mountain country, in her father's house, some one had said that only
men who were born so, could do cunningly with the left hand; and how
Siur, then quite a boy, had said, 'Well, I will try': and how, in a month
or two, he had come to her with an armlet of silver, very curiously
wrought, which he had done with his own left hand.

So Robert said: 'Yea, mother, he works with his left hand almost as much
as with his right, and sometimes I have seen him change the hammer
suddenly from his right hand to his left, with a kind of half smile, as
one who would say, 'Cannot I then?' and this more when he does smith's
work in metal than when he works in marble; and once I heard him say when
he did so, 'I wonder where my first left hand work is; ah! I bide my
time.' I wonder also, mother, what he meant by that.'

She answered no word, but shook her arm free from its broad sleeve, and
something glittered on it, near her wrist, something wrought out of
silver set with quaint and uncouthly-cut stones of little value.

* * * * *

In the council-chamber, among the lords, sat Svend with his six brethren;
he chief of all in the wielding of sword or axe, in the government of
people, in drawing the love of men and women to him; perfect in face and
body, in wisdom and strength was Svend: next to him sat Robert, cunning
in working of marble, or wood, or brass; all things could he make to look
as if they lived, from the sweep of an angel's wings down to the slipping
of a little field-mouse from under the sheaves in the harvest-time. Then
there was Harald, who knew concerning all the stars of heaven and flowers
of earth: Richard, who drew men's hearts from their bodies, with the
words that swung to and fro in his glorious rhymes: William, to whom the
air of heaven seemed a servant when the harp-strings quivered underneath
his fingers: there were the two sailor-brothers, who the year before,
young though they were, had come back from a long, perilous voyage, with
news of an island they had found long and long away to the west, larger
than any that this people knew of, but very fair and good, though
uninhabited.

But now over all this noble brotherhood, with its various gifts hung one
cloud of sorrow; their mother, the Peace-Queen Cissela was dead, she who
had taught them truth and nobleness so well; she was never to see the
beginning of the end that they would work; truly it seemed sad.

There sat the seven brothers in the council chambe