So said Hereward, and took the rudder into his own hand. “Now then," as she rushed into the breakers, "pull together, rowers all, and with a will." The men yelled, and sprang from the thwarts as they tugged at the oars. The sea boiled past them, surged into the waist, blinded them with spray. She grazed the sand once, twice, thrice, leaping forward gallantly each time; and then, pressed by a huge wave, drove high and dry upon the beach, as the oars snapt right and left, and the men tumbled over each other in heaps.

The peasants swarmed down like flies to a carcase: but they recoiled as there rose over the forecastlebulwarks, not the broad hats of peaceful buscarles, but peaked helmets, round red shields, and glittering axes. They drew back, and one or two arrows few from the crowd into the ship. But at Hereward's command no arrows were shot in answer. "Bale her out quietly; and let us show these fellows that we are not afraid of them. That is the best chance of peace."

At this moment a mounted party came down between the sand-hills; it might be, some twenty strong, Before them rode a boy on a jennet, and by him a clerk, as he seemed, upon a mule. They stopped to talk with the peasants, and then to con| gult among themselves.

Hereward looked at him smiling, as he sat there, keeping the head of his frightened horse toward the ship with hand and heel, his long locks streaming in the wind, his face full of courage and command, and of honesty and sweetness withal; and thought that he had never seen so fair a lad.

"And who art thou, thou pretty bold boy?" asked Hereward, in French.

"L" said he, haughtily enough, as resenting Hereward's familiar “ thou," "am Arnulf, grandson and heir of Baldwin, Marquis of Flanders, and lord of this land. And to his grace I call on you to surrender yourselves."

Hereward looked, not only with interest, but respect, upon the grandson of one of the most famous and prosperous of northern potentates, the descendant of the mighty Charlemagne himself. He turned and told the men who the boy was.

"It would be a good trick," quoth one, "to catch that young whelp, and keep him as a hostage."

"Here is what will have him on board before he can turn," said another, as he made a running-noose

in a rope.

**Quiet, men! Am I master in this ship or you?" Hereward saluted the lad courteously. "Verily the blood of Baldwin of the Iron Arm has not degenerated. I am happy to behold so noble a son, of so noble a race."

"And who are you, who speak French so well, and yet by your dress are neither French nor Fleming?"

"I am Harold Naemansson, the Viking; and these my men. I am here, sailing peaceably for England; as for yielding-mine yield to no living man, but die as we are, weapon in hand. I have heard of your grandfather, that he is a just man and a bountiful; therefore take this message to him, young sir. If he have wars toward, I and my men will fight for him with all our might, and earn hospitality and ransom with our only treasure, which is our swords. But if he be at peace, then let him bid us go in peace, for we are Vikings, and must fight, or rot and die.”

"You are Vikings?" cried the boy, pressing his horse into the foam so eagerly, that the men, mistaking his intent, had to be represt again by Hereward. "You are Vikings! Then come on shore, and welcome. You shall be my friends. You shall be my brothers. I will answer to my grandfather. I have longed to see Vikings. I long to be a Viking myself."

"By the hammer of Thor," cried the old master, "and thou wouldst make a bonny one, my lad." Hereward hesitated; delighted with the boy, but by no means sure of his power to protect them.

But the boy rode back to his companions, who had by this time ridden cautiously down to the sea, and talked and gesticulated eagerly.

Then the clerk rode down, and talked with Hereward.

"Are you Christians?" shouted he, before he would adventure himself near the ship.

"Christians we are, Sir Clerk, and dare do no harm to a man of God."

The clerk rode nearer; his handsome palfrey, furred cloak, rich gloves and boots, moreover his air of command, showed that he was no common

man.

"I," said he, "am the Abbot of St. Bertin of Sithiu, and tutor of yonder prince. I can bring down, at a word, against you, the chatelain of St. Omer with all his knights, beside knights and menat-arms of my own. But I am a man of peace, and not of war; and would have no blood shed if I can help it."

"Your

"Then make peace," said Hereward. lord may kill us if he will, or have us for his guests if he will. If he does the first, we shall kill, each of us, a few of his men before we die; if the latter, we shall kill a few of his foes. If you be a man of God, you will counsel him accordingly."

"Alas! alas!" said the Abbot with à shudder, "that, ever since Adam's fall, sinful man should talk of nothing but slaying and being slain; not knowing that his soul is slain already by sin, and that a worse death awaits him hereafter than that death of the body, of which he makes so light!"

