ief away from his heathen deities, Thor
and Odin, to the worship of the Christians' God; and, revolving strange
fancies in her mind, she determined what she would do when she "grew
up,"--as many a girl since her day has determined. But even as they
reached the fair city of Geneva--then half Roman, half Gallic, in its
buildings and its life--the wonderful news met them how this boy-king
Clovis, sending a challenge to combat to the prefect Syagrius, the last
of the Roman governors, had defeated him in a battle at Soissons, and
broken forever the power of Rome in Gaul.

War, which is never any thing but terrible, was doubly so in those
savage days, and the plunder of the captured cities and homesteads
was the chief return for which the barbarian soldiers followed their
leaders. But when the Princess Clotilda heard how, even in the midst of
his burning and plundering, the young Frankish chief spared some of the
fairest Christian churches, he became still more her hero; and again the
desire to convert him from paganism and to revenge her father's murder
took shape in her mind. For, devout and good though she was,
this excellent little maiden of the year 485 was by no means the
gentle-hearted girl of 1888, and, like most of the world about her, had
but two desires: to become a good church-helper, and to be revenged on
her enemies. Certainly, fourteen centuries of progress and education
have made us more loving and less vindictive.

But now that the good priest Ugo of Rheims saw that his own home land
was in trouble, he felt that there lay his duty. And Godegesil, the
under-king of Geneva, feeling uneasy alike from the nearness of this
boy conqueror and the possible displeasure of his brother and over-lord,
King Gundebald, declined longer to shelter his niece in his palace at
Geneva.

"And why may I not go with you?" the girl asked of Ugo; but the old
priest knew that a conquered and plundered land was no place to which
to convey a young maid for safety, and the princess, therefore, found
refuge among the sisters of the church of St. Peter in Geneva. And here
she passed her girlhood, as the record says, "in works of piety and
charity."

So four more years went by. In the north, the boy chieftain, reaching
manhood, had been raised aloft on the shields of his fair-haired and
long-limbed followers, and with many a "hael!" and shout had been
proclaimed "King of the Franks." In the south, the young Princess
Clotilda, now nearl