Slowly, as the wind blew coolly on my forehead, came back to me a knowledge of what had been our evil fortune and how it was that I, a man of some presence among our daring company, I, a Viking of the Angles, should be drifting thus wounded and alone in mine own ship, helpless to guide it. The crafty Romans had outwitted us and we had not been spared! In our fast shield ship, not a very great one but swift upon its way, we had been lying in wait, as was our custom, in a small bay of the Gallic coast, awaiting the near passing of any vessel which seemed to offer booty. What came, we cared not greatly, for we feared no enemy we might encounter, though preferring much some laden Phœnician trader still venturing to Britain. In default of such rare prize we must content ourselves with a chance ship of the Veneti, who also had some traffic beyond the narrow sea. Proud were we Vikings, for was not ours the blood of the bold races of the forest who had swept up the Elbe five hundred years ago and, dividing into kindred tribes, Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, had seized upon all Jutland and, from hunters and river fishers, had become most bold and skilful sailors and the most adventurous of rovers of the sea? Already there came dread to the dwellers at the riversides and all along the Gallic coast and, sometimes, even to the shores of Britain, when our shield ships showed their sails against the distant sky. No ship of the Gaul we feared, but we sought not acquaintance with the now frequent Roman galleys, since they were prone to come in squadrons. Ever we kept a lookout for them and cared not when they appeared if only there were space enough between us, for we could outsail them easily. This was not so much because we feared, as because there would be but little spoil to follow the taking of a ship containing only legionaries, and there was the further reason that, were we ourselves to be taken, we would die at once. To the Roman, and it must be said to most others, we were but ravening pirates, ruthless and dangerous as the sharks of the sea or the wolves of the land, and meriting only death. Little cared we! We had but inherited the ways of our ancestors from the time when they raided the lands, each of the other, in the German wood or seized upon the holdings which seemed good to them as they fought their way northward from the branched sources of the Elbe and Weser. Yet we were never cruel, and lacked not loyalty and faithfulness unto death to friend and blood kin.