Scarcely was this melancholy duty completed, before the few monks who had escaped from the massacre of Peterborough made their appearance. They had come all that way for assistance, for, excepting themselves, there were none left alive to help to bury their murdered brethren, on whose bodies the wolves from the woods, they said, were already feeding. With heads bent, and weeping eyes, and breaking hearts, those poor monks had moved mournfully along, leaving the wolves to feed upon their butchered brothers beside the blackened ruins of their monastery, until they could find friends who would help them to drag the half-consumed remains from beneath the burning rafters, place them side by side, and, without distinction, bury them in one common and peaceful grave. How clearly we can picture that grave group on their journey! their subdued conversation by the way, of the dead, whose good deeds they discussed, or whose vices they left untouched, as they recalled their terrible ending; the country through which they passed, desolate; the inhabitants, who were wont to come on holy-days to worship, fled; a hamlet here reduced to ashes, there a well-known form, half consumed, stretched across the blackened threshold. We can picture the wolf stealing away until they had passed; the raven, with his iron and ominous note, making a circle round their heads, then returning to the mother or the infant, half hidden in the sedge beside the mere, or with her long hair floating loose amongst the water-flags, amid which she was stabbed as she ran shrieking, with the infant at her breast. Wherever they turned their eyes, there would they behold desolation, and death, and decay,--see homes which the fire had consumed, in ruins; or where the children had escaped, witness them weeping beside the roofless walls, fatherless, motherless, hopeless; for such was the England of those days, over which the destroying sea-kings passed. Let us, however, hope, that there were a few like Sidroc amongst them; that the raven and the wolf were not their only attendants, but that the angel of mercy, though concealed in a pillar of cloud by day, and in a pillar of fire by night, was still there, and though unseen, many a time stretched forth his hand to rescue. It is painful to picture such scenes as our history presents at this period; they are all either soaked through with the blood of the slain, or black and crackled with the scorching flames which have passed over them. It makes us shudder to think what they who once lived and moved as we now do, must have endured; while, after the lapse of nearly a thousand years, we cannot portray their sufferings without sympathizing with their sorrows, and experiencing a low, heart-aching sensation. The grave that covers up and buries the past, inters not all pain and sorrow with the dead, but leaves a portion behind, that the living may feel what they once suffered--the agonizing shriek, and the heart-rending cry, ring for