The naive treatment of details is delicious.  Harold, when about to embark, steps with bare legs into the tide:  the water is laid out in the form of a hill of waves, in order to indicate that it gets deeper later on.  It might serve as an illustration of the Red Sea humping up for the benefit of the Israelites!  The curious little stunted figure with a bald head, in the group of the conference of messengers, would appear to be an abortive attempt to portray a person at some distance—­he is drawn much smaller than the others to suggest that he is quite out of hearing!  This seems to have been the only attempt at rendering the sense of perspective.  Then comes a mysterious little lady in a kind of shrine, to whom a clerk is making curious advances; to the casual observer it would appear that the gentleman is patting her on the cheek, but we are informed by Thierry that this represents an embroideress, and that the clerk is in the act of ordering the Bayeux Tapestry itself!  Conjecture is swamped concerning the real intention of this group, and no certain diagnosis has ever been pronounced!  The Countess of Wilton sees in this group “a female in a sort of porch, with a clergyman in the act of pronouncing a benediction upon her!” Every one to his taste.

A little farther on there is another unexplained figure:  that of a man with his feet crossed, swinging joyously on a rope from the top of a tower.

Soon after the Crowning of Harold, may be seen a crowd of people gazing at an astronomic phenomenon which has been described by an old chronicler as a “hairy star.”  It is recorded as “a blazing starre” such as “never appears but as a prognostic of afterclaps,” and again, as “dreadful to be seen, with bloudie haires, and all over rough and shagged at the top.”  Another author complacently explains that comets “were made to the end that the ethereal regions might not be more void of monsters than the ocean is of whales and other great thieving fish!” A very literal interpretation of this “hairy star” has been here embroidered, carefully fitted out with cog-wheels and all the paraphernalia of a conventional mediaeval comet.

In the scenes dealing with the preparation of the army and the arrangement of their food, there occurs the lassooing of an ox; the amount of action concentrated in this group is really wonderful.  The ox, springing clear of the ground, with all his legs gathered up under him, turns his horned head, which is set on an unduly long neck, for the purpose of inspecting his pursuers.  No better origin for the ancient tradition of the cow who jumped over the moon could be adduced.  And what shall we say of the acrobatic antics of Leofwine and Gyrth when meeting their deaths in battle?  These warriors are turning elaborate handsprings in their last moments, while horses are represented as performing such somersaults that they are practically inverted.  In the border of this part of the tapestry, soldiers are seen stripping off the coats of mail from