ttlers from Wales in A.D. 795,
and the name of the old west country port of Watchet being claimed
as of Norse origin, I have not hesitated to place the Norsemen
there.

Owen and Oswald, Howel and Thorgils, and those others of their
friends and foes beyond the few whose names have already been
mentioned as given in the chronicles, are of course only historic
in so far as they may find their counterparts in the men of the
older records of our forefathers. If I have too early or late
introduced Govan the hermit, whose rock-hewn cell yet remains near
the old Danish landing place on the wild Pembrokeshire coast
between Tenby and the mouth of Milford Haven, perhaps I may be
forgiven. I have not been able to verify his date, but a saint is
of all time, and if Govan himself had passed thence, one would
surely have taken his place to welcome a wanderer in the way and in
the name of the man who made the refuge.

CHAS. W. WHISTLER.

STOCKLAND, 1904.

CHAPTER I. HOW OWEN OF CORNWALL WANDERED TO SUSSEX, AND WHY HE BIDED THERE.

The title which stands at the head of this story is not my own. It
belongs to one whose name must come very often into that which I
have to tell, for it is through him that I am what I may be, and it
is because of him that there is anything worth telling of my doings
at all. Hereafter it will be seen, as I think, that I could do no
less than set his name in the first place in some way, if indeed
the story must be mostly concerning myself. Maybe it will seem
strange that I, a South Saxon of the line of Ella, had aught at all
to do with a West Welshman--a Cornishman, that is--of the race and
line of Arthur, in the days when the yet unforgotten hatred between
our peoples was at its highest; and so it was in truth, at first.
Not so much so was it after the beginning, however. It would be
stranger yet if I were not at the very outset to own all that is
due from me to him. Lonely was I when he first came to me, and
lonely together, in a way, have he and I been for long years that
for me, at least, have had no unhappiness in them, for we have been
all to each other.

I have said that I was lonely when he first came to me, and I must
tell how that was. I suppose that the most lonesome place in the
world is the wide sea, and after that a bare hilltop; but next to
these in loneliness I would set the glades of a beech forest in
midwinter silence, when the snow lies deep on the ground under
boughs that ar