as did your noble uncle before you.” And so they marched inland, after the boy had dismounted one of his men, and put Hereward on the horse. “You gentlemen of the sea can ride as well as sail,” said the châtelain, as he remarked with some surprise Hereward’s perfect seat and hand. “We should soon learn to fly likewise,” laughed Hereward, “if there were any booty to be picked up in the clouds there overhead”; and he rode on by Arnulf’s side, as the lad questioned him about the sea, and nothing else. “Ah, my boy,” said Hereward at last, “look there, and let those be Vikings who must.” And he pointed to the rich pastures, broken by strips of corn-land and snug farms, which stretched between the sea and the great forest of Flanders. “What do you mean?” But Hereward was silent. It was so like his own native fens. For a moment there came over him the longing for a home. To settle down in such a fair fat land, and call good acres his own; and marry and beget stalwart sons, to till the old estate when he could till no more. Might not that be a better life--at least a happier one--than restless, homeless, aimless adventure? And now, just as he had had a hope of peace,--a hope of seeing his own land, his own folk, perhaps of making peace with his mother and his king,--the very waves would not let him rest, but sped him forth, a storm-tossed waif, to begin life anew, fighting he cared not whom or why, in a strange land. So he was silent and sad withal. “What does he mean?” asked the boy of the Abbot. “He seems a wise man: let him answer for himself.” The boy asked once more. “Lad! lad!” said Hereward, waking as from a dream. “If you be heir to such a fair land as that, thank God for it, and pray to Him that you may rule it justly, and keep it in peace, as they say your grandfather and your father do; and leave glory and fame and the Vikings’ bloody trade to those who have neither father nor mother, wife nor land, but live like the wolf of the wood, from one meal to the next.” “I thank you for those words, Sir Harold,” said the good Abbot, while the boy went on abashed, and Hereward himself was startled at his own saying, and rode silent till they crossed the drawbridge of St. Bertin, and entered that ancient fortress, so strong that it was the hiding-place in war time for all the treasures of the country, and so sacred withal that no woman, dead or alive, was allowed to defile it by her presence; so that the wife of Baldwin the Bold, ancestor of Arnulf, wishing to lie by her husband, had to remove his corpse from St. Bertin to the Abbey of Blandigni, where the Counts of Flanders lay in glory for many a generation.