The Prince and the Page: A Story of the Last Crusade

A FINE EVENING-six centuries ago-shed a bright parting light over Alton Wood, illuminating the gray lichens that clung to the rugged trunks of the old oak trees, andshining on the smoother bark of the graceful beech, with that sidelong light that, towardsevening, gives an especial charm to woodland scenery. The long shadows lay across anopen green glade, narrowing towards one end, where a path, nearly lost amid dwarf furze, crested heather, and soft bent-grass, led towards a hut, rudely constructed of sods of turfand branches of trees, whose gray crackling foliage contrasted with the fresh verdurearound. There was no endeavour at a window, nor chimney; but the door of wattledboughs was carefully secured by a long twisted withe.A halbert, a broken arrow, a deer-skin pegged out on the ground to dry, a bundle of faggots, a bare and blackened patch of grass, strewn with wood ashes, were tokens of recenthabitation, though the reiterations of the nightingale, the deep tones of the blackbird andthe hum of insects, were the only sounds that broke the stillne