"Ah! the foul fiends bidding him to their black abode. Mark you, Jock, once he gets there he'll have the whole dismal brood hanged, drawn, and quartered before the year's end." "'Twould be his first gracious deed then, I give thee warrant." From an opposite point of the compass a second cock crowed; and then another and another. The day at last was dawning; the mist lifting, dispersing. Slowly it thinned away, as though one after another of a myriad of gauzy curtains was being raised from between the opposing armies. When eyes could penetrate from line to line hostilities began. A pallid, ghost-like form, grotesquely exaggerated, would emerge from the fog. Then would be heard a sharp cry, a groan, a horrible rattling in an expiring throat, a flinging aloft of a pair of arms, and a sinking of the spectral figure into the black mire above which it seemed to have been floating. These emerging shadows multiplied from one into a score; from a score into a hundred; from a hundred into a thousand. There was no crash of sudden onset and meeting. Rather there was that which resembled a gentle crescendo of death. A blending together of two armed forces with the melting of the fog. It was as though a peaceful entity had gently risen to yield place to a warlike one. By now, the din and crash were become incessant. Wading hip deep in the reddening waters of the brook and in the crimsoning black mire of the morass, the men of the opposed armies met and battled, hand to hand. From the wood belched flashes of fire. Heavy smoke clouds rolled away among the leaves. The thunder of primitive artillery reverberated across the meadow, mingling its sound of a new kind of warfare with that of the decadent. Wherever a crescendo occurs, a diminuendo is commonly indicated. The augmenting of Richmond's desperately battling forces by those of Stanley marked the climax of the crescendo. The downfall of Richard the Third before the sturdy lance of Richmond, the beginning of the diminuendo; the fitting finale to the whole. Wild of eye, disheveled, his charger struck away from beneath him, King Richard faced his mortal foe. Dauntless to the last gasping breath, he made one frenzied, vain effort to rally his scattering army. "A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" he shrieked aloud; and then, dying, pitched forward into the dust. The Battle of Bosworth Field was with the history of things past. "His kingdom for a horse, quotha!" shouted Stanley. "His kingdom? Bah! What is his kingdom now, honest gentles?" he added, leaping from his blood-slavered stallion and contemptuously spurning with his steel-booted foot the pitiful remains of the dead monarch. "What is his kingdom now?" Sir William repeated, looking inquiringly about him. "Why, somewhat above three cubits of unwashed dirt. A full cubit less, by the rood, than any man of us here shall inherit."