prince who made the jest about the brood-mares--and they two will
fight the quarrel out. Cunimund, says Paul, began the war--of course
that is his story. Alboin is growing a great man; he has married a
daughter of Clotaire, king of the Franks: and now he takes to his
alliance the Avars, who have just burst into the Empire, wild people
who afterwards founded a great kingdom in the Danube lands, and they
ravage Cunimund's lands. He will fight the Lombards first,
nevertheless: he can settle the Avars after. He and his, says Paul,
are slain to a man. Alboin makes a drinking-cup of his skull,
carries off his daughter Rosamund ('Rosy-mouth'), and a vast
multitude of captives and immense wealth. The Gepidae vanish from
history; to this day (says Paul) slaves either of the Lombards or the
Huns (by whom he rather means Avars); and Alboin becomes the hero of
his time, praised even to Paul's days in sagas, Saxon and Bavarian as
well as Lombard, for his liberality and his glory. We shall see now
how he has his chance at the Nibelungen hoard.

He has heard enough (as all Teutons have) of Italy, its beauty, and
its weakness. He has sent five thousand chosen warriors to Narses,
to help him against Totila and the Ostrogoths; and they have told him
of the fair land and large, with its vineyards, olive-groves, and
orchards, waste by war and pestilence, and crying out for human
beings to come and till it once more.

There is no force left in Italy now, which can oppose him. Hardly
any left in the Roman world. The plague is come; to add its horrors
to all the other horrors of the time--the true old plague, as far as
I can ascertain; bred, men say, from the Serbonian bog; the plague
which visited Athens in the time of Socrates, and England in the
seventeenth century: and after the plague a famine; woe on woe,