HOW HEREWARD SUCCORED A PRINCESS OF CORNWALL.


The next place in which Hereward appeared was far away on the southwest,
upon the Cornish shore. How he came there, or after how long, the
chronicles do not say. All that shall be told is, that he went into port
on board a merchant ship carrying wine, and intending to bring back tin.
The merchants had told him of one Alef, a valiant _regulus_ or
kinglet of those parts, who was indeed a distant connection of Hereward
himself, having married, as did so many of the Celtic princes, the
daughter of a Danish sea-rover, of Siward's blood. They told him also that
the kinglet increased his wealth, not only by the sale of tin and of red
cattle, but by a certain amount of autumnal piracy in company with his
Danish brothers-in-law from Dublin and Waterford; and Hereward, who
believed, with most Englishmen of the East Country, that Cornwall still
produced a fair crop of giants, some of them with two and even three
heads, had hopes that Alef might show him some adventure worthy of his
sword. He sailed in, therefore, over a rolling bar, between jagged points
of black rock, and up a tide river which wandered away inland, like a
land-locked lake, between high green walls of oak and ash, till they saw
at the head of the tide Alef's town, nestling in a glen which sloped
towards the southern sun. They discovered, besides, two ships drawn up
upon the beach, whose long lines and snake-heads, beside the stoat carved
on the beak-head of one and the adder on that of the other, bore witness
to the piratical habits of their owner. The merchants, it seemed, were
well known to the Cornishmen on shore, and Hereward went up with them
unopposed; past the ugly dikes and muddy leats, where Alef's slaves were
streaming the gravel for tin ore; through rich alluvial pastures spotted
with red cattle, and up to Alef's town. Earthworks and stockades
surrounded a little church of ancient stone, and a cluster of granite