CHAPTER XIV.
"Oh, give to me my gui-l'annee, I pray you, Monseigneur; The king's princess doth ride to-day, And I ride forth with her.
Oh! I will ride the maid beside Till we come to the sea, Till my good ship receive my bride, And she sail far with me.
Oh, donnez-moi ma gui-l'annee, Monseigneur, je vous prie!" The singer was perched on a huge broad stone, which, lying athwart other tall perpendicular stones, made a kind of hut, approached by a pathway of upright narrow pillars, irregular and crude.

Vast must have been the labour of man's hands to lift the massive table of rock upon the supporting shafts--relics of an age when they were the only architecture, the only national monuments; when savage ancestors in lion skins, with stone weapons, led by white-robed Druid priests, came solemnly here and left the mistletoe wreath upon these Houses of Death for their adored warriors.
Even the words sung by Shoreham on the rock carried on the ancient story, the sacred legend that he who wore in his breast this mistletoe got from the Druids' altar, bearing his bride forth by sea or land, should suffer no mischance; and for the bride herself, the morgen-gifn should fail not, but should attest richly the perfect bliss of the nuptial hours.
The light was almost gone from the day, though the last crimson petals had scarce dropped from the rose of sunset.

Upon the sea beneath there was not a ripple; it was a lake of molten silver, shading into a leaden silence far away.

The tide was high, and the ragged rocks of the Banc des Violets in the south and the Corbiore in the west were all but hidden.
Below the mound where the tuneful youth loitered was a path, leading down through the fields and into the highway.

In this path walked lingeringly a man and a maid.