their warriors and their
kings by the wisdom of deceit.

The son of Osslah entered the vast pile with a fearless step, and
approached the place at the upper end of the hall, where the old men sat
in conclave.

"How, base-torn and craven limbed!" cried the eldest, who had been
a noted warrior in his day; "darest thou enter unsummoned amidst the
secret councils of the wise men? Knowest thou not, scatterling! that the
penalty is death?"

"Slay