Close at his heels came three laborers walking abreast, with spade and mattock over their shoulders.

They sang some rude chorus right tunefully as they walked, but their English was so coarse and rough that to the ears of a cloister-bred man it sounded like a foreign and barbarous tongue.

One of them carried a young bittern which they had caught upon the moor, and they offered it to Alleyne for a silver groat.

Very glad he was to get safely past them, for, with their bristling red beards and their fierce blue eyes, they were uneasy men to bargain with upon a lonely moor.
Yet it is not always the burliest and the wildest who are the most to be dreaded.

The workers looked hungrily at him, and then jogged onwards upon their way in slow, lumbering Saxon style.