He, with seventeen of his companions, had been captured, and had been made, according to the custom of those rude days, to straddle a large log, one behind the other, with their hands tied behind their backs. Up came, then, the victor, Jarl Hakon (after a leisurely breakfast of pork chops), to strike off their heads. This, to us, seems unkind; but having one’s head chopped off was such a matter of course in those days that no one ever thought for an instant of minding it in the least. Give and take was the way they looked at it. But brave as these men were in the presence of the headsman, they shuddered at the very thought of a barber. They gloried in their long hair. To lose their heads was an incident of war; to lose their locks a disgrace which followed them even into the next world. According to a superstition of theirs, a Sea-Cavalier who lost his curls just before parting with his head was doomed to be a Roundhead ghost and a laughing-stock throughout eternity. Up strode the fierce headsman, Tharkell Leire, and bade the captive Viking lean forward and lay his golden hair upon the log. He obeyed, but held his calm, sky-blue eye upon the glittering axe, and, quick as a flash, as it descended, covered his fair curls with his fairer neck. And when his seventeen comrades, who sat there waiting their turn, saw how their wily captain had outwitted their enemy, and how he raged thereat, they roared with Sea-King laughter. 27. III.—THE BOUCHES. Every school-boy knows what the Edict of Nantes was; but philosophers differ as to what was the effect of its revocation upon the fortunes of France. For us it is enough to know that Louis XIV., by recalling it, drove to Virginia our ancestor John Bouche, whose daughter, Elizabeth, completely captivated my great etc. grandfather, Tom Whacker, by her pretty French accent and trim French figure. She was good and wise, too; but the rascal never found that out till after he married her. It must be owing to the Danichester strain, I suppose, that the Whackers, so sensible in many ways, have always sought grace and beauty in their wives, rather than piety and learning; and I suppose I shall be no wiser than my fathers when my time comes. This Huguenot cross gave the old Whacker stock a twist towards theology. Two of the sons of Thomas and Elizabeth took orders, much to the surprise of their father, who used to say that _Reverend Whacker_ had a queer sound to his ear. So prepotent, in fact, has the Huguenot strain become, that a Whacker is no longer a Whacker. In the old days our eyes were as blue as the sky; now they are as black as sloes. Once we were reserved and silent; now—but enough. As for myself, it has often seemed to me that I was all Bouche,—Bouche _et præterea nihil_,—as the ancient Romans put it in their compact way.