cut them off in numbers, as they impetuously rushed away towards the valley and the castle. At a signal from Oswald, the Saxons ceased their harrying of the scattered and flying foe, and with swift footsteps they regained the head of the gorge and over the shoulder of the hills, to the help of their comrades, who barred the advance of the second band of Normans. Now, whilst Oswald, with sagacity and conspicuous valour, had routed one contingent of the Normans, the sturdy Viking Sigurd, with a dozen of his own reckless and desperate band, reinforced by less than a score of Oswald's followers, pressed eagerly on to the fray with the other band of Normans. Sigurd possessed none of the qualities of generalship, beyond a desperate and headlong valour, which always bore him into the thickest of the fight. His personal strength was prodigious, and no other man could wield his ponderous sword; in a rough and desperate struggle where strength and valour were everything, and skill of little avail, he had no equal in all Northumbria. His own followers, too, in thicket warfare, with their short but heavy swords in one hand, and a long, gleaming knife or dagger in the other, were unrivalled in such an encounter as the one they challenged to-day. In Oswald's struggle, the place and plan of attack had more to do with the complete demoralisation of the Normans, than the desperate valour with which it was carried out. In Sigurd's case, it is true, the surprise, the thicket, and the rough and precipitous ground, were stout allies of his. But otherwise, everything depended on the vigour and valour of himself and men. Now Pierre led this second company, and he was a sturdy rogue who had to be reckoned with when it came to a tussle with weapons; and any one who counted on Pierre succumbing to panic or to fear would be grievously mistaken.