u know that it is not the custom of old Hariowald to boast
before acting: but this time I predict to you certain, complete,
glorious, joyous victory.

"All our gods will unite to aid us to-morrow. Not least of them Loeki,
the flame-creator. Tents and ships will vanish in fire. The lake nymph
will drag many hundreds down in her net. The terrible earth-goddess
will open her mysterious bosom, on which the insolent aliens have
trodden with iron feet: she will pour forth the avengers, the sons of
her country, into the midst of the enemy's strongest fortress! For the
Lofty One blinded the hated foe, so that they chose in our whole
district the spot for their camp most fatal to them. And when they fly
from the tents to the galleys, amid the terrors of the night, by the
flickering glare of their burning fortifications--they will find on the
lake the same destruction in fire and blood.

"If the last of the flying ships, with masts and prows half burned,
pursued and harried by our swift boats, should really succeed in
reaching the southern shore and the harbor fortress from which they
sailed forth so victoriously, who knows--I will not say more--who knows
whether they may not find there an unexpected doom?

"No! Silence still! Hear me to the end.

"Before I dissolve the assembly and send you all to prepare your
weapons in the best way, to polish the points and blades, and to eat
and drink enough,--not over much, then afterwards--do you hear--to
seek sleep soon, very soon, for you will have no slumber to-morrow
night--hear one thing more: you must make one resolve before this
battle!

"Remember, men, how from generation to generation these Romans have
sinned against our people; how again and again they have broken faith
and treaty; how they will not even grant us the poor land we have
wrested from the marsh and the primeval forest; how, in violation of
treaties, they have pushed their fortresses farther and farther into
our boundaries; how they forced thousands of our ancestors to fight
naked and unarmed with wild beasts on the blood-stained sand of their
arenas in the city by the Tiber, gloating, safe in their high seats,
over the death-agonies of our kinsmen under the paws and rent by the
teeth of roaring monsters; how they forced thousands of our young men
into their cohorts and made them shed their blood, often far beyond the
salt sea!

"Ha, Alemanni of the Black Forest, do you still know how they invited
your King Wid