spite of the wicked uncle
Gundebald, were married at Soissons, in the year 493, and, as the fairy
stories say, "lived happily together ever after."

The record of their later years has no place in this sketch of the
girlhood of Clotilda; but it is one of the most interesting and dramatic
of the old-time historic stories. The dream of that sad little princess
in the old convent at Geneva, "to make her boy-hero a Christian, and to
be revenged on the murderer of her parents," was in time fulfilled. For
on Christmas-day, in the year 493, the young king and three thousand of
his followers were baptized amid gorgeous ceremonial in the great church
of St. Martin at Rheims.

The story of the young queen's revenge is not to be told in these pages.
But, though terrible, it is only one among the many tales of vengeance
that show us what fierce and cruel folk our ancestors were, in the days
when passion instead of love ruled the hearts of men and women, and
of boys and girls as well; and how favored are we of this nineteenth
century, in all the peace and prosperity and home happiness that
surround us.

But from this conversion, as also from this revenge, came the great
power of Clovis and Clotilda; for, ere his death, in the year 511, he
brought all the land under his sway from the Rhine to the Rhone, the
ocean and the Pyrenees; he was hailed by his people with the old Roman
titles of Consul and Augustus, and reigned victorious as the first king
of France. Clotilda, after years of wise counsel and charitable works,
upon which her determination for revenge seems to be the only stain,
died long after her husband, in the year 545, and to-day, in the city of
Paris, which was even then the capital of new France, the church of St.
Clotilda stands as her memorial, while her marble statue may be seen by
the traveller in the great palace of the Luxembourg.

A typical girl of those harsh old days of the long ago,--loving
and generous toward her friends, unforgiving and revengeful to her
enemies,--reared in the midst of cruelty and of charity, she did her
duty according to the light given her, made France a Christian nation,
and so helped on the progress of civilization. Certainly a place among
the world's historic girls may rightly be accorded to this fair-haired
young princess of the summer-land of France, the beautiful Clotilda of
Burgundy.

WOO OF HWANG-HO.: THE GIRL OF THE YELLOW RIVER.

(Afterwards the Great Empress Woo of