"A very good sermon, my Lord Abbot, to listen to next Sunday morning: but we are hungry, and wet, and desperate, just now; and if you do not

The Abbot rode out of the water faster than he had ridden in, and a fresh consultation ensued, after which the boy, with a warning gesture to his companions, turned and galloped away through the sand-hills.

"He is gone to his grandfather himself, I verily believe," quoth Hereward.

They waited for some two hours, unmolested; and, true to their policy of seeming recklessness, shifted and dried themselves as well as they could; ate what provisions were unspoilt by the salt water, and, broaching the last barrel of ale, drank healths to each other and to the Flemings on shore.

At last down rode with the boy a noble-looking | man, and behind him more knights and men-atarms. He announced himself as Manasses, Chatelain St. Omer, and repeated the demand to surrender.

"There is no need for it," said Hereward. "We are already that young prince's guests. He has

said that we shall be his friends and brothers. He has said that he will answer to his grandfather, the great Marquis, whom I and mine shall be proud to serve. I claim the word of a descendant of Charlemagne."

he could not act.

"Needs must," grunted they, as they packed up each his little valuables.

Then Hereward sheathed his sword, and leaping from the bow, came up to the boy.

"Put your hands between his, fair sir," said the Chatelain.

"That is not the manner of Vikings."

And he took the boy's right hand, and grasped it in the plain English fashion.

"There is the hand of an honest man. Come down, men, and take this young lord's hand, and serve him in the wars as I will do."

One by one the men came down; and each took Arnulf's hand, and shook it till the lad's face grew red. But none of them bowed, or made obeisance. They looked the boy full in the face, and as they stepped back, stared round upon the ring of armed men with a smile and something of a swagger,

"These are they who bow to no man, and call no man master," whispered the Abbot.

"Heaven forefend!" murmured the Abbot. "They will be safe, at least, within your ramparts," whispered the chatelain.

"And they shall tell me about the sea. Have I not told you how I longed for Vikings; how I will have Vikings of my own, and sail the seas with them, like my uncle Robert, and go to Spain and fight the Moors, and to Constantinople and marry the kaiser's daughter? Come," he cried to Hereward, come on shore, and he that touches you or your ship, touches me!"

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"Sir Chatelain and my Lord Abbot," said Hereward, "you see that, Viking though I be, I am no barbarous heathen, but a French-speaking gentleman, like yourselves. It had been easy for me, had I not been a man of honour, to have cast a rope, as my sailors would have had me do, over that young boy's fair head, and haled him on board, to answer for my life with his own. But I loved him, and trusted him, as I would an angel out of heaven; and I trust him still. To him, and him only, will I yield myself, on condition that I and my men shall keep all our arms and treasure, and enter his service, to fight his foes and his grandfather's, wheresoever they will, by land or sea.'

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'Fair sir," said the Abbot, "pirate though you call yourself, you speak so courtly and clerkly, that I, too, am inclined to trust you; and if my young lord will have it so, into St. Bertin I will receive you, till our lord the Marquis shall give orders about you and yours."

So promises were given all round; and Hereward explained the matter to the men, without

their short sea-bows of horn and deer-sinew; their red Danish jerkins; their blue sea-cloaks, fastened on the shoulder with rich brooches; and the gol and silver bracelets on their wrists. He wondered at their long shaggy beards, and still more at the blue patterns with which the English among them, Hereward especially, were tattoed on throat, and arm, and knee.

“Yes, you are Vikings-just such as my uncle Robert tells me of."

Hereward knew well the exploits of Robert le Frison in Spain and Greece. "I trust that your noble uncle," he asked, "is well? He was one of us poor sea-cocks, and sailed the swan's path gallantly, till he became a mighty prince. Here is a man here who was with your noble uncle in Byzant."

And he thrust forward the old master.

The boy's delight knew no bounds. He should tell him all about that in St. Bertin.

Then he rode back to the ship, and round and round her (for the tide by that time had left her high and dry), and wondered at her long snake-like lines, and carven stem and stern.

"Tell me about this ship. Let me go on board of her. I have never seen a ship inland at Mons there; and even here there are only heavy ugly busses, and little fishing-boats. No. You must be all hungry and tired. We will go to St. Bertin at once, and you shall be feasted royally. Hearken, villains!" shouted he to the peasants. "This ship belongs to the fair sir here-my guest and friend; and if any man dares to steal from her a stave or a nail I will have his thief's hand cut off."

