ope, and some hundred boys were educated,
free of cost, at Abingdon--the cloisters in summer serving as their
classrooms. And let me tell my schoolboy readers, the fare and the
discipline were alike very hard.

But the chapel in great abbeys--like the one we are writing
about--resembled a cathedral rather than a college chapel. And he
who has the general plan of a cathedral in his mind can easily
imagine the abbey church of St. Mary's at Abingdon.

The choir was devoted to the monks alone; the nave and aisles
apportioned to the laity; the side chapels contained altars
dedicated to special saints, and occasional services.

Such was the building into which Etienne de Malville entered, not
without religious awe, as the pealing organ--then recently
introduced by the Normans--rolled its volume of sound through the
vaulted aisles.

The monks were all in the choir, which was lighted by torches and
tapers. In the nave a few laity of the town were scattered--here a
knight or soldier, there a mechanic.

Suddenly, as Etienne took his place, the tread of many armed heels
broke the silence, and penetrated up the aisle.

The sound ceased; those who caused it were already in their chosen
places, and the monks had begun the Psalms, when Etienne heard a
peculiarly stern and deep voice near at hand taking up the sacred
words of Israel's royal singer, with which the worshipper seemed
familiar.

Then, for the first time, he perceived that the Conqueror--the
mightiest of earth's warriors--was he from whom the voice
proceeded, kneeling without state in the midst of his subjects,
lords and vassals, to join in the late evening service of the
church {xix}.

CHAPTER XIX. AN INTERVIEW WITH THE CONQUEROR.

The mighty Conqueror of England was the central figure of the age
in which he lived--the greatest soldier of an age of soldiers, and
not less statesman than warrior.

Born to a life of warfare, the Conquest had been but the
culminating point of a career spent in the tented field--but on
that one event he staked his all.

For had he been vanquished at Senlac there was no hope of flight;
the English commanded the sea, while his suzerain of France, ever
on the watch to regain those Norman dominions which Rollo had won,
would have taken instant advantage of the loss of its military
leaders to re-annex Normandy to the French crown, and must have
succeeded.

Had William fallen in England the Norman name and glory would have
pe