it was small loss to him, for shortly after the mounting wave shut up
the other.

"When the water was gone down, the mayor commanded that the five bodies,
which hung with necks twisted and limp, should be left a testimony to
the Basques that the water of Bayonne did come up to the bridge and that
the toll was justly due from them. He then returned home amidst the
acclamations of his people, who were delighted that they had so good a
mayor, a sensible man, a great lover of justice, quick in wise
enterprises, and who rendered to every man his due."


VI.

One asks where were the preceding ages of civilization. Where was the
influence of Babylonia and Egypt, of Athens and of Rome? Here in
mid-Europe, nearly two thousand years after Socrates, and in the second
millenary of the white light of Christianity, men were like wolves, nay
worse, rending their prey or each other not under the lashing of hunger
but from very ferocity.

By way of contrast, take a fête given in Bayonne in happier years. An
account of it, garnered from old records, I translate from the French of
Lagrèze.[5] Elizabeth, sister of Charles IX and wife of Philip of Spain,
was returning from the Baths of Cauterets and passing through the city;
the fête was in her honor. Charles was there, the King of France, with
the queen-mother, Catherine de Medici; Marguerite of Valois, and her
future husband, the young Henry of Navarre.

[5] LAGRÈZE: _La Société et les Moeurs en Béarn._