"The ship, fair lord," said Hereward, "is yours, not mine. You should build twenty more after her pattern, and man them with such lads as these, and then go down to

Miklagard and Spanialand,

That lie so far on the lee, O!'

as did your noble uncle before you."

And so they marched inland, after the boy had dismounted one of his men, and put Hereward on the horse.

"You gentlemen of the sea can ride as well as sail," said the Chatelain, as he remarked with some surprise Hereward's perfect seat and hand.

"We should soon learn to fly likewise," laughed Hereward, "if there were any booty to be picked up in the clouds there overhead;" and he rode on by Arnulf's side, as the lad questioned him about the sea, and nothing else.

"Ah, my boy," said Hereward at last, "look there, and let those be Vikings who must."

And he pointed to the rich pastures, broken by strips of cornland and snug farms, which stretched between the sea and the great forest of Flanders. "What do you mean?

But Hereward was silent. It was so like his own native fens. For a moment there came over him the longing for a home. To settle down in such a fair fat land, and call good acres his own; and marry and beget stalwart sons, to till the old estate when he could till no more. Might not that be a better life-at least a happier one-than restless, homeless, aimless adventure? And now, just as he had had a hope of peace-a hope of seeing his own land, his own folk, perhaps of making peace with his mother and his king-the very waves would not let him rest, but sped him forth, a storm-tossed waif, to begin life anew, fighting he cared not whom or why, in a strange land.

So he was silent and sad withal.

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her presence; so that the wife of Baldwin the Bold, ancestor of Arnulf, wishing to lie by her husband, had to remove his corpse from St. Bertin to the Abbey of Blandigni, where the Counts of Flanders lay in glory for many a generation.

The pirates entered, not without gloomy distrust, the gates of that consecrated fortress; while the monks in their turn were (and with some reason) considerably frightened when they were asked to entertain as guests forty Norse rovers. Loudly did the elder among them bewail (in Latin, lest their guests should understand too much) the present weakness of their monastery, where St. Bertin was left to defend himself and his monks all alone against the wicked world outside. Far different had been their case some hundred and seventy years before. Then St. Valeri and St. Riquier of Ponthieu, transported thither from their own restingplaces in France for fear of the invading Northmen, had joined their suffrages and merits to those of St. Bertin, with such success that the abbey had never been defiled by the foot of the heathen. But alas! the saints, that is their bodies, after awhile became home sick; and St. Valeri appearing in a dream to Hugh Capet, bade him bring them back to France in spite of Arnulf, Count of those parts, who wished much to retain so valuable an addition to his household gods.

But in vain. Hugh Capet was a man who took few denials. With knights and men-at-arms he came, and Count Arnulf had to send home the holy corpses with all humility, and leave St. Bertin all alone.

Whereon St. Valeri appeared in a dream to Hugh Capet, and said unto him, "Because thou hast zealously done what I commanded, thou and thy successors shall reign in the kingdom of France to everlasting generations.” *

However, there was no refusing the grandson and heir of Count Baldwin; and the hearts of the

The boy asked once more.

"Lad! lad!" said Hereward, waking as from a dream. "If you be heir to such a fair land as that, thank God for it, and pray to Him that you may rule it justly, and keep it in peace, as they say your grandfather and your father do; and leave glory, and fame, and the Vikings' bloody trade, to those who have neither father nor mother, wife nor land, but live like the wolf of the wood, from one meal to the next."

"I thank you for those words, Sir Harold," said the good Abbot, while the boy went on abashed, and Hereward himself was startled at his own saying, and rode silent till they crossed the drawbridge of St. Bertin, and entered that ancient fortress, so strong that it was the hiding-place in war time for all the treasures of the country, and so sacred withal that no woman, dead or alive, was allowed to defile it by

took courage, and admitted them into the hospice, with solemn warnings as to the doom which they might expect if they took the value of a horse-nail from the patrimony of the blessed saint. Was he less powerful or less careful of his own honour than St. Lieven of Holthem, who, not more than fifty years before, had struck stone-blind four soldiers of the Emperor Henry's, who had dared, after warning, to plunder the altar?† Let them remember, too, the fate of their own forefathers, the heathens of the North, and the check which, one hundred and seventy years before, they had received under those very walls. They had exterminated the people of Walcheren; they had taken prisoners Count Regnier; they had burnt Ghent, Bruges, and St. Omer itself, close by; they had left nought between the