“What! sittest thou there, old black-frock, in our presence?” shouted the king, bending his bow; “but we will teach thee manners!” Still, the bird moved not, but again sent forth his ominous and sullen croak above the jocund throng. The bow was raised--the cord was drawn back to the monarch’s ear: it twanged, and the next moment the hermit-bird came fluttering down, transfixed by the long shaft, with painful and discordant cries, and fell close at the feet of Rufus’s charger. There was a murmur in the crowd; and one, a page who waited on the king, whispered with a pale face and agitated voice into his fellow’s ear: “I have heard say-- ‘Whose shaft ’gainst raven’s life is set, Shaft’s feather his heart-blood shall wet!’” The red king caught the whisper, and turning with an inflamed countenance and flashing eye on the unwitting wakener of his wrath--“Dastard and fool!” he shouted; and, clinching his gloved hand, he dealt the boy so fierce a blow upon the chest, that he fell to the earth like a lifeless body, plunging so heavily upon the sod head-foremost, that the blood gushed from nose, ears, mouth, and he lay senseless and inanimate as the surrounding clay. With a low, sneering laugh, the tyrant once more spurred his charger forward, amid the smothered execrations of his Norman followers, boiling with indignation for that one of their noble and victorious race should have endured the foul wrong of a blow, though it were dealt him by a monarch’s hand. And there were scowling brows, and teeth set hard, among the very noblest of his train; and, as the glittering band swept on, the father of the injured boy--a dark-browed, aged veteran, who had couched lance at Hastings to win the throne of earth’s most lovely island for that base tyrant’s sire--reined in his horse, and, leaping to the earth, upraised the body from the gory turf, and wiped away the crimson stream from the pale features, and dashed pure water, brought from a neighboring brooklet in a comrade’s bacinet, upon the fair young brow--but it was all in vain! The dying child rolled upward his faint eyes; they rested on the anxious lineaments of that war-beaten sire, who, stern and fiery to all else, had ever to that motherless boy been soft and tender as a woman. “Father,” he gasped, while a brief, painful smile illuminated with a transient gleam his ashy lips--“mercy, kind mother Mary! Father--father”--the words died in the utterance; the dim eyes wavered--closed; the head fell back upon the stalwart arm that had supported it, and, with one long and quivering convulsion, the innocent soul departed!