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However this may be, Guthrum gave Alfred a very friendly reception, and the hour of social intercourse and enjoyment which the general and the ballad-singer spent together was only a precursor of the more solid and honest friendship which afterward subsisted between them as allied sovereigns.
"Browbeater was right," said he; "you are here at full length in the Hue and Cry middle size of rather plausible carriage brown hair hazel eyes and a very knowing look the upper lip a good deal curled; which I see is the case; known to be in the possession of more money that ought to belong to a person in your condition and lastly, before you came here you were hawking high treason in the King's County, in the character of a ballad-singer and vagabond.
This was quite enough for Victor Carrington, who did not leave Arlington Street until he had extorted from the valet the entire history of the baronet's adoption of the ballad-singer. A year and some months had passed, and the midsummer sunlight shone upon the woods around Raynham Castle. It was a grand pile of buildings, blackened by the darkening hand of time.
There are, also, several choice specimens of Titian, Holbein, and Domenichino; with a few cabinet pictures in the Dutch school, by Teniers, Ostade, &c. In this palace are Raphael's celebrated cartoons, which are too well known to need describing in this place. A Ballad-Singer is a town-crier for the advertising of lost tunes. Hunger hath made him a wind-instrument; his want is vocal, and not he.
Her dress was light green, and there were anemones in her hair. She was so scented with wild thyme that it made the sentry sneeze. "Your health, and God bless you!" was her greeting. How pretty she was! and such a singer! Not a theater singer nor a ballad-singer; no, but a singer of the woods. For she wandered through the gay, green forest, and had a concert there for her own amusement.
A brilliant American author, N. P. Willis, who then saw her for the first time, wrote: "In one of the intervals, I walked under the King's stand, and saw Her Majesty the Queen, and the young Princess Victoria, very distinctly. They were leaning over the railing listening to a ballad-singer, and seeming as much interested and amused as any simple country-folk could be.
The face of the ballad-singer haunted him perpetually; and he spent the best part of the day leaning over the garden-gate and smoking. Mrs. Jernam was not offended by her nephew's conduct. "Ah! my boy," she said, smiling fondly on her handsome kinsman, "it's fortunate Providence made you a sailor, for you'd have been ill-fitted for any but a roving life."
I had often, in my childhood, followed a ballad-singer, to hear the sequel of a dismal story, though sure of being severely punished for delaying to return with whatever I was sent to purchase.
Presently a glimmer of star-light pierced the universal gloom, and in that uncertain light a shadowy figure came gliding towards him across the ocean a face shone upon him beneath the radiance of the stars. It was the face of the ballad-singer. The shadow drew nearer to him, with a strange gliding motion. The shadow lifted a white, transparent hand, and pointed. To what?
Here the improvisatore, secretly employed by a politic and mysterious government, recounted, with a rapid utterance, and in language suited to the popular ear, at the foot of the spars which upheld the conquered banners of Candia, Crete, and the Morea, the ancient triumphs of the Republic; while there, a ballad-singer chanted, to the greedy crowd, the glory and justice of San Marco.
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