hild cry, and on opening the door to afford it succour, a greet
black bull, or a shadowy goblin dog, might rush over the threshold;
or, more awful still, if something flapped, as with wings, against the
lattice, and then a raven or a white dove flew in and settled on the
hearth, such a visitor would be a sure sign of misfortune to the house;
therefore, heed my advice, and lift the latchet for nothing."

Her husband calls her away, both depart. The stranger, left alone,
listens awhile to the muffled snow-wind, the remote, swollen sound of
the river, and then he speaks.

"It is Christmas Eve," says he, "I mark the date; here I sit alone on
a rude couch of rushes, sheltered by the thatch of a herdsman's hut;
I, whose inheritance was a kingdom, owe my night's harbourage to a poor
serf; my throne is usurped, my crown presses the brow of an invader; I
have no friends; my troops wander broken in the hills of Wales; reckless
robbers spoil my country; my subjects lie prostrate, their breasts
crushed by the heel of the brutal Dane. Fate! thou hast done thy worst,
and now thou standest before me resting thy hand on thy blunted blade.
Ay; I see thine eye confront mine and demand why I still live, why I
still hope. Pagan demon, I credit not thine omnipotence, and so cannot
succumb to thy power. My God, whose Son, as on this night, took on Him
the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls
thy hand, and without His behest thou canst not strike a stroke. My God
is sinless, eternal, all-wise--in Him is my trust; and though stripped
and crushed by thee--though naked, desolate, void of resource--I do not
despair, I cannot despair: were the lance of Guthrum now wet with my
blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray; Jehovah,
in his own time, will aid."

I need not continue the quotation; the whole devoir was in the same
strain. There were errors of orthography, there were foreign idioms,
there were some faults of construction, there were verbs irregular
transformed into verbs regular; it was mostly made up, as the above
example shows, of short and somewhat rude sentences, and the style stood
in great need of polish and sustained dignity; yet such as it was, I
had hitherto seen nothing like it in the course of my professorial
experience. The girl's mind had conceived a picture of the hut, of the
two peasants, of the crownless king; she had imagined the wintry forest,
she had recalled the old Saxon