le the Danes were feasting and
making merry, and as the Danes were not expecting a fight, the English
were easily able to get much the best of it.

At last, after many fights, King Alfred managed to make peace with the
Danes, and then he settled down to see what he could do for his own
people. He saw that if he was to keep out the wicked Danes he must be
able to fight them by sea as well as by land. So he learned how to build
ships and taught his people how to build them, and that was the
beginning of the great English navy, which you ought to be proud of if
you are big enough to read this book. Alfred was wise enough to see that
knowledge is power, and, as he wanted his people to be strong, he tried
to make them learned. He built schools, and at University College,
Oxford, there are people that will tell you that that college was
founded by Alfred the Great.

He used to divide up his time very carefully, giving part to study and
part to settling disputes among his people, and part to his shipbuilding
and his other duties. They had no clocks and watches in those days, and
he used sometimes to get so interested in his work as to forget that it
was time to leave it and go on to something else, just as you do
sometimes when you get so interested in a game of rounders that you
forget that it is time to go on with your lessons. The idea of a clock
never entered into Alfred's head, at least not a clock with wheels, and
hands on its face, but he was so clever that he made a clock out of a
candle. He painted rings of different colours round the candle, and when
the candle had burnt down to the first ring it was half an hour gone,
and when it was burnt to the next ring it was another half-hour, and so
on. So he could tell exactly how the time went.

He was called Alfred the Great, and no king has better deserved such a
title.

"So long as I have lived," he said, "I have striven to live worthily."
And he longed, above all things, to leave "to the men that came after a
remembrance of him in good works."

He did many good and wise things, but the best and wisest thing he ever
did was to begin to write the History of England. There had been English
poems before this, but no English stories that were not written in
poetry. So that Alfred's book was the first of all the thousands and
thousands of English books that you see on the shelves of the big
libraries. His book is generally called the Saxon Chronicle, and was
added to by