The accounts which we have of the way in which the hosts spent the night before the battle are all to the disadvantage of the English. Had they been the winning instead of the losing party, the chroniclers would doubtless have been less severe. As it is, they tell us that the troops of Harold spent the night in eating and drinking and merriment--never lying down in their beds. If this be true, how we are we to account for the vigour with which they fought from nine o’clock in the morning until nightfall next day? The Normans and French, on the other hand, we are told, betook themselves to their orisons. “They made confession of their sins, accused themselves to the priests, and vowed that they would never more eat flesh on the Saturday” (the day of the battle). Many of them kept the vow! At the dawn of day each party had completed its preparations. Before the sun should set, a battle was to be fought on which hung not merely the fate of an empire, but, as events have subsequently proved, the destinies of the civilized world to this hour. THE BATTLE. “Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of fate below.” _Dryden._ The room is still pointed out in the roofless donjon keep of Falaise, in which Arlotte, the tanner’s daughter, gave birth to William the Conqueror. It is a small comfortless apartment. When the newborn babe was laid upon the floor, he grasped the straw which covered it with a vigour that induced the bystanders to predict that he would ere long take a foremost place amongst the ambitious potentates of his age. In the course of our worsted narrative we have followed our hero to a point in which he is about to justify the correctness of these surmisings.