of blackberries wasted their sweetness on the desert air.

Now and then came the horn of the hunter, waking up the echoes,
then the loud murmur of hounds, then the rush and clamour of the
chase swept by, and all was quiet again, even as it is said to be
in the solitudes of the Black Forest, when the Wild Huntsman has
passed.

But there was a lonelier and yet wilder region, where the sound of
the hunter's horn only penetrated in faint vibrations from the far
distance.

This region was a deep and entangled morass, which had only been
explored by the veteran hunter of former days, or by the hunted
outlaw of the present. Streams had overflown their banks, the water
had stagnated, rank foliage had arisen, and giant trees rotted in
swamp and slime.

The Normans had never penetrated into this wilderness of slimy
desolation, although, of course, they had again and again reached
its borders and found bogs of bottomless depth, quagmires which
would suck one out of sight in a few minutes, and at nightfall
legions of evil spirits, as they thought them--for after dark these
sloughs were alive with Jack-o'-lanterns, which men believed to be
the souls of unbaptized infants.

In former Chronicles we have described the old hall of Aescendune,
as it stood in Anglo-Saxon days; it was then rather a home, a kind
of "moated grange," than a fortress.