and that the laws and manners and the tongue of the Saxons may not utterly perish, my hopes are all in heaven!” Some of the best and wisest of those who had sought for refuge in the isle of Ely, feared that when this bright guiding light should be put out, and other old patriots, like the Abbat Frithric, should take their departure, the spirit which animated this Saxon league would depart also, or gradually cool and decline. CHAPTER IV. THE MONKS OF ELY FEAST. It was on a wet evening in Autumn, as the rain was descending in torrents upon swamps that seemed to have collected all the rains that had been falling since the departure of summer, and just as the monks of Ely were singing the Ave Maria (_Dulce, cantaverunt Monachi in Ely!_)[63] that Elfric, the whilom novice of Spalding, surrounded by some of the Lord Abbat’s people, and many of the town folk, who were all laughing and twitching at his cloak, arrived at the gate of the hospitium.[64] Our Lord Abbat Frithric had brought with him two holy books. Elfric, our novice, had brought with him two grim Norman heads, for he had not been idle on the road, but had surprised and killed on the borders of the fen country, first one man-at-arms, and then another; and the good folk of Ely were twitching at his mantle in order that they might see again the trophies which he carried under his broad sleeve. At his first coming to the well-guarded ford across the Ouse, the youth had made himself known. Was he not the youngest son of Goodman Hugh, who dwelt aforetime by Saint Ovin’s Cross, hard by the village of Haddenham, and only a few bow-shot from the good town of Ely.[65] And when the Saxons had seen the two savage Norman heads, and had looked in the youth’s face, the elders declared that he was the very effigies of the Goodman Hugh; and some of the younkers said that, albeit his crown was shorn, and his eye not so merry as it was, they recalled his face well, and eke the days when Elfric the son of Goodman Hugh played at bowls with them in the bowling-alley of Ely, and bobbed for eels[66] with them in the river, and went out with them to snare wild water-fowl in the fens. Judge, therefore, if he met not with an hospitable reception from town and gown, from the good folk of Ely, and from all the monks!