long brown coat, upon the low stone coping underneath those broken
railings, you might hear this tale from them, as I did, more years
ago than I care to recollect.

But lest you do not choose to go to all this trouble, or lest the old
men who could tell it you have grown tired of all talk, and are not
to be roused ever again into the telling of tales, and you yet wish
for the story, I will here set it down for you.

But I cannot recount it to you as they told it to me, for to me it
was only a tale that I heard and remembered, thinking to tell it
again for profit, while to them it was a thing that had been, and the
threads of it were interwoven with the woof of their own life. As
they talked, faces that I did not see passed by among the crowd and
turned and looked at them, and voices that I did not hear spoke to
them below the clamour of the street, so that through their thin
piping voices there quivered the deep music of life and death, and my
tale must be to theirs but as a gossip's chatter to the story of him
whose breast has felt the press of battle.


John Ingerfield, oil and tallow refiner, of Lavender Wharf,
Limehouse, comes of a hard-headed, hard-fisted stock. The first of
the race that the eye of Record, piercing the deepening mists upon
the centuries behind her, is able to discern with any clearness is a
long-haired, sea-bronzed personage, whom men call variously Inge or
Unger. Out of the wild North Sea he has come. Record observes him,
one of a small, fierce group, standing on the sands of desolate
Northumbria, staring landward, his worldly wealth upon his back.
This consists of a two-handed battle-axe, value perhaps some forty