rs, and rushed out of the dining-hall with his
companions. They were received with shouts of joy by their
countrymen outside; they mounted their horses and rode away,
determined to revenge their slaughtered comrades.

Delighted to march once more under the generalship of one of the
bravest of men, and to exchange the prospect of death by hunger
for death on the battlefield, the Goths at once rose in arms.
Lupicinus, with no proper preparation, joined battle with them
at the ninth milestone from Marcianople, was defeated, and only
saved himself by a shameful flight. The barbarians equipped
themselves with the arms of the slain legionaries, and in truth
that day ended in one blow the hunger of the Goths and the
security of the Romans; for the Goths began thenceforward to
comport themselves no longer as strangers but as inhabitants,
and as lords to lay their commands upon the tillers of the soil
throughout all the Northern provinces.

That began a war which inflicted the third great blow on the Roman
Empire--the defeat and death of the Emperor Valens before Adrianople.
The Goths in this campaign seem to have brought in some of their old
enemies, the Huns, as allies--pretty clear proof of the contention I
have set up that the Huns were not such desperate savages; but these
Asiatics made the war rather more brutal than was usual for those days,
without a doubt. Theodosius, the younger (son of that brave general who
had just won back Britain for the Roman Empire), restored somewhat the
Roman power in the provinces south of the Balkans for a time. But in
the year 380 the Romans made peace again with the Goths, allowing them
to settle in Bulgaria as well as north of the Danube as allies of the
Roman Power.

In the latter part of the fourth century and the first half of the fifth
century the Huns fill the pages of Bulgarian history. Then came the
Slavs; and then, in the seventh century, the Bulgars, almost certainly a
Hun tribe, but Huns modified by two centuries of time. But the death of
Valens may be said to have ended the Roman Empire as a World Power. Let
us retrace our steps a little and give the chief facts as to how a
Bulgarian Empire for a time--a very short time--replaced the Roman
Empire over a great area of the Balkan Peninsula.

CHAPTER III

THE SCRAP-HEAP OF RACES

The historian, rightly, must always march under a banner inscribed
"Why?" The