s sails were of fluttering silk. With fair winds
and kindly waves the Prince and his men soon sped across the sea, and
gladly they saw again the square towers of the castle King Ida had
built, proudly looking down on the fields of restless water that only
the bravest of the King's husbandmen durst venture to plough. From her
turret window the Queen watched the sails of the gallant ship gleaming
in the sun, and knew full well that Prince Wynd was nearly home again.
Speedily she summoned all the witch wives along with whom she worked her
wicked magic, and set them to meet the ship, to use every spell they
knew that could bring shipwreck, and disaster, and death, and to rid her
of the youth whom she had always dreaded. But they returned to her
despairingly. No spell was known to them that could work against a ship
whose masts were made of the rowan tree. Then, casting aside magic, the
Witch Queen dispatched a boat-load of armed men to meet the ship, to
board it, and to slay all that they could. Little cared Wynd and his men
for a boat-load of warriors, and few there were left alive in the boat,
and those sore wounded, when Wynd's ship came to anchor in the shallows
under the dark cliff.

But here a more dangerous adversary met Prince Wynd. Threshing through
the water came the horrible, writhing thing that Northumbrians knew as
the Laidley Worm; and ever as they would have beached the ship, the huge
serpent beat them off again, till all the sea round them was a welter of
froth and slime and blood. Then Childe Wynd ordered his men to take
their long oars once more and bring the ship farther down the coast and
beach her on Budle sand. Down the coast they went, while the Queen
eagerly watched from the battlements, and the Laidley Worm followed them
fast along the shore, and all the folk of Bamborough scrambled up the
cliff side, and, holding on by jagged bits of crags and tough clumps of
grass and of yellow tansy, kept a precarious foothold, waiting,
wide-eyed, to see what would be the outcome of the fray. As near the
sandy beach of Budle as they durst venture their ship came Prince Wynd
and his thirty-three men, then the rowers sat still, and the Prince
leapt out, shoulder deep, into the water, and waded to the shore. Like a
wounded tiger that has been baulked of its prey but gets it into its
power at last, the Laidley Worm came to meet him, and all who watched
thought his last hour had come. But like the white flash of a sea-