Yet
since Canute is once more free to beset London--" He did not finish, and for a
while it appeared as though he did not see the sunlit fields his eyes were
resting on.
But suddenly the boy broke in upon him with a burst of stifled laughter.
"Look, lord! In yonder field, behind the third haycock!"
The moment that he had complied, laughter banished the Etheling's meditations.
Cozily ensconced in the soft side of a haycock was Father Ingulph, a couple of
jovial harvesters sprawled beside him, a fat skin of ale in his hands on its
way to his mouth. As the pair on the hilltop looked down, one of the trio
began to bellow out a song that bore no resemblance whatever to a hymn.
Keeping under cover of the bushes, the eavesdroppers laughed with malicious
enjoyment.
"But I will make him squirm for that!" the Etheling vowed. "I will tell him
that your paganism has made spells over me so that I cannot tell a holy
relique from an ale-skin; and a bedridden woman looks to me like two strapping
yeomen. I will, I swear it!"
"And I shall be able to hold it against him as a shield, the next time he is
desirous to fret me about taking a new belief," the boy rejoiced.
But presently Sebert's remarks began to take a new tone. "They have the
appearance of relishing what they have in that skin," he observed first. And
then, "I should not mind putting my own teeth into that bread-and-cheese.
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