intending to land at Wareham and reinforce the host shut up in Exeter. Had they been able to carry out their plan, the whole history of England would have been changed. Its history might have been, not that of the Anglecyn [English kin], but of a Danish people. But another destiny was in

store for England. When the great fleet reached Swanwick (Swanage), it was met by a tremendous gale, which drove the long keels in hopeless confusion on the rocks. A hundred and twenty ships were lost. The Danes lost control of the Channel, and the host at Exeter was practically at the mercy of Alfred.

The Danish forces still at Wareham were now isolated. They could not expect reinforcements or provisions from the sea for some time. They were compelled to choose between a daring dash for re-union with the army in Exeter, and surrender. They chose the exciting alternative. Horses were somehow purchased or captured; they broke out of their entrenchments and through the investing force and rode for Exeter. Alfred pursued them, but failed to overtake them. Before he could get within striking distance, they were safe within the walls. The army in Exeter was too big to remain there now that supplies were exhausted, and not big enough to face Alfred's army with confidence. For the first time since Ashdown, Alfred seemed

to have victory in his grasp. The Danes recognised that they were beaten, and surrendered on condition of being allowed to leave Wessex. They gave hostages, and swore many oaths. "And this time," the Chronicle says, "they observed the peace well," being, in fact, for the moment unable to do anything else.

The events which followed illustrate the "glorious uncertainty" which gives war its fascination to many temperaments. The Danes had withdrawn into Mercia, and had apportioned some of the rich lands in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire among themselves. The West Saxon army, feeling, no doubt, that it had done its work well, had been for the time disbanded, and the men had returned to their farms. Winter had set in, and, according to all the rules of war then recognised, campaigning ought to have been at an end. Suddenly the Danes, probably reinforced unexpectedly, and anxious to retrieve their footing in Wessex, "stole away to Chippenham after twelfth night." No opposition was possible, for Wessex was taken by surprise. They went where they would, overrunning the Western kingdom, and "sat down there."

Chapter IV

The Hour of Darkness

"And straightway the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness."

St Mark

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."-R. Browning.

"Go into thyself, strike Earth;

Antæus, young giant, whom fortune trips,

And thou com'st on a saving fact

To nourish thy planted worth.

Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips,

Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact

The redemption of sinners deluded.”—George Meredith.

To every man there comes a time when the props on which he has leaned fall away from him, and he is left to act as though he were the only man in the world. Friends and companions with whom he has shared his toils and pleasures leave him, called away by death or severing interests. The ambitions which have lured him on prove illusory or disappointing as they fade into the common light of day. Men in whom he had believed and trusted prove faithless. Hopes which made his path radiant go out and leave him, as an Eastern

traveller is overtaken by sundown in a desert. The confidence every man cherishes that his life is to be a success is suddenly overborne by the memory of his own failures, and in presence of the spectres of the past the living man becomes bloodless and ready to faint. When a man faces naked destiny in this way, alone, one of two things must follow. He either cowers before it and gives in, or he rises to wrestle with it, and to wrest out of the failures and blunders of the past a triumph for the future. He is compelled to go into himself, to find what elements of strength remain for the struggle, what is the thing deepest and strongest within him, and out of the elements of strength that remain to choose the weapons for his contest. It is then, if ever, that a man breaks through the veil of sense and finds that "spirit with spirit may meet." He finds God. If he comes then to know himself in relation to the Eternal, he issues from the conflict sharer in the victory of the Son of Man over sense and time. Even if, in the external conflict, defeat overtakes him, the great victory is his; he is victor by faith, and his life has attained one of the consummations for which it was given.

This was the kind of experience which suddenly overtook Alfred when the Danes stole into Wessex in mid-winter and seized Chippenham. The fact seems to have been as Henry of Huntington de

scribes it, "They spread over the country like locusts, and there being no one able to resist them they took possession of it for themselves." There were no battles, no stormings of towns, no sieges, everywhere the West Saxons were found unprepared, without an army, and when confronted by troops of armed Danes obliged to surrender. Many of them gave up the struggle as hopeless and fled. "Mickle of the folk over sea they drove, and of the others the most deal they rode over: all but King Alfred, he with a little band hardly fared after the woods and on the moor-fastnesses": so the Chronicle tells the tale of disaster. Starvation drove some abroad and others into the hands of the Danes. Only in Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Somerset of all the "folk" in England were a few found faithful to Alfred. As regards the rest of Wessex, it seemed for some months as if it were only a matter of time before the Danes would do with it as they had done with Northumbria and Mercia and East England. They would part the lands among them and "remain ploughing and tilling."

There is no use attempting to minimise the straits in which Alfred now found himself. His glory does not lie in never having met disaster, but in having faced it and overcome it. The stories which are told about these months when he wandered almost