Eleazar was well versed in making his way through perils. They rather avoided the imperial roads, and crept along through by-ways. As it happened, their present peril was rather from hunger than from robbery, so thoroughly had the Huns ravaged the land and massacred or hunted away the inhabitants. By day they travelled miles without seeing a human being. The green corn had been cut down for the cattle; the vineyards were a tangle of scarred and broken stems; the husbandmen and vine-dressers had fled no one knew whither. The June sunshine shone down on a broad waste of trampled desert. All along the way, moreover, there were ghastlier traces of the invasion; unburied corpses lying by the wayside in heaps, or one by one, smitten down in their flight; and at night, when they sought shelter behind the walls of some burnt village, only the dogs gathered round them—cowed, lean, hungry dogs, whom the Irish deer-hound for the most part frightened away—poor famished dogs, finding terrible food in the human bones scattered around the ruined homes. Only one night did they happen to find any traces of the inhabitants. It was the last day before they reached the banks of the Seine. They had encamped for the night on the edge of a forest, and spread their rugs and garments on the ground inside the ruined walls of a hovel. In the middle was a hole full of ashes, and on these still lay some charred chestnuts. Outside was a stone trough by a little spring, which bubbled up and trickled into it; a broken pitcher had been left beside it. In a corner of the little ruined home Ethne discovered a rude wooden cradle and a child’s rattle. When she saw it she burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping. When Miriam tried to comfort her in this rare burst of emotion, “Where, where is the poor mother?” was all she could say, “and the little child?” When she recovered, and had begun with Baithene to gather chips for the fire among the trees near at hand, they heard a faint hushed wail near them, as if some one were trying to soothe the cries of a child. Creeping softly on into the forest, they came on a little family group, an old man and a young woman, with two children crying for hunger. Something in Ethne’s face and voice always made people trust her, and to her delight she found she understood what they were saying to each other. “They are of the Bagaudæ!” she said to Baithene. “The poor oppressed peasants of our own race!” and she insisted on bringing them all to the hovel. Eleazar was not altogether pleased at this addition to the family circle; but Miriam welcomed them as her father Abraham might of old. The fire was lit, and cakes of flour were laid on it, and shared with the hungry peasants. The children were evidently quite at home. They ran up to the cradle, and for the moment all their sorrows were blotted out at the discovery of their own lost toys; and soon all slept, except Ethne and the mother, who held a whispered conversation.