stand its call: Land or destruction! So,
in the name of our whole league of peoples, I ask (we Alemanni yield in
courage to no race on earth), do you wish to gain us, our spears,
forever against all your enemies, especially the false Franks, our evil
neighbors and yours? Do you desire that?"

The Romans listened intently; no one interrupted him in his appeal.

"Well, there is a way, but only one." He paused.

"Speak," urged Saturninus eagerly.

"Vacate all the land which you still occupy but can hold only by
constant fighting, the country northward between this lake and the
right bank of the Rhine to where the Main empties into it beneath your
stronghold of Mogontiacum, and all the region south of the lake to the
chain of the Cisalpine region."

"Insolent fellow!" shouted Herculanus. The other army leaders also did
not spare words of wrath. "Not bad!" said Ausonius, smiling. Saturninus
alone was silent; he was thinking how the great military hero,
Aurelian, had given up, in a manner very similar to the way asked here,
Trajan's proud conquest, Dacia, and thereby, for a long time, pacified
the Goths on the Danube.

But Adalo continued: "Do it, do it half voluntarily; do it for the most
valuable compensation; for I tell you, it must be done very soon. Then
it will be exacted without compensation in return. Do it willingly; for
there is a proud prediction current among our people: the Alemanni will
some day pasture their horses from the snows of the Alps to the woods
of the Vosges."

Ausonius rose indignantly. "Not another word! For our sole answer take
to your people the old Roman war-cry, 'Woe to the Barbarians!'"

"Woe to the Barbarians!" repeated the army leaders, with loud shouts.

"Before I go," said the youth,--he struggled fiercely to subdue the
agitation, the terrible anxiety which now sent a tremor through every
limb,--"listen to another message. You have captured a daughter of our
people." Six eyes were bent upon him with the keenest attention. "I am
commissioned to ransom her." In spite of every effort to appear calm
and cold his voice trembled.

"Are you Bissula's relative? She has no brother," said Ausonius
suspiciously.

"Or her lover?" asked Herculanus.

The youth's face flamed, his brow knit wrathfully. "Neither her kinsman
nor her betrothed lover. I am commissioned--I have already said so--to
ransom her. Name the price."

Ausonius was about to utter a refusal, but Saturninus hastily
antici