Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/33

Rh, being a good musician, disguised himself as a gleeman or minstrel, and went, with his harp, to the Danish camp. He played and sang in the very tent of the Danish leader, and entertained the Danes as they caroused. While he seemed to think of nothing but his music, he was watchful of their tents, their arms, their discipline, everything that he desired to know. And right soon did this great King entertain them to a different tune; for, summoning all his true followers to meet him at an appointed place, where they received him with joyful shouts and tears, as the monarch whom many of them had given up for lost or dead, he put himself at their head, marched on the Danish Camp, defeated the Danes with great slaughter, and besieged them for fourteen days to prevent their escape. But, being as merciful as lie was good and brave, he then, instead of killing them, proposed peace: on condition that they should altogether depart from the Western part of England and settle in the East; and that should become a Christian in remembrance of the Divine religion which now taught his conqueror, the noble, to forgive the enemy who had so often injured him. This, did. At his baptism. was his godfather. And was an honorable chief who well deserved that clemency; for, ever afterwards, he was loyal and faithful to the king. The Danes under him were faithful too. They plundered and burned no more, but worked like honest men. They ploughed, and sowed, and reaped, and led good honest English lives. And I hope the children of those Danes played, many a time, with Saxon children in the sunny fields; and that Danish young men fell in love with Saxon girls, and married them; and that English travellers, benighted at the doors of Danish cottages, often went in for shelter until morning; and that Danes and Saxons sat by the red fire, friends, talking of King Alfred the Great.

All the Danes were not like these under ; for, after some years, more of them came over, in the old plundering and burning way—among them a fierce pirate of the name of, who had the boldness to sail up the Thames to Gravesend, with eighty ships. For three years, there was a war with these Danes; and there was a famine in the country, too, and a plague, both upon