N. At length the incensed King
swore he would tear out Samson's eyes; and Samson, thinking that his only
hope of safety was in becoming a monk, became one, went on such errands
no more, and kept his eyes in his head.

All this time, from the turbulent day of his strange coronation, the
Conqueror had been struggling, you see, at any cost of cruelty and
bloodshed, to maintain what he had seized. All his reign, he struggled
still, with the same object ever before him. He was a stern, bold man,
and he succeeded in it.

He loved money, and was particular in his eating, but he had only leisure
to indulge one other passion, and that was his love of hunting. He
carried it to such a height that he ordered whole villages and towns to
be swept away to make forests for the deer. Not satisfied with sixty-
eight Royal Forests, he laid waste an immense district, to form another
in Hampshire, called the New Forest. The many thousands of miserable
peasants who saw their little houses pulled down, and themselves and
children turned into the open country without a shelter, detested him for
his merciless addition to their many sufferings; and when, in the twenty-
first year of his reign (which proved to be the last), he went over to
Rouen, England was as full of hatred against him, as if every leaf on
every tree in all his Royal Forests had been a curse upon his head. In
the New Forest, his son Richard (for he had four sons) had been gored to
death by a Stag; and the people said that this so cruelly-made Forest
would yet be fatal to others of the Conqueror's race.

He was engaged in a dispute with the King of France about some territory.
While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with that King, he kept his bed and
took medicines: being advised by his physicians to do so, on account of
having grown to an unwieldy size. Word being brought to him that the
King of France made light of this, and joked about it, he swore in a
great rage that he should rue his jests. He assembled his army, marched
into the disputed territory, burnt--his old way!--the vines, the crops,
and fruit, and set the town of Mantes on fire. But, in an evil hour;
for, as he rode over the hot ruins, his horse, setting his hoofs upon
some burning embers, started, threw him forward against the pommel of the
saddle, and gave him a mortal hurt. For six weeks he lay dying in a
monastery near Rouen, and then made his will, giving England to William,
Normandy to Robert, an