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When his yells and curses had been silenced she told a friend what she had done, then going back to the lake, she sang her death-song and cast herself into the water, hoping thus to rejoin her husband.
A fishing party, of which she was a member, proceeded to this lake, and while resting on the eastern shore she fled away, and to the top of this high eminence, where, discovering herself to the company below, she recited the story of her broken heart and undying love for him whose name she had been even forbade to speak, and, closing by chanting a wild death-song, flung herself down the sides of this terrible precipice, and was dashed in pieces.
A shot rang out from somewhere among the agency buildings, and the days of the boaster were numbered. Back, bearing the body, scurried the trio of friends, and in less than an hour, in fury and transport and grief and rage, the women were tearing their hair and prodding themselves with knives, while the warriors, singing the death-song, were painting themselves for battle.
And as the flames sprang up, and Elgiva sang her death-song, and the thralls and slaves screeched their unwillingness to die, I tore away my fastenings, leaped, and gained the fens, the gold collar of my slavehood still on my neck, footing it with the hounds loosed to tear me down.
"The imitation is perfect, I allow," said Bois-Rose, "but you must not be thus deceived. It is an Indian sentinel who calls to his companions either to warn them to be watchful, or what is more like their diabolical spirit, to remind us that they are watching us. It is a kind of death-song with which they wish to regale us."
The raid ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet in verses still left to us sings piteously the death-song of Uriconium, "the white town in the valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green woodlands.
O God! it was the death-wail! I fell upon my knees, my hands clasped in agony; the sweat of misery dropped off my brow, and with a heart bleeding and breaking I prayed I know not what. Again the terrible cry smote upon my ear, and I could mark the horrible cadences of the death-song, as the voices of the mourners joined in chorus. My suspense became too great to bear.
"These verses sound but ill," said the Sea-King, interrupting himself; "we will make some better;" and, careful of his verses as a Skald in his last battle, as well as in his first, he sung: It was his death-song.
The hawser was a good one a new ten-inch rope. It sang like the deep tones of an organ, loud above the rattle of the rigging and the shrouds; but that was its death-song. It gave way with the noise of a cannon, and in the smoke that followed its recoil they were dragged out by the wild ice, and driven hither and thither at its mercy.
Was the cold little sparrow singing itself away, as it was once believed the swan sung its own death-song? Or may the new neighbour of the robin be the very one whose voice rang out so clear and loud, above the howlings of the storm?
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