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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and in quarrelling as to who should be their leaders. So one night, in the next spring, the Saxons crept up the hill and burned the castle and the villa and the priest's cell, and took all that part of Britain into the kingdom of Anglo-Saxendom. The gardener had been working in the rocky crest of the hill that looks over the marsh, and there lay two skeletons of great stature. Whilst we looked, the air worked on them, and they crumbled and trickled into fine dust. Only the teeth remained, and these he gathered into a sugar basin. It is by such dust as this that the history of men and of great battles is recorded. . . . The anecdote with which Serapion had concluded this episode had induced a frame of polite attention in the audience. They might have shuffled their feet, coughed, or asked questions had they realised that he had actually concluded the tale of the Portus Lemanis. As it was, they waited whilst he took a sip from a tumbler of water, and began again upon the history of? BERTRAN DE BORN May 26TM, 1180 In the still, hot afternoon the crumbled stones of the breach in the eastern tower of the castle of Autafort sent up lazy smoke into the pellucid sky and, as is customary after long and troublesome sieges, all things had an air of silence, of rest, and of waiting about. The great catapults stood limp and deserted over the battlement; just beside the barbican hung the body of a man with an arrow in his throat; twelve other bodies lay in the ditch at the foot of the wall. The tent of the King of England had been set up before the southern end of the castle, upon level ground; that of the King of Aragon stood a hundred yards away. These two kings had been besieging this small castle. Its lord, the Viscount of Autafort, and all his surviving companions stood, w...