hronica_ shall wander inconveniently enough, as in wintry
twilight, through some poor stript hazel-grove, rustling with
foolish noises, and perpetually hindering the eyesight; but
across which, here and there, some real human figure is seen
moving: very strange; whom we could hail if he would answer;--
and we look into a pair of eyes deep as our own, _imaging_ our
own, but all unconscious of us; to whom we for the time are
become as spirits and invisible!

Chapter III

Landlord Edmund

Some three centuries or so had elapsed since _Beodric's-worth_*
became St. Edmund's _Stow,_ St. Edmund's _Town_ and Monastery,
before Jocelin entered himself a Novice there. 'It was,' says
he, 'the year after the Flemings were defeated at Fornham St.
Genevieve.'

-------------
* Dryasdust puzzles and pokes for some biography of this Beodric;
and repugns to consider him a mere East-Anglian Person of
Condition, not in need of a biography,--whose [script] _weorth_
or _worth,_ that is to say, _Growth,_ Increase, or as we should
now name it, _Estate,_ that same Hamlet and wood Mansion, now St.
Edmund's Bury, originally was. For, adds our erudite Friend, the
Saxon [script], equivalent to the German _werden,_ means to
_grow,_ to _become;_ traces of which old vocable are still found
in the North-country dialects, as, 'What is _word_ of him?
meaning 'What is become of him?' and the like. Nay we in modern
English still say, 'Woe _worth_ the hour' (Woe _befall_ the
hour), and speak of the _'Weird_ Sisters;' not to mention the
innumerable other names of places still ending in _weorth_ or
_worth._ And indeed, our common noun _worth,_ in the sense of
_value,_ does not this mean simply, What a thing has _grown_ to,
What a man has _grown_ to, How much he amounts to,--by the
Threadneedle-street standard or another!
--------------

Much passes away into oblivion: this glorious victory over
the Flemings at Fornham has, at the present date, greatly
dimmed itself out of the minds of men. A victory and battle
nevertheless it was, in its time: some thrice-renowned Earl of
Leicester, not of the De Montfort breed, (as may be read in
Philosophical and other Histories, could any human memory retain
such things,) had quarreled with his sovereign, Henry Second of
the name; had been worsted, it is like, and maltreated, and
obliged to fly to foreign parts; but had rallied there into new
vigour; and so, in the year 1173, returns across