“drew Priam’s curtains in the dead of night, And would have told him, half his Troy was burned”; and told Abbot Thorold that the monks of Peterborough had sent him; and that unless he saddled and rode his best that night, with his meinie of men-at-arms, his Golden Borough would be even as Troy town by morning light. “A moi, hommes d’armes!” shouted Thorold, as he used to shout whenever he wanted to scourge his wretched English monks at Malmesbury into some French fashion. The men leaped up, and poured in, growling. “Take me this monk, and kick him into the street for waking me with such news.” “But, gracious lord, the outlaws will surely burn Peterborough; and folks said that you were a mighty man of war.” “So I am; but if I were Roland, Oliver, and Turpin rolled into one, how am I to fight Hereward and the Danes with forty men-at-arms? Answer me that, thou dunder-headed English porker. Kick him out.” And Ywar was kicked into the cold, while Thorold raged up and down his chamber in mantle and slippers, wringing his hands over the treasure of the Golden Borough, snatched from his fingers just as he was closing them upon it. That night the monks of Peterborough prayed in the minster till the long hours passed into the short. The poor corrodiers, and other servants of the monastery, fled from the town outside into the Milton woods. The monks prayed on inside till an hour after matin. When the first flush of the summer’s dawn began to show in the northeastern sky, they heard mingling with their own chant another chant, which Peterborough had not heard since it was Medehampstead, three hundred years ago,--the terrible Yuch-hey-saa-saa-saa,--the war-song of the Vikings of the north. Their chant stopped of itself. With blanched faces and trembling knees they fled, regardless of all discipline, up into the minster tower, and from the leads looked out northeastward on the fen. The first rays of the summer sun were just streaming over the vast sheet of emerald, and glittering upon the winding river; and on a winding line, too, seemingly endless, of scarlet coats and shields, black hulls, gilded poops and vanes and beak-heads, and the flash and foam of innumerable oars. And nearer and louder came the oar-roll, like thunder working up from the northeast; and mingled with it that grim yet laughing Heysaa, which bespoke in its very note the revelry of slaughter. The ships had all their sails on deck. But as they came nearer, the monks could see the banners of the two foremost vessels. The one was the red and white of the terrible Dannebrog. The other, the scarcely less terrible white bear of Hereward.