Reader, pp. 207-216.

LXXVII. ALFRED THE GREAT. (217)

1. More than a thousand years ago, (in the year 849), a prince was born in
England, who afterwards became one of the most celebrated and best loved
kings in the world. His name was Alfred--afterwards called Alfred the
Great--and he was the favorite son both of the king and queen.

2. In those days the common people were very ignorant; few of them could
even read and write. There were no schools, and the monasteries, where
almost the only teaching had been done, were nearly all destroyed in the
wars which were continually going on. Only the higher classes had any
chance to study, and even they paid much more attention to fighting than
to studying.

3. But Alfred was different from most persons of his time. Even when a
little boy, he delighted in listening to poems and to the ballads which
harpers used to sing, and he learned many of them by heart. When he was
twelve years old, his mother, the queen, offered to give a volume of poems
to that one of her four sons who would first learn to read it. Alfred was
the youngest of them all, yet he easily won the prize of which his
brothers thought so little.

4. But, as has been said, these were stirring times, and Alfred was soon
called on to show his great abilities as a soldier. The Danes, a warlike
people, were continually swooping down in their vessels upon the coast of
England. Often they spread over the entire country, plundering and burning
the towns, and killing the people.

5. In the midst of these invasions Alfred became king, when he was only
twenty-two years old. He proved as good a warrior as he was a student. He
thought that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. He was
generally successful against the Danes, but at one time they seemed to
have the country entirely in their power, and Alfred was compelled to hide
for his life.

6. For some time he dressed as a peasant, and lived in the cottage of a
cowherd, who was so careful of his king's safety that he did not even tell
his wife who he was. So she treated the king as a common peasant, and one
day gave him a sharp scolding because he allowed some cakes to burn on the
griddle, after she had left him to watch them. She told him he was clever
enough at eating cakes though he managed so badly at baking them.

7. When the search for him grew less active, Alfred gradually collected
some of his followers, with whom he encamped on a small spot