teps; wandering tribes
called Franks, had overswept the country, and recoiled, again and
again. But _this_ invasion of the so-called Salian Franks, never
retreats again.]

And by St. Firmin's grave speaks now another gentle evangelist, and
the first Frank king's prayer to the King of kings is made to Him,
known only as "the God of Clotilde."

I must ask the reader's patience now with a date or two, and stern
facts--two--three--or more.

Clodion, the leader of the first Franks who reach irrevocably beyond
the Rhine, fights his way through desultory Roman cohorts as far as
Amiens, and takes it, in 445.[4]

[Footnote 4: See note at end of chapter, as also for the allusions in
p. 8, to the battle of Soissons.]

Two years afterwards, at his death, the scarcely asserted throne is
seized--perhaps inevitably--by the tutor of his children, Merovee,
whose dynasty is founded on the defeat of Attila at Chalons.

He died in 457. His son Childeric, giving himself up to the love of
women, and scorned by the Frank soldiery, is driven into exile, the
Franks choosing rather to live under the law of Rome than under a base
chief of their own. He receives asylum at the court of the king of
Thuringia, and abides there. His chief officer in Amiens, at his
departure, breaks a ring in two, and, giving him the half of it, tells
him, when the other half is sent, to return.

And, after many days, the half of the broken ring is sent, and he
returns, and is accepted king by his Franks.

The Thuringian queen follows him, (I cannot find if her husband is
first dead--still less, if dead, how dying,) and offers herself to him
for his wife.

"I have known thy usefulness, and that thou art very strong; and I
have come to live with thee. Had I known, in parts beyond sea, any one
more useful than thou, I should have sought to live with _him_."

He took her for his wife, and their son is Clovis.

A wonderful story; how far in literalness true is of no manner of moment
to us; the myth, and power of it, _do_ manifest the nature of the French
kingdom, and prophesy its future destiny. Personal valour, personal
beauty, loyalty to kings, love of women, disdain of unloving marriage,
note all these things for true, and that in the corruption of these will
be the last death of the Frank, as in their force was his first glory.

Personal valour, worth. _Utilitas_, the keystone of all. Birth
nothing, except as gifting with valour;--Law of primogeniture
u