He
showed himself the stricken fight in the plain, and the press, and
the struggle, and the breaking of the serried band, and himself
amidst the ring of foemen doing most valiantly, and falling there at
last, his shield o'er-heavy with the weight of foemen's spears for a
man to uphold it. Then the victory of his folk and the lamentation
and praise over the slain man of the Mountain Dales, and the burial
of the valiant warrior, the praising weeping folk meeting him at the
City-gate, laid stark and cold in his arms on the gold-hung garlanded
bier.
There ended his dream, and he laughed aloud and said: 'I am a fool!
All this were good and sweet if I should see it myself; and forsooth
that is how I am thinking of it, as if I still alive should see
myself dead and famous!'
Then he turned a little and looked at the houses of the Thorp lying
dark about the snowy ways under the starlit heavens of the winter
morning: dark they were indeed and grey, save where here and there
the half-burned Yule-fire reddened the windows of a hall, or where,
as in one place, the candle of some early waker shone white in a
chamber window.
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