thread of a river. On its way to the pass of the Brown range
it skirted the garden of the Gallands, which rose in terraces to a
seventeenth-century house overlooking the old town from its outskirts.
They were such a town, such a road, such a landscape as you may see on
many European frontiers. The Christian people who lived in the region
were like the Christian people you know if you look for the realities of
human nature under the surface differences of language and habits.

Beyond the house rose the ruins of a castle, its tower still intact.
Marta always referred to the castle as the baron; for in her girlhood
she had a way of personifying all inanimate things. If the castle walls
were covered with hoar frost, she said that the baron was shivering; if
the wind tore around the tower, she said that the baron was groaning
over the democratic tendencies of the time. On such a summer afternoon
as this, the baron was growing old gracefully, at peace with his
enemies.

Centuries older than the speck in the sky was the baron; but the pass
road was many more, countless more, centuries older than he. It had been
a trail for tribes long before Roman legions won a victory in the pass,
which was acclaimed an imperial triumph. To hold the pass was to hold
the range. All the blood shed there would make a red river, inundating
the plain. Marta, a maker of pictures, saw how the legions, brown,
sinewy, lean aliens, looked in their close ranks. They were no less real
to her imagination than the infantry of the last war thirty years ago,
or the Crusaders who came that way, or the baron in person and his
shaggy-bearded, uncouth, ignorant ruffians who were their own moral law,
leaving their stronghold to plunder the people of the fertile plain of
the fruits of their toil.

Stone axe, spear and bow, javelin and broadsword, blunderbuss and
creaking cannon--all the weapons of all stages in the art of war--had
gone trooping past. Now had come the speck in the sky, straight on, like
some projectile born of the ether.

"Beside the old baron, we are parvenus," Marta would say. "And what a
parvenu the baron would have been to the Roman aristocrat!"

"Our family is old enough--none older in the province!" Mrs. Galland
would reply. "Marta, how your mind does wander! I'd get a headache just
contemplating the things you are able to think of in five minutes."

The first Galland had built a house on the land that his king had given
him for one of