cruel. The Empress Sophia, listening too readily to court-
slanders, bade him 'leave to men the use of arms, and come back to the
palace, to spin among the maids.'--'Tell her,' said the terrible old imp,
'I will spin her such a thread as she shall not unravel.'

He went, superseded by Longinus; but not to Constantinople. From Naples
he sent (so says Paul the Deacon) to Alboin, and bade him come and try
his fortune as king of Italy. He sent, too, (so says old Paul) presents
to tempt the simple Lombard men--such presents as children would like--all
fruits which grew in Italian orchards. Though the gold was gone, those
were still left. Great babies they were, these Teutons, as I told you at
the first; and Narses knew it well, and had used them for his ends for
many a year.

Then were terrible signs seen in Italy by night; fiery armies fighting in
the sky, and streams of blood aloft, foreshadowing the blood which should
be shed.

Sent for or not, King Alboin came; and with him all his army, and a
mighty multitude, women, and children, and slaves; Bavarians, Gepidae,
Bulgars, Sarmatae, Pannonians, Sueves, and Noricans; whose names (says
Paul) remain unto this day in the names of the villages where they
settled. With Alboin, too, came Saxons, twenty thousand of them at the
least, with wife and child. And Sigebert king of the Franks put Suevic
settlers into the lands which the Saxons had left.

Alboin gave up his own Hungarian land to his friends the Avars, on the
condition that he should have them back if he had to return. But return
he never did, he nor his Lombard host. This is the end. The last
invasion of Italy. The sowing, once for all, of an Italian people. Fresh
nations were still pressing down to the rear of the Alps, waiting for
their turn to enter the Fairy Land--not knowing, perhaps, that nothing
was left therein, but ashes and blood:--but their chance was over now: a
people were going into Italy who could hold what they got.

On Easter Tuesday, in the year of grace 568, they came, seemingly by the
old road; the path of Alaric and Dietrich and the rest; the pass from
Carniola, through which the rail runs now from Laybach to Trieste. It
must have been white, in those days, with the bones of nigh 200 years.
And they found bisons, aurochsen, in the mountains, Paul says, and is not
surprised thereat, because there are plenty of them in Hungary near by.
An old man told him he had seen a skin in which fi