Wilfred of Aescendune was gone.  His tragical fate had aroused little sympathy amongst his Norman companions, hardened as they were by familiarity with scenes of violence; the burning of the abbey and the fiery fate of its inmates had been but a nine days’ wonder.  Etienne and his fellow pages spoke of their lost companion with little regard to the maxim, “nihil nisi bonum de mortuis,” and seemed, indeed, to think that he was well out of the way.

There were few English left to mourn him:  the baron would trust none in the castle, and the churls and thralls of the village had perished or taken refuge in the greenwoods, which lay, like a sea of verdure, to the north of the domain of Aescendune, where it was shrewdly suspected they might be found, enjoying the freedom of the forests, and making free with the red deer.

It was a primeval forest, wherein were trees which had witnessed old Druids, silver knife in hand, cutting the mistletoe, or which had stood in the vigour of youth when Caesar’s legionaries had hunted those same Druids to their last retreats.  Giant oaks cast their huge limbs abroad, and entwined in matrimonial love with the silver beech; timid deer with their fawns wantoned in the shade beneath, or wild swine munched the acorns.  Here were slow sedgy streams, now illumined, as by a ray of light, when some monster of the inland waters flashed along after his scaly prey, or stirred by a sudden plunge as the otter sprang from the bank.  Sometimes the brock took an airing abroad, and the wolf came to look after his interests and see what he could snatch.

While, in the upper regions, amidst that sea of leaves, whole tribes of birds, long since vanished from England, carried on their aerial business, and now and then the eagle made a swoop amongst them, and then there was a grand scattering.

Many a lonely pool there was, where the kingfisher had never seen the face of man; many a bushel, not to say waggon load, of nuts rotted for want of modern schoolboys to gather them; many an acre of blackberries wasted their sweetness on the desert air.

Now and then came the horn of the hunter, waking up the echoes, then the loud murmur of hounds, then the rush and clamour of the chase swept by, and all was quiet again, even as it is said to be in the solitudes of the Black Forest, when the Wild Huntsman has passed.

But there was a lonelier and yet wilder region, where the sound of the hunter’s horn only penetrated in faint vibrations from the far distance.

This region was a deep and entangled morass, which had only been explored by the veteran hunter of former days, or by the hunted outlaw of the present.  Streams had overflown their banks, the water had stagnated, rank foliage had arisen, and giant trees rotted in swamp and slime.

The Normans had never penetrated into this wilderness of slimy desolation, although, of course, they had again and again reached its borders and found bogs of bottomless depth, quagmires which would suck one out of sight in a few minutes, and at nightfall legions of evil spirits, as they thought them—­for after dark these sloughs were alive with Jack-o’-lanterns, which men believed to be the souls of unbaptized infants.