with the same furious
onslaught which had overwhelmed Duke Leopold's glorious horsemen at
Morgarten, they fell upon the nobles in a bloody melee in which horses,
men and valets perished in a hopeless confusion. Three Gruyere knights
were left lifeless on the battlefield and eighty-four others, who thus
paid the price of their temerity in thinking to stem the already
formidable confederation of citizens and free people in Switzerland.
Undeterred by this defeat and continually menaced by the incursions of
the Bernois, Count Pierre de Gruyere successfully held them in check,
and, no less wise as ruler than he was valorous in war, enlarged the
power and extent of his domain by political and matrimonial alliances
with the great Romand families of Blonay, Grandson and Oron, as well as
with the warlike La Tour Chatillons of the Valais, and with the powerful
Wissenbourgs and the semi-royal Hapsburg-Kibourgs of eastern
Switzerland. Leaving to his nephews, "Perrod" and "Jeannod," the
seigneuries of Vanel and Montsalvens which they had inherited from their
father, he shared with them the rule of the people.

The "three of Gruyere" whose acts are recorded in the dry and unpoetic
parchments of the time, were united in a paternal and pacific rule under
which people and country reached a legendary height of arcadian
prosperity.

First to deserve the name so cherished in the legends of Gruyere of
"pastoral king," Count Pierre III saw his herds increase and valleys and
mountain sides blossom into fabulous fertility. His was the golden age
of the herdsmen the "Armaillis," of whom it was related in symbolic
legend that, "their cows were so gigantic and milk so abundant that it
overflowed the borders of the ponds into which they poured it." By boat
they skimmed the cream in these vast basins, and one day a "_beau
berger_," busy with the skimming, was upset in his skiff by a sudden
squall and drowned. The young lads and maidens sought long and vainly
for his body and wore mourning for his tragic fate. Discovered only
several days later, when amid floods of boiling cream they whipped the
butter into a mound high as a tower, his body was buried in a great
cavern in the golden butter, filled full by the bees with honey rays
wide as a city's gates. "Where," asks a living Romand writer, "is the
eclogue of Virgil or Theocritus to surpass the beauty of this legend?"

Dying full of years and honors, Count Pierre left the care of his
beloved peo