lass. Mead and, in very grand
houses, wine now began to circle in goblets of gold and silver, or of
wood inlaid with those precious metals. In humbler houses, story-telling
and songs, sung to the music of the harp by each guest in turn, formed
the principal amusement of the drinking-bout.

Meantime the music and the mead did their work in maddening brains; the
revelry grew louder; riddles, which had flown thick around the board at
first, gave place to banter, taunts, and fierce boasts of prowess; angry
eyes gleamed defiance; and it was well if, in the morning, the household
slaves had not to wash blood-stains from the pavement of the hall, or in
the still night, when the drunken brawlers lay stupid on the floor, to
drag a dead man from the red plash in which he lay.

From the reek and riot of the hall the ladies of the household soon
withdrew to the bower, where they reigned supreme. There, in the earlier
part of the day, they had arrayed themselves in their bright-coloured
robes, plying tweezers and crisping-irons on their yellow hair, and
often heightening the blush that Nature gave them with a shade of rouge.
There, too, they used to scold their female slaves, and beat them, with
a violence which said more for their strength of lung and muscle than
for the gentleness of their womanhood.

When their needles were fairly set a-going upon those pieces of delicate
embroidery, known and prized over all Europe as "English work," some
gentlemen dropped in, perhaps harp in hand, to chat and play for their
amusement, or to engage in games of hazard and skill, which seem to have
resembled modern dice and chess. When in later days supper came into
fashion, the round table of the bower was usually spread for
_Evening-food_, as this meal was called. And not long afterwards, those
bags of straw, from which they sprang at sunrise, received for another
night their human burden, worn out with the labours and the revels of
the day.

W. F. COLLIER
(Adapted)

PUCK'S SONG

See you the dimpled track that runs,
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet.

See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book.

See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke,
On the day that Harold died.