horse thoughtfully left the mark of one iron-shod hoof clearly
imprinted in the rock just where he cleared it, and where it is still
shown to the curious and the stout of wind.

It is a pity to remember that, in spite of such prowess of knight and
devotion of beast. Roland perished on his flight from Spain.

But, like all brave warriors, he became mightier in death even than he
had been in life, and furnished an ideal of valor which animated the
most chivalrous youth of all Europe, throughout many centuries.

With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.

It has been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is
pronounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix--a town
some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home
of the Foch family.

Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may have thought of this as a
probability, it is certain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the
history of Foix and especially in those phases of it that Froissart
relates.

Froissart, the genial gossip who first courted the favor of kings and
princes and then was gently entreated by them so that his writing of
them might be to their renown, was on his way to Blois when he heard of
the magnificence of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Whereupon the
chronicler turned him about and jogged on his way to Foix. Gaston
Phoebus was not there, but at Orthez--150 miles west and north--and,
nothing daunted, to Orthez went Froissart, by way of Tarbes, traveling