Spring, that gives such life and beauty to the landscape, but aroused the Danes to new aggressions, and they this time marched into the opposite division of Mercia, crossing the Humber and the Trent, and landing in that part of Lincolnshire which is still called Lindsey, where they spread death and desolation wherever they passed. From north to south they swept onward like a destroying tempest; the busy hamlet, the happy home, and the growing harvest, all vanished beneath their footsteps. Where in the morning sunshine, the pleasant village, and the walled town, stood upon the high cliffs and overlooked the wild wold and reedy marish; the dim twilight dropped down upon a waste of smoking ruins, and blackened ashes, while such of the inhabitants as escaped the merciless massacre, either sheltered in the gloomy wood, where "the grey wolf of the weald" had its lair, or in the sedgy swamp where the wild swan built, and the black water-hen went paddling onward before her dusky and downy young ones. Wherever a church or a monastery stood up amid the scenery, thitherward the Danes directed their steps, for to slaughter the priest at the altar, and carry their clamorous war-cry into the choir, where they changed the hymning of the psalter into the groans and shrieks of agonised death, was to them a delight, equal to that of the heaven which they hoped to inhabit hereafter. But sack, slay, burn, and destroy, are words which but faintly describe the ravages of these Northern pagans, that fall upon the ear with an indistinct meaning; and it is only by following them step by step, and bringing their deeds before the eye of the reader, that we can throw the moving shadows of these savage sea-kings for a moment upon our pages. Having ravaged the district of Lindsey, destroyed the beautiful monastery of Bardney, and killed every monk they found within its walls, they crossed the Witham, and entered that division of Lincolnshire which is called Kesteven--here a stand was made against them. The earl of Algar, with his two officers, Wibert and Leofric, mustered together the inhabitants who dwelt around the wild and watery neighbourhood of Croyland, and being joined by the forces which Osgot the sheriff of Lincoln had collected, and aided by a monk who had once been a famous warrior, and now cast aside his cowl to don a heavy helmet, they sallied forth in the September of 868, and gave battle to the Danes. After a sharp contest, in which three of the sea-kings were slain, the men of Mercia drove the pagans into their intrenchments, nor did they cease from assailing them in their stronghold until darkness had settled down upon the land. But a thousand men, though backed by so good a cause, were sure to fall at last before such a mighty and overwhelming host as the invaders presented.