But no matter what subject presented itself, all his reflections were tinged with gloom, and several times he rose to his feet and walked about with the uneasy feeling of one who has, he knows not why, a presentiment of coming woe. At length, worn out with bodily fatigue and melancholy musing, he fell into a feverish sleep, and dreamt dreams which made his breath come by gasps, and caused his brow to darken, and his teeth to clench, and his frame to quiver. It seemed to him at first that a sweet voice was singing the popular ballad, “I go to the verdure, for love invites me;” that he was, in fact, in the woodlands around Oakmede, walking hand in hand with De Moreville’s daughter, and that suddenly as they moved through the greenwood and reached a spot familiar to him from childhood, they came upon his mother stretched lifeless and rigid under a leafless tree growing on a hillock where there still remained a circle of rough stones, which seemed to indicate that the place had in ancient days been dedicated to the rites of the Druids. Oliver started in great horror, and rapidly his imagination associated the death of his mother with the enmity which had been shown towards himself by Hugh de Moreville. But he did not awake. Suddenly, as if by magic, other figures appeared on the scene, and before him, as he imagined, were all the departed chiefs of the house of Icingla urging him to execute a terrible vengeance, while one of them, arrayed in the long cloak and wearing the long beard in vogue among the Anglo-Saxons up to the time of the Conquest, raised his hand and exclaimed-- “Dally not with the Norman’s daughter, O heir of the Icinglas! nor deem that aught but evil can come of her love. Beware of her wiles, and avoid her presence, and wed her not, for harder thou wouldst find the couch of the foreign woman than the bare ground on which thou sleepest while keeping faith with thy country and thy race.”