The Boy Who Won A Prize

From the very first this little boy was full of promise and very
attractive. This fact is rather hard on some of us, is it not, who find
it difficult to be good and to win the confidence of grown-up people.
But the confidence of others is precisely what the boy Alfred did win,
and it was not because he was a molly-coddle, for no young prince ever
swung a battle-ax more lustily than did Alfred.

When he was a little bit of a chap only five years old, he was taken to
Rome to see the Pope. Alfred was born in 849 at the town of Wantage, so
you know what year it was when he went to Rome. The Pope took a great
fancy to him and hallowed him as his "bishop's son." Just how old this
charming boy was when he began to read we do not know. At that time,
of course, all boys read Latin, for there were no English books to
read. But there is an old English couplet--a couplet is two lines of
verse with a rhyme at the end of each line--which may tell the story of
Alfred's reading:


At writing he was good enough, and yet as he telleth me,
He was more than ten years old ere he knew his A B C.


Alfred may have been younger or older than this. We don't know, and the
probability is that we never shall know. This little boy was much loved
by his father, King Ethelwulf, and his mother, Queen Osburh. He had
many brothers and sisters, and was himself the fifth child. But he was
a finer-looking boy than the others, and more graceful in his way of
speaking and in his manners.

From the time that he was a tiny child he loved to know things. And yet
his parents and nurses allowed him to remain untaught in reading and
writing until he was quite a big boy. But at night, when the gleemen
sang songs to the harp in the royal villa, Alfred listened attentively.
He had memorized very early some splendid old English songs, such as
"Beowulf." He knew all about Grendel, and all about the death of the
warrior Beowulf after his battle with the dragon. And he had listened
to gentler songs, like the one of the cowherd, Cædmon. He listened
to the singing of poems which were full of the sea and full of war.
Saints, warriors, and pirates were the chief heroes. A Roman poet,
thinking of the warriors and pirates, called the English people "sea
wolves." All their poetry was full of the sea, and it is still true
that the English love the sea.