Knut, the son of the king of Danemarck, standing on his proud gilded ship, received the English prelates and chiefs with great stateliness, yet not without courtesy; and when the silken purse and the scrapings of the shrine-treasures had been presented to him (Thurstan blushing the while), he sat down with his jarls on one side of a long table, and the Englishmen sat down on the opposite side; and then the conference began. Unhapily for the English landsmen a summer storm began to blow at the same time, causing the royal ship to roll, and thus making them feel the terrible sickness of the sea. At this Thurstan almost wished that he had let the prior come, instead of coming himself. Knut, the prince, spoke first in a very few words, and then his jarls further propounded and explained his plan of the war. The Danes indeed had nearly all the talking to themselves, for not many of them understood what the English said, or had patience to hear it interpreted; the qualms and sickness of the English almost took away their power of speech, and, moreover, they very soon discovered that nothing they could say had any effect in altering the opinions and decisions of the predetermined Danes. It was grievous, they said that the English, who had been so rich, should now have so little money to share with their friends and deliverers! They hoped that the good prelates and lords would be able to hold out in the isle of Ely and throughout the fen country; and as they had held out so long, no doubt they could hold out longer. In the meanwhile they, their good allies the Danes, would divide their fleet, and scour all the coast, and sail up all the great rivers, for this would distract the attention of the Normans, would alarm them at one and the same time in many different and distant places, and infallibly compel them to recall their forces from Cam-bridge and Stamford, and to give up all premeditated attacks on the fen country. “Aye,” said a sea-rover, whose yellow hair had grown as white as snow with excess of age, and whose sunken eye glistened at the memory of past adventures of that sort, “Aye, Saxons! we will sweep all this eastern coast from north to south and from south to north, as with a besom! We will sail or row our barks up every river that flows into the sea on this side of your island, and that hath keels on its waters or towns on its banks. Tweed, Tyne, and Humber, Trent, Orwell, Stour, and Thamesis, with all the rivers that run between them or into them, shall hear our war-cry as of yore!” “But, alas!” said one of the Saxon lords, “who will suffer in this kind of war but the Saxons? The Normans have very few ships. The ships on the coast and on the rivers, and the townships and hamlets, are all English still, and cannot be seized or destroyed without ruin to us and the cause which the king of Danemarck hath engaged to support.”