“Stir! the French are upon you.  To arms, I say.  To arms!”

Presently through the throng advanced an old white-bearded man who wore a badge of office, crying as he came, “Make way for the bailiff!”

The crowd obeyed, opening a path, and soon we were face to face.

“What is it, Hubert of Hastings?” he asked.  “Is there fire that you shout so loudly?”

“Aye, Worship,” I answered.  “Fire and murder and all the gifts that the French have for England.  The Fleet of France is beating up for Hastings, fifty sail of them or more.  We crept through them in the fog, for the wind which would scarce move them served our turn and beyond an arrow or two, they took no note of a fishing-boat.”

“Whence come they?” asked the bailiff, bewildered.

“I know not, but those in another boat we passed in the midst shouted that these French were ravaging the coast and heading for Hastings to put it to fire and sword.  Then that boat vanished away, I know not where, and that is all I have to tell save that the French will be here within an hour.”

Without staying to ask more questions, the bailiff turned and ran towards the town, and presently the alarm bells rang out from the towers of All Saints and St. Clement’s, while criers summoned all men to the market-place.  Meanwhile I, not without a sad look at my boat and the rich catch within, made my way into the town, followed by my two men.

Presently I reached an ancient, timbered house, long, low, and rambling, with a yard by its side full of barrels, anchors, and other marine stores such as rope, that had to do with the trade I carried on at this place.

I, Hubert, with a mind full of fears, though not for myself, and a stirring of the blood such as was natural to my age at the approach of my first taste of battle, ran fast up to that house which I have described, and paused for a moment by the big elm tree that grew in front of the door, of which the lower boughs were sawn off because they shut out the light from the windows.  I remember that elm tree very well, first because when I was a child starlings nested in a hole in the trunk, and I reared one in a wicker cage and made a talking bird of it which I kept for several years.  It was so tame that it used to go about sitting on my shoulder, till at last, outside the town a cat frightened it thence, and before I could recapture it, it was taken by a hawk, which hawk I shot afterwards with an arrow out of revenge.

Also this elm is impressed upon me by the fact that on that morning when I halted by it, I noted how green and full of leaf it was.  Next morning, after the fire, I saw it again, all charred and blackened, with its beautiful foliage withered by the heat.  This contrast remained upon my memory, and whenever I see any great change of fortune from prosperity to ruin, or from life to death, always I bethink me of that elm.  For it is by little things which we ourselves have seen and not by those written of or told by others, that we measure and compare events.