"The old enemies from yonder. The small fellows with the deep-set eyes and blunt noses. A good deal of our meat will again be ridden tender under the saddle this year." He drew out of his pocket a strangely shaped small horse-shoe, with a high heel to it. "Do you know that?--A little shoe, and a little steed, a crooked sabre, and arrows fleet;--as quick as lightning, and never at rest; oh Lord, deliver us from this pest!" "The Huns?" exclaimed the Duchess, in startled tones. "If you prefer to call them Hungarians, or Hungry-ones,--'tis the same to me," said the messenger. "Bishop Pilgrim sent the tidings from Passau to Freising; whence it reached us. They have already swum over the Danube, and will be falling like locusts into the German lands; and as quick as winged Devils. 'You may sooner catch the wind on the plain, or the bird in the air,' is an old saying with us. May the plague take their horses!--I for myself, only fear for my sister's child at Passau; the fair little Bertha." ... "It is impossible!" said Dame Hadwig. "Can they have forgotten already, what answer the messengers of the Exchequer, returned them: 'we have iron and swords and five fingers to our hands?' In the battle on the Inn, their heads were made acquainted with the truth of these words." "Just for that very reason," said the man. "He who has been beaten once, likes to come back and beat the enemy in his turn. The messengers of the Exchequer, in reward for their bravery, have had their heads cut off;--so who will like taking their places in the foremost ranks?" "We likewise know the path, which has been trodden by our ancestors, going to meet the enemy," proudly returned the Duchess. She dismissed the man from Augsburg with a present. Then she sent for Ekkehard. "Virgil will have to rest a while," said she, telling him of the danger that was threatening from the Huns. This state of things was by no means pleasant. The nobles had forgotten, in their many personal feuds, how to act and stand up together; whilst the Emperor, of Saxon origin and not over fond of the Suabians, was fighting in Italy, far away from the German frontier. So the passage to the Bodensee was open to the invaders; whose mere name caused a terror wherever it was pronounced. For years their tribes swarmed like will-o'-the-wisps, through the