s came in slowly,
and provender and supplies of all kinds are hard to wring from the
pagan, and harder still to take from Christian men. One day, while it
was yet so cold that the water was still frozen, the King's people had
gone out "to get them fish or fowl, or some such purveyance as they
sustained themselves withal." No one was left in the royal hut for the
moment but himself, and his mother-in-law Eadburgha. The King--after his
constant wont whensoever he had opportunity--was reading from the Psalms
of David, out of the Manual which he carried always in his bosom. At
this moment a poor man appeared at the door and begged for a morsel of
bread "for Christ his sake." Whereupon the King, receiving the stranger
as a brother, called to his mother-in-law to give him to eat. Eadburgha
replied that there was but one loaf in their store, and a little wine in
a pitcher, a provision wholly insufficient for his own family and
people. But the King bade her nevertheless to give the stranger part of
the last loaf, which she accordingly did. But when he had been served
the stranger was no more seen, and the loaf remained whole, and the
pitcher full to the brim. Alfred, meantime, had turned to his reading,
over which he fell asleep, and dreamt that St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
stood by him, and told him it was he who had been his guest, and that
God had seen his afflictions and those of his people, which were now
about to end, in token whereof his people would return that day from
their expedition with a great take of fish. The King awakening, and
being much impressed with his dream, called to his mother-in-law and
recounted it to her, who thereupon assured him that she too had been
overcome with sleep and had had the same dream. And while they yet
talked together on what had happened so strangely to them, their
servants come in, bringing fish enough, as it seemed to them, to have
fed an army.

The monkish legend goes on to tell that on the next morning the King
crossed to the mainland in a boat, and wound his horn thrice, which drew
to him before noon five hundred men. What we may think of the story and
the dream, as Sir John Spelman says, "is not here very much material,"
seeing that, whether we deem it natural or supernatural, "the one as
well as the other serves at God's appointment, by raising or dejecting
of the mind with hopes or fears, to lead man to the resolution of those
things whereof he has before ordained the event."