“Come on,--leap it like men! Send back for your horses, knights, and ride them at it like bold huntsmen!” The front rank could not but rush on: for the pressure behind forced them forward, whether they would or not. In a moment they were wallowing waist deep, trampled on, and disappearing under their struggling comrades, who disappeared in their turn. “Look, Torfrida! If they plant their scaling ladders, it will be on a foundation of their comrades’ corpses.” Torfrida gave one glance through the openings of the hoarding, upon the writhing mass below, and turned away in horror. The men were not so merciful. Down between the hoarding-beams rained stones, javelins, arrows, increasing the agony and death. The scaling ladders would not stand in the mire. If they had stood a moment, the struggles of the dying would have thrown them down; and still fresh victims pressed on from behind, shouting “Dex Aie! On to the gold of Ely!” And still the sow, under the weight, slipped further and further back into the stream, and the foul gulf widened between besiegers and besieged. At last one scaling ladder was planted upon the bodies of the dead, and hooked firmly on the gunwale of the hoarding. Ere it could be hurled off again by the English, it was so crowded with men that even Hereward’s strength was insufficient to lift it off. He stood at the top, ready to hew down the first comer; and he hewed him down. But the Normans were not to be daunted. Man after man dropped dead from the ladder top,--man after man took his place; sometimes two at a time; sometimes scrambling over each other’s backs. The English, even in the insolence of victory, cheered them with honest admiration. “You are fellows worth fighting, you French!” “So we are,” shouted a knight, the first and last who crossed that parapet; for, thrusting Hereward back with a blow of his sword-hilt, he staggered past him over the hoarding, and fell on his knees. A dozen men were upon him; but he was up again and shouting,-- “To me, men-at-arms! A Dade! a Dade!” But no man answered. “Yield!” quoth Hereward. Sir Dade answered by a blow on Hereward’s helmet, which felled the chief to his knees, and broke the sword into twenty splinters. “Well hit,” said Hereward, as he rose. “Don’t touch him, men! this is my quarrel now. Yield, sir! you have done enough for your honor. It is madness to throw away your life.” The knight looked round on the fierce ring of faces, in the midst of which he stood alone. “To none but Hereward.” “Hereward am I.” “Ah,” said the knight, “had I but hit a little harder!” “You would have broke your sword into more splinters. My armor is enchanted. So yield like a reasonable and valiant man.” “What care I?” said the knight, stepping on to the earthwork, and sitting down quietly. “I vowed to St. Mary and King William that into Ely I would get this day; and in Ely I am; so I have done my work.”