uted in exultation over her fall. Perhaps Zenobia may in that moment
have thought upon Cleopatra, whose example she had once proposed to
follow; and, according to the pagan ideas of greatness and fortitude,
envied her destiny, and felt her own ignominy with all the bitterness of
a vain repentance.

The captivity of Zenobia took place in the year 273, and in the fifth
year of her reign. There are two accounts of her subsequent fate,
differing widely from each other. One author asserts that she starved
herself to death, refusing to survive her own disgrace and the ruin of
her country; but others inform us that the Emperor Aurelian bestowed on
her a superb villa at Tivoli, where she resided in great honor; and that
she was afterward united to a Roman senator, with whom she lived many
years, and died at a good old age. Her daughters married into Roman
families, and it is said that some of her descendants remained so late
as the fifth century.

SIEGFRIED[3]

[Footnote 3: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By KARL BLIND

(ABOUT 450)

[Illustration: Siegfried.]

Siegfried is the name of the mythic national hero of the Germans, whose
tragic fate is most powerfully described in the "Nibelungen Lied," and
in a series of lays of the Icelandic Edda. A matchless warrior, a
Dragon-killer and overthrower of Giants, who possesses a magic sword, he
conquers the northern Nibelungs and acquires their famed gold hoard. In
the great German epic he is the son of Siegmund and Siegelinde, who rule
in the Netherlands. Going Rhine-upward to Worms, to Gunther, the King of
the Burgundians, he woos and wins Kriemhild, the beautiful sister of
that king, after having first helped Gunther to gain the hand of
Bruenhild, a queen beyond sea, in Iceland. No one could obtain that
valiant virgin's consent to wedlock unless he proved a victor over her
in athletic feats, and in trials of battle. By means of his own colossal
strength and his hiding hood, Siegfried, standing invisibly at the side
of Gunther, overcomes Bruenhild. Even after the marriage has been
celebrated at Worms, Siegfried has once more to help the Burgundian king
in the same hidden way, in order to vanquish Bruenhild's resistance to
the accomplishment of the marriage. When, in later times, Kriemhild and
Bruenhild fall out in a quarrel about their husbands' respective worth,
the secret of such stealthy aid having been given, is let out by the
former in a manner affec