It was a few days after the arrival of the Danes at their quarters, and Alfgar stood on the rampart at the close of a November day; it was St. Martin's Mass, as the festival was then called. The sun was sinking with fading splendour behind the lofty downs in the west, and casting his departing beams on the river, the estuary, with the fleet, and the blue hills of Hampshire in the far distance.