Four hundred vessels of the largest class, and more than twice that number of the transports of the day, were speedily assembled in the frith of Dives, a stream which falls into the sea between the Seine and Orne. There, for a month or better, by contrary winds and furious storms, they were detained inactive. At length, a southern breeze rose suddenly, and by its aid they made the harbor of Saint Valery; but there, again, they were detained by times more stormy than before; and, superstitious as all men of that period were, the soldiers soon began to tremble and to murmur; strange tales of dreams, and prodigies were circulated, and the spirit of that vast host, of late so confident and proud, sank hourly. At length, whether at the instigation of their own fanatical belief, or as a last resource, or hoping to distract the minds of men from gloomier considerations, the Norman chiefs appointed a procession round the harbor of Saint Valery; bearing the holiest relics, and among them, the bones of the good saint himself, the patron and nomenclator of the town; and ere the prayers were ended, lo! the wind shifted once again, and now blew steadily and fair, swelling the canvass with propitious breath, and driving out each vane and streamer at full length, toward their destined port. The same storm, which had held William on his Norman coast, windbound and motionless, which he had cursed as unpropitious and disastrous, fifty times every day, for the last month, had been, in truth--so little is the foresight, and so ignorant the wisdom even of the most sagacious among mortals--had been, in truth, the agent by which his future conquest was to be effected. Those gales which pent the Norman galleys in their harbors, had forced the English fleet, shattered and storm-tossed, to put in for victuals and repairs, leaving the seas unguarded to the approach of the invaders. Nor was this all! Those self-same gales had wafted from the northward another fleet of foemen, the Norwegian host of the bold sea-king, Harold Hardrada, and the treacherous Tosti, the rebel brother of the Saxon monarch. Debarking in the Humber, they had laid waste the fertile borders of Northumberland and Yorkshire; had vanquished, in a pitched battle, Morcar and Edwin, and the youthful Waltheof--who had made head against them with their sudden levies, raised from the neighboring countries--had driven them into the walls of York, and there were now besieging them with little hope of rescue or relief. Meanwhile, the king, who had, for months, been lying in the southern portion of the realm, in Essex, Kent, or Sussex, awaiting, at the head of the best warriors of his kingdom, the arrival of his most inveterate foeman--summoned by news of this irruption, unexpected, yet, as it seemed most formidable, into his northern provinces, lulled into temporary carelessness by the long tarrying of his Norman enemy; and hoping, as it indeed seemed