ader's
white charger.

"See the sword he wears in his gay clothes. Likely he also has been in
battle. He must needs be happy who can strike out into the world like
that." Envying, they gazed after him until the horses' hoofs threw up a
yellow wall between.

They would have opened their wide mouths wider had they known that the
red-cloaked page was looking wistfully at them and their kine and the
nodding clover.

"It must be very enjoyable to wander all day in the peace of the meadows
and hear nothing louder than cow-bells," she was thinking. "It is good
to see creatures that no man is stabbing or doing harm to."

Through warm sunshine, tempered by fresh breezes, they came yet deeper
into the drowsy farmland. Gradually the yeomen-soldiers, who had been
wrangling over the mystery of Edric's actions, dropped one by one into
lazy silence, or set their tongues to whistling cleverly turned answers
to the bird-calls in the hedges. Another mile, and from somewhere in
the fields came the swinging chant of a ploughman, as he turned the soil
between the rows of rustling corn,--

"Hail, Mother Earth, thou feeder of folk!
Be thou growing, by goodness of God,
Filled with fodder, the folk to feed."

Like the unbinding of a spell, the words fell upon the farmer-soldiers.
Dropping every other topic, they began to argue over the crops; and
after that they could not pass a harmless calf tethered to a crab-tree
that they did not quarrel over the breed, nor start a drove of grunting
swine out of the mast but they must lay wagers on the weight.

Running wild in the animation, it was not long before the clamor caught
up with the Etheling where he rode before them in sober reflection. He
smiled faintly as he caught the burden of the disjointed phrases.

"...Twelve stone; I will peril my head upon it!"... "Yorkshire, I tell
you, Yorkshire."... "A fortnight? It will be ready in a week, or I have
never grown barley corn!"

"I do not believe that a tree-toad can change color more easily," he
observed to the old cniht who rode at his side. "That Englishmen are
not stout fighters, no man can say, but the love of it is not in their
breasts; while with Northmen--"

"With Northmen," Morcard added, "to fight is to eat."

Another faint smile touched Sebert's mouth as he glanced over his
shoulder at the red-cloaked boy. "After seeing this sprout, that is easy
to believe. Except that time alone when a two-year-old colt kicked me on
the