The story of Alfred’s seclusion on the island, as it might almost be called, of Ethelney, is told very differently by the different narrators of it.  Some of these narrations are inconsistent and contradictory.  They all combine, however, though they differ in respect to many other incidents and details, in relating the far-famed story of Alfred’s leaving the cakes to burn.  It seems that, though the cow-herd himself was allowed to regard Alfred as a man of rank in disguise—­though even he did not know that it was the king—­his wife was not admitted, even in this partial way, into the secret.  She was made to consider the stranger as some common strolling countryman, and the better to sustain this idea, he was taken into the cow-herd’s service, and employed in various ways, from time to time, in labors about the house and farm.  Alfred’s thoughts, however, were little interested in these occupations.  His mind dwelt incessantly upon his misfortunes and the calamities which had befallen his kingdom.  He was harassed by continual suspense and anxiety, not being able to gain any clear or certain intelligence about the condition and movements of either his friends or foes.  He was revolving continually vague and half-formed plans for resuming the command of his army and attempting to regain his kingdom, and wearying himself with fruitless attempts to devise means to accomplish these ends.  Whenever he engaged voluntarily in any occupation, it would always be something in harmony with these trains of thought and these plans.  He would repair and put in order implements of hunting, or any thing else which might be deemed to have some relation to war.  He would make bows and arrows in the chimney corner—­lost, all the time, in melancholy reveries, or in wild and visionary schemes of future exploits.

One evening, while he was thus at work, the cow-herd’s wife left, for a few moments, some cakes under his charge, which she was baking upon the great stone hearth, in preparation for their common supper.  Alfred, as might have been expected, let the cakes burn.  The woman, when she came back and found them smoking, was very angry.  She told him that he could eat the cakes fast enough when they were baked, though it seemed he was too lazy and good for nothing to do the least thing in helping to bake them.  What wide-spread and lasting effects result sometimes from the most trifling and inadequate causes!  The singularity of such an adventure befalling a monarch in disguise, and the terse antithesis of the reproaches with which the woman rebuked him, invest this incident with an interest which carries it every where spontaneously among mankind.  Millions, within the last thousand years, have heard the name of Alfred, who have known no more of him than this story; and millions more, who never would have heard of him but for this story, have been led by it to study the whole history of his life; so that the unconscious cow-herd’s wife, in scolding the disguised monarch for forgetting her cakes, was perhaps doing more than he ever did himself for the wide extension of his future fame.[2]