“Out! out! ye English thieves!”
“Saint Denys! on, on! Saint Michael, shield us!”
Then came the sound of fiercer strife, the cry of deadlier anguish.
For there with arrow, spear, and knife,
Men fought the desperate fight for life.
Martin slipped on his garb, and hurried to the scene. He looked, gained a sloping bank, and there—
That morning, a merry young knight and his train set out from Herstmonceux Castle to go “a hunting,” and in the very exuberance of his spirits, like Douglas of old, he thought fit to hunt in the woods haunted by the “merrie men,” as he in the Percy’s country.
Such a merry young knight, such a roguish eye.
But he had not ridden far into the debatable land when the path lay between two sloping, almost precipitous banks, crowned with underwood. All at once a voice cried:
“Stand! Who are ye? Whence come ye? What do ye here in the woods which free Englishmen claim as their own?”
A shaggy form, a bull-like individual, stood above them. The young knight gazed upon his interlocutor with a comic eye.