Argosy All-Story Weekly, November 12, 1927 — page 127: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

By JOSEPH IVERS LAWRENCE Author of ‘‘Captain Will-o’-the- Wisp,’’ ‘* What Price the World,’’ ete. CHAPTER XIII. THE SAXON HEART. “ ALFRED,” responded the man in the cloak, in a low voice, “‘ but merely a humble soldier. Strange heathen kings have set themselves up to rule the land, and the Saxons must wait for a king who will rise up and set them free. Say no more of kings, gallant Herwin, but come to our cottage and be welcomed as our friend.” This man, then, thought Conrad in his stark amazement—this gentle, pious scholar who lived like an anchorite, attended by no one save his adoring wife, was that King Alfred, ruler of the West Saxons, who was remembered in Rome. Innocent and un- sophisticated, they called him; untouched by the Roman world of venality and gilded vice; returning to his native wilderness as guileless as he came, carrying with him only the beauty and wisdom that he ab- sorbed from teachers as two-faced as Janus, bicephalic god of the pagan race. Conrad walked as in a trance when the king led the way back to the cottage. He was of a family of senatorial rank in the Roman Empire, but he had held no public offices and been favored with no personal contact with emperors or kings. For a Roman to meet one of the many kings of Britain’s isles, and even this Alfred, most famous and for a time most powerful of the native chieftains, was to be taken by the mature and sophisticated.as an amusing experience rather than a distinction, yet he felt strangely impressed, strangely subdued and awed—changed in some mysterious way from the being that had stepped from the cottage a moment before. * This story began in the Argosy-Allstory Weekly for October 29. 601 EORMICLOOO© (E@)