A fire is detestable enough at all times, but most detestable by day. At night it is customary, a work of darkness which lights up the dark, picturesque, magnificent, with a fitness Tartarean and diabolic. But under a glaring sun, amid green fields and blue skies, all its wickedness is revealed without its beauty. You see its works, and little more. The flame is hardly noticed. All that is seen is a canker eating up God’s works, cracking the bones of its prey,--for that horrible cracking is uglier than all stage-scene glares,--cruelly and shamelessly under the very eye of the great, honest, kindly sun. And that felt Hereward, as he saw Peterborough burn. He could not put his thoughts into words, as men of this day can: so much the better for him, perhaps. But he felt all the more intensely--as did men of his day--the things he could not speak. All he said was aside to Winter,-- “It is a dark job. I wish it had been done in the dark.” And Winter knew what he meant. Then the men rushed into the Bolldyke Gate, while Hereward and Winter stood and looked with their men, whom they kept close together, waiting their commands. The Danes and their allies cared not for the great glowing heap of peat. They cared not for each other, hardly for themselves. They rushed into the gap; they thrust the glowing heap inward through the gateway with their lances; they thrust each other down into it, and trampled over them to fall themselves, rising scorched and withered, and yet struggling on toward the gold of the Golden Borough. One savage Lett caught another round the waist, and hurled him bodily into the fire, crying in his wild tongue:-- “You will make a good stepping-stone for me.” “That is not fair,” quoth Hereward, and clove him to the chine. It was wild work. But the Golden Borough was won. “We must in now and save the monks,” said Hereward, and dashed over the embers. He was only just in time. In the midst of the great court were all the monks, huddled together like a flock of sheep, some kneeling, most weeping bitterly, after the fashion of monks. Only Herluin stood in front of them, at bay, a lofty crucifix in his hand. He had no mind to weep. But with a face of calm and bitter wrath, he preferred words of peace and entreaty. They were what the time needed. Therefore they should be given. To-morrow he would write to Bishop Egelsin, to excommunicate with bell, book, and candle, to the lowest pit of Tartarus, all who had done the deed. But to-day he spoke them fair. However, his fair speeches profited little, not being understood by a horde of Letts and Finns, who howled and bayed at him, and tried to tear the crucifix from his hands; but feared “the white Christ.” They were already gaining courage from their own yells; in a moment more blood would have been shed, and then a general massacre must have ensued.