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They seem then to have gone to Essex and to have plundered there with their ships, getting help from the Danes who were settled in East-Anglia, or at least from such of them as still were heathens. Alfred's fleet however quite overcame them and took away their treasure, but his fleet was again attacked and defeated by the East-Anglian Danes.

We know what the narrow seas can do on East-Anglian and Kentish shores; and the same work of coast-erosion that we there see proceeding before our very eyes must have taken place in Cornwall before the days when historians could note it. The denudations that left our stark Cornish coasts as we know them now for the most part occurred in times that are dim and legendary.

With them, too, he was no less successful; but while he was thus occupied, the East-Anglian and Northumbrian Danes seized the opportunity of revolt, and sailed in two fleets for the coast of Devonshire. These also he defeated, though even then it required no less than three years to drive these new invaders from the country.

Sæberht, King of the East-Saxons, received a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered him to build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of London, while soon after the East-Anglian king Rædwald resolved to serve Christ and the older gods together.

Suddenly the song of a nightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through the open window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry and romance. “That nightingale has as fine a voice,” says Borrow, “as though he were born and bred in the Eastern Counties.” Borrow is proud of being an East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware and which he now turns to good account in the important business he has set himself, of melting Lavengro’s frost and being admitted a member of the Open-Air Club. “Ah!” says the wily-student, “I know the Eastern Counties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales.” Borrow’s face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not direct his attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although the southern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such as Cornwall and Devon, are without nightingales.

Sebastian of English legend; in later days his figure gleamed from the pictured windows of church after church along the eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury rose over his relics. With him ended the line of East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of the pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its crown.

In this quarter the palisades were the weakest, and the ground the least elevated; but it was guarded by men on whose skill with axe and shield Harold placed the firmest reliance the Anglo- Danes of his old East-Anglian earldom.

Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of the well-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water-wagtail by the ponds as he descanted upon the powers of that enchanted birdpowers, like many human endowments, more glorious than pleasant, if it is sober truth, as Borrow would gravely tell, that the gipsy lad who knocks a water-wagtail on the head with a stone gains for a bride a “ladye from a far countrie,” and dazzles with his good luck all the other black-eyed young urchins of the dingle.

In this quarter the palisades were the weakest, and the ground the least elevated; but it was guarded by men on whose skill with axe and shield Harold placed the firmest reliance the Anglo-Danes of his old East-Anglian earldom.