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 "I care not," replied Gurth, "how soon he makes a mark of me. Yesterday he left Wilfrid, my young master, in his blood. To-day he has striven to kill before my face the only other living creature that ever shewed me kindness. By St Edmund, St Dunstan, St Withold, St Edward the Confessor, and every other Saxon saint in the calendar, (for Cedric never swore by any that was not of Saxon lineage, and all his household had the same limited devotion,) I will never forgive him."

"To my thinking now," said the Jester, who was frequently wont to act as peace-maker in the family, "our master did not propose to hurt Fangs, but only to affright him. For, if you observed, he rose in his stirrups, as thereby meaning to over-cast the mark; and so he would have done, but Fangs happening to bound up at the very moment, received a scratch, which I will be bound to heal with a penny's breadth of tar."

"If I thought so," said Gurth—"if I could but think so—but no—I saw the javelin was well aimed—I heard it whizz through the air with all the wrathful malevolence of him who cast it, and