yed in the service of mankind.

In the misty barbaric ages before history fairly began, and in the early
times of the Roman domination, the Rhone was the sole highway into
northern Gaul from the Mediterraenean; later, when the Gallic system of
Roman roads had been constructed, it held its own fairly well against
the two roads which paralleled it--that on the east bank throughout
almost its entire length, and that on the west bank from Lyons southward
to a point about opposite to the present Montelimar; in the
semi-barbarous Middle Ages--when the excitements of travel were
increased by the presence of a robber-count at every ford and in every
mountain-pass--it became again more important than the parallel highways
on land; and in our own day the conditions of Roman times, relatively
speaking, are restored once more by steamboats on the river and
railways on the lines of the ancient roads. And so, having served these
several masters, the Rhone valley of the present day is stored
everywhere with remnants of the barbarism, of the civilization, and of
the semi-barbarism which successively have been ploughed under its
surface before what we have the temerity to call our own civilization
began. Keltic flints and pottery underlie Roman ruins; just beneath the
soil, or still surviving above it, are remains of Roman magnificence;
and on almost all the hill-tops still stand the broken strongholds of
the robber nobles who maintained their nobility upon what they were
lucky enough to be able to steal. Naturally--those ruined castles, and
the still-existent towns of the same period, being so conspicuously in
evidence--the flavour of the river is most distinctly Mediaeval; but a
journey in this region, with eyes open to perceive as well as to see, is
a veritable descent into the depths of the ancient past.

Indeed, the _Gladiateur_ had but little more than swung clear from
Lyons--around the long curve where the Saone and the Rhone are united
and the stream suddenly is doubled in size--than we were carried back to
the very dawn of historic times. Before us, stretching away to the
eastward, was the broad plain of Saint-Fons--once covered with an oak
forest to which Druid priests bearing golden sickles came from the Ile
Barbe at Yule-tide to gather mistletoe for the great Pagan feast; later,
a battle-field where Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus came to a
definite understanding in regard to the rulership of Gaul; later still,
the si