baptismal fount, and sent them back to their father loaded with presents. {49} The pirate, however, was not overcome by his foe's generosity. He attacked Mercia, sustained by the Danish hordes established in the country. Abandoning all thought of the conquests which he had originally intended, and the kingdom which he had wished to found, he once more took up the irregular invasions by which he had acquired so much wealth, and thought only of plundering the Saxon territory. But the subjects of Alfred had learnt some useful lessons; they rose with one accord against the foreign enemy, and when the king, returning in haste from Devonshire, arrived in the vicinity of the Severn, he found himself at the head of a numerous army which allowed him to completely surround the trenches of Hastings. The Danes had been decimated by hunger: they had even eaten their horses. Making a last desperate effort, they opened up a passage straight through the ranks of their enemies, and took refuge in Chester, where they spent the winter. In the spring-time, the long vessels, the "water-serpents," as the pirates would affectionately call them, invariably brought reinforcements to them. In 895, Hastings began by attacking Wales, finding the states of King Alfred too well defended. He ended, however, by retreating to the isle of Mersey, from whence he set out in 896 to establish himself on the river Lea, in the north of London. He had raised a fortress and there defended himself valiantly, when King Alfred perceived that he could stop all the enemy's navigation by river. He accordingly constructed a canal, and reduced the Danes to despair: their fleet was on dry ground. They abandoned it, and marched in a northern direction. This time the old pirate was beaten. Wearied by this struggle against a man of energy equal to his own, and in the enjoyment of the youth and vigor which he no longer possessed, he assembled his vessels in the spring of 897, and leaving definitively the English coast, he ascended the Seine and extorted from Charles the Simple a donation of land in the vicinity of Chartres. He established himself there, and Rollo found him there fifteen years later, spending in peace the remainder of his stormy life. {50}