So such a tale I told them, long familiar to me; but as I told it the
words seemed to quicken and grow, so that I knew not the sound of my
own voice, and they ran almost into rhyme and measure as I told it;
and when I had done there was silence awhile, till one man spake, but
not loudly:

"Yea, in that land was the summer short and the winter long; but men
lived both summer and winter; and if the trees grew ill and the corn
throve not, yet did the plant called man thrive and do well. God send
us such men even here."

"Nay," said another, "such men have been and will be, and belike are
not far from this same door even now."

"Yea," said a third, "hearken a stave of Robin Hood; maybe that shall
hasten the coming of one I wot of." And he fell to singing in a clear
voice, for he was a young man, and to a sweet wild melody, one of
those ballads which in an incomplete and degraded form you have read
perhaps. My heart rose high as I heard him, for it was concerning the
struggle against tyranny for the freedom of life, how that the
wildwood and the heath, despite of wind and weather, were better for a
free man than the court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the
rich to give to the poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and
not the will of another man commanding him for the commandment's sake.
The men all listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a
couplet at the end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not
unmusical voices. As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by
me, as they were indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but
rough and tangled thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn under the