to regain his kingdom, and wearying himself with fruitless attempts to
devise means to accomplish these ends. Whenever he engaged voluntarily
in any occupation, it would always be something in harmony with these
trains of thought and these plans. He would repair and put in order
implements of hunting, or any thing else which might be deemed to have
some relation to war. He would make bows and arrows in the chimney
corner--lost, all the time, in melancholy reveries, or in wild and
visionary schemes of future exploits.

One evening, while he was thus at work, the cow-herd's wife left, for
a few moments, some cakes under his charge, which she was baking
upon the great stone hearth, in preparation for their common supper.
Alfred, as might have been expected, let the cakes burn. The woman,
when she came back and found them smoking, was very angry. She told
him that he could eat the cakes fast enough when they were baked,
though it seemed he was too lazy and good for nothing to do the least
thing in helping to bake them. What wide-spread and lasting effects
result sometimes from the most trifling and inadequate causes! The
singularity of such an adventure befalling a monarch in disguise, and
the terse antithesis of the reproaches with which the woman rebuked
him, invest this incident with an interest which carries it every
where spontaneously among mankind. Millions, within the last thousand
years, have heard the name of Alfred, who have known no more of him
than this story; and millions more, who never would have heard of him
but for this story, have been led by it to study the whole history of
his life; so that the unconscious cow-herd's wife, in scolding
the disguised monarch for forgetting her cakes, was perhaps doing
more than he ever did himself for the wide extension of his future
fame.[2]