ry splendid
victories in the battles that he fought, made long expeditions into
foreign countries, having once gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to
obtain the Holy Cross. His wife was a beautiful lady, the daughter of
a chieftain of Cornwall. Her name was Guenever.[1] On his return from
one of his distant expeditions, he found that his nephew, Medrawd,
had won her affections while he was gone, and a combat ensued in
consequence between him and Medrawd. The combat took place on the
coast of Cornwall. Both parties fell. Arthur was mortally wounded.
They took him from the field into a boat, and carried him along the
coast till they came to a river. They ascended the river till they
came to the town of Glastonbury. They committed the still breathing
body to the care of faithful friends there; but the mortal blow had
been given. The great hero died, and they buried his body in the
Glastonbury churchyard, very deep beneath the surface of the ground,
in order to place it as effectually as possible beyond the reach of
Saxon rage and vengeance. Arthur had been a deadly and implacable foe
to the Saxons. He had fought twelve great pitched battles with them,
in every one of which he had gained the victory. In one of these
battles he had slain, according to the traditional tale, four hundred
and seventy men, in one day, with his own hand.

Five hundred years after his death, King Henry the Second, having
heard from an ancient British bard that Arthur's body lay interred in
the Abbey of Glastonbury, and that the spot was marked by some small
pyramids erected near it, and that the body would be found in a rude
coffin made of a hollowed oak, ordered search to be made. The ballads
and tales which had been then, for several centuries, circulating
throughout England, narrating and praising King Arthur's exploits, had
given him so wide a fame, that great interest was felt in the recovery
and the identification of his remains. The searchers found the
pyramids in the cemetery of the abbey. They dug between them, and came
at length to a stone. Beneath this stone was a leaden cross, with the
inscription in Latin, "HERE LIES BURIED THE BODY OF GREAT KING
ARTHUR." Going down still below this, they came at length, at the
depth of sixteen feet from the surface, to a great coffin, made of the
trunk of an oak tree, and within it was a human skeleton of unusual
size. The skull was very large, and showed marks of ten wounds. Nine
of them were closed