o could tell Ferdinand stories of
the 24th of May (anniversary of the battle) as it was observed each
year until the Revolution of 1789. At the southern extremity of the
battlefield there stood for many generations a gigantic equestrian
statue, of wood, representing the holy warrior, Missolin, rallying his
flock to rout the unbelievers. And in the presence of a great
concourse singing songs of grateful praise to Missolin, his statue was
crowned with garlands by young maidens wearing the picturesque gala
dress of that vicinity.

Some forty-odd years after Missolin's victory, Charlemagne went with
his twelve knights and his great army through Tarbes on his way to
Spain to fight the Moors. And when that ill-starred expedition was
defeated and its warriors bold were fleeing back to France, Roland--so
the story goes--finding no pass in the Pyrenees where he needed one
desperately, cleaved one with his sword Durandal.

High up among the clouds (almost 10,000 feet) is that Breach of
Roland--200 feet wide, 330 feet deep, and 165 feet long. A good
slice-out for a single stroke! And when Roland had cut it, he dashed
through it and across the chasm, his horse making a clean jump to the
French side of the mountains. That no one might ever doubt this, the
horse thoughtfully left the mark of one iron-shod hoof clearly
imprinted in the rock just where he cleared it, and where it is still
shown to the curious and the stout of wind.

It is a pity to remember that, in spite of such prowess of knight and
devotion of beast. Roland perished on his flight from Spain.

But, like all brave warriors, he became mightier in death even than he
had been in life, and furnished an ideal of valor which animated the
most chivalrous youth of all Europe, throughout many centuries.

With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.

It has been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is
pronounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix--a town
some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home
of the Foch family.

Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may have thought of this as a
probability, it is certain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the
history of Foix and especially in those phases of it that Froissart
relates.

Froissart, the genial gossip who first courted the favor of kings and
princes and then was gently entreated by them so that his writing of
them might be to their