u. On the very night on which he seems to have
concluded them--an hour after we had made the land--we found him in his
cabin, dead, resting peacefully as if he had slumbered."

* * * * *

Hereward the Wake

With, the appearance of "Hereward the Wake," sometimes called
"Hereward, the Last of the English," Kingsley brought to a
close a remarkable series of works of fiction. Although the
story was not published until 1866, the germ of it came to
Kingsley, according to Mrs. Kingsley's "Memoirs" of her
husband, during the summer of 1848, while on a visit to
Crowland Abbey, near Peterborough, with the Rev. F.D. Maurice.
As its title implies, the romance is suggested by the life and
adventures of Hereward, a Saxon yeoman who flourished about
1070. The story itself perhaps does not move along with the
same spirit and vigour that characterise Kingsley's earlier
works; it shows, nevertheless, that he had lost none of his
cunningness for dramatic situations, nor his vivid powers of
visualising scenes and events of the past.

_I.--Hereward Seeks His Fortune_

In the year of Canute's death was born Hereward, second son of Leofric,
Earl of Mercia, and Godiva. At the age of eighteen he was a wild,
headstrong, passionate lad, short in stature, but very broad, and his
eyes were one blue and one grey. Always in trouble with authority, the
climax came when he robbed Herluin, steward of Peterborough, of a sum of
sixteen silver pennies collected for the use of the monastery, and for
this exploit he was outlawed.

Accordingly, he left his home and went north, to Siward, who was engaged
in war with Macbeth, and for aught we know he may have helped to bring
great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill. However that may be, he stayed
in Scotland with one Gilbert of Ghent, at whose house, among other
doughty deeds, single-handed he slew a mighty white bear that escaped
from captivity, incidentally saving the life of a pretty little maiden
named Alftruda, and earning the hatred of the other men, who had not
dared to face the bear.

Finding Scotland a little uncomfortable in consequence, he went to
Cornwall, taking with him only his faithful servant Martin, and there at
the court of Alef, a Danish kinglet, he had cause to kill a local
celebrity, a giant named Ironhook, who was betrothed to Alef's daughter,
though much against her w