down, up a little track that gleamed
white in the grass; and now he could see the huge plain, with a few
lights twinkling out of farms; far down to the west there was a little
redness of light, and he thought that this was doubtless where the army
of the barons lay; but he seemed to himself to have neither wonder nor
fear left in his mind; he only went like one that had a task to perform;
and soon he came to the top.

Here all was bare, save for some bushes of furze that grew blackly in
the gloom; he stepped through them, and he came at last to where a great
mound stood, that was held to be the highest place in all the down, a
mound that marked the place of a battle, or that was perhaps the
burying-place of some old tribe--for it was called the Barrow of the
Seven Kings.

He came quickly to the mound, and went to the top; and then he laid the
sword upon the turf by him, and kneeled down; once again came a great
outpouring of fire from heaven in the west, and a peal of thunder
followed hard upon it; and indeed the storm was near at hand; he could
see the great wings of the cloud moving now, and a few large drops
splashed in the grass about him, and one fell upon his brow.

And now a great fear fell upon Henry of he knew not what. He seemed to
himself to be in the presence of some vast and fearful thing, that was
passing swiftly by; and yet seemed, for all its haste, to have espied
him, and to have been, as it were, stayed by him; there came into his
mind a recollection of how he had once, on a summer's day, joined the
mowers in one of the fields, and had mowed a few swathes with them for
the pleasure of seeing the rich seeded grass fall before the gleaming
scythe. At one of his strokes, he remembered, he had uncovered a little
field-mouse, that sate in the naked field, its high covert having been
swept bare from above it, and watched him with bright eyes of fear,
while he debated whether he should crush it; he had done so, he
remembered, carelessly, with his foot, and now he wished that he had
spared it, for it was even so that he himself felt.

So to strengthen himself in his purpose, he made a prayer aloud, though
it was a thing that in his idle life he had much foregone; and he said:

"Lord God, if Thou indeed hearest and seest me, make me strong to do
what I have a mind to do; I have lived foolishly and for myself, and I
have little to give. I have despised life, and it is as an empty husk to
me. I have put lov