This was not only a battle between Saxon and Briton, it was also a battle between Christian and Heathen; and yet the woman, on the Christian side, from time to time broke forth into the Druidical incantations of early British days; this she did in moments of savage passion as she stood upright in her car dealing forth death from the sheaf of arrows at her side. In one corner of the battle-field the mist-cloud lifted wholly for a few minutes, and the sun shone on the thinned ranks of the Britons showing them woefully hindered in their movements by fallen warriors and horses; a mere sprinkling of young and strong remained; here and there a wounded man raised himself and still tried to use his bow. Old men and women fought on desperately. The war-dogs were still numerous--a veritable phalanx armed with spiked collars and goaded into savage rage, strangely horrible with their red, hanging tongues and bloodshot eyes. In the sudden gleam of sunshine the boy saw that the woman leader was in extreme peril. She had driven her chariot so quickly over the grass--slippery with dew and blood--that her horse had fallen. The boy galloped over dead and dying to her side--as he rode he saw a javelin, aimed at the woman, pierce the side of the struggling horse. At a sign from his friend, the youth, with rare dexterity, harnessed his own horse to her chariot, in place of hers. She pointed to a gap in the ranks of a small band of Saxons; and, mounting again on his steed, the boy galloped with her to the spot--the sharp knives of the chariots doing desperate work among a body of Saxon soldiers through which they ploughed. It was the ancient method of warfare, which the woman by instinct had followed. At just such a gap in the ranks of the foe as she had chosen it was the custom to leap from the chariot and charge on foot; but now she remained standing in her car and, suddenly cutting the traces, set her companion free to charge furiously on the surprised enemy--whilst she aided him by a quick shower of arrows. Her artifice succeeded; the boy bounded forward causing such havoc among a little band of Saxons that they--taken off their guard--turned and fled. In the panic of the moment the enemy did not see that the boy’s gallant horse had received his death-wound. With a last frantic attempt to obey his master’s onward signal, the animal raised itself on its hinder limbs, pawed wildly in the air, gave one long, whistling breath and, with throat and nostrils choked with blood, fell back dead--and, in falling, fell upon his master. It was the last act of the long, stubborn, futile resistance. The hovering fog-cloud swept down again upon the field as a curtain drops at the end of a scene.