Alfred knew all about warfare, but it was not for warfare that this gentle boy and brave man cared most. One day his noble mother, Osburh, showed him and his brothers a book of poetry written in English. "Whichever of you," she said, "shall the soonest learn this volume shall have it for his own." This book was a very beautiful book with an illuminated letter at the beginning of the volume. An illuminated letter is usually bright with gold as well as with other colors. Of course the boy Alfred wanted this wonderful book. He said before all his brothers, who were older than he, "Will you really give that book to one of us, that is to say to him who can first understand and repeat it to you?" "Yes," answered his mother, smiling, and assuring him that it was so. Alfred thereupon took the book from her hand and went to his master to read it. And it was not so very long before he had it all by heart. Then one day he brought the book to his mother and recited it. And so well did he do that he received the gift as his mother had promised him he should. We have taken a look through the golden door over which is written _Old English Poetry_. We know something of what the boy Alfred learned from the book his mother gave him. By that time he had grown to be a large boy. When he was still a little boy he had been taken from his nurses and taught the use of arms and how to ride. All his training was teaching him how to be a soldier. Yet there was something for which Alfred cared even more. All about them in those days were the Danes, the fiercest of fighting-men. Government, the gentle religion of Christ, peace, had been almost dislodged by these fierce, heathen Danes. Yet in the midst of the war-filled years of his boyhood and young manhood Alfred was dreaming of what English books, of what education in their own tongue, might do for his people. And even in war times they were very busy just getting things together in order to live. They had to have food, they had to be warm, they had to have houses and clothes. In the woods they had pigs--wild-looking swine with tusks. In the fields they had cattle and sheep and chickens. From the sea they took fish. They made butter and cheese, ale and mead, candles, leather from skins, and they wove cloth and silk. They kept bees, too, as you know from what happened to little Finan in the story of Cædmon. Besides all these things they had their carpenter's work, their blacksmith's, their baker's, hunting, woodcutting, the making of weapons, and a hundred and one other employments.