Eadwulf the Red never recovered from the starvation and exposure endured in his escape and subsequent wanderings; and, though he received the priceless boon of liberty, and the king's free pardon for his crimes, though he passed his declining days in the beautiful cottage nigh Kentmere, with his noble brother, his fair wife, and all the treasured little ones about him, who grew up like olive-branches round Kenric's happy, honored board, with every thing to soothe his stubborn heart and soften his morose and bitter spirit, he lived and died a gloomy, disappointed, bitter, and bad-hearted man, a victim in some sort of the vicious and cruel system which had debased his soul more even than it had degraded his body. Yet it was not in that accursed system, altogether; for the gallant and good Kenric, and his sweet wife, Edith the Fair, were living proofs, even, as the noble poet sings-- "That gentleness and love and trust Prevail o'er angry wave and gust;" and it was no less "the spur, that the clear spirit doth raise," than the grand force of that holiest Saxon institution, Trial by Jury, that raised Kenric from a Saxon serf to be an English freeman. End of Project Gutenberg's Wager of Battle, by Henry William Herbert