THE CAPTURE OF WORTHAM HOLD.


Upon his return home, after relating to his mother the events of the
morning's conflict, Cuthbert took his way to the cottage inhabited by an
old man who had in his youth been a mason.

"Have I not heard, Gurth," he said, "that you helped to build the Castle
of Wortham?"

"No, no, young sir," he said; "old as I am, I was a child when the
castle was built. My father worked at it, and it cost him, and many
others, his life."

"And how was that, prithee?" asked Cuthbert.

"He was, with several others, killed by the baron, the grandfather of the
present man, when the work was finished."

"But why was that, Gurth?"

"We were but Saxon swine," said Gurth bitterly, "and a few of us more or
less mattered not. We were then serfs of the baron. But my mother fled
with me on the news of my father's death. For years we remained far away,
with some friends in a forest near Oxford. Then she pined for her native
air, and came back and entered the service of the franklin."

"But why should your mother have taken you away?" Cuthbert asked.

"She always believed, Master Cuthbert, that my father was killed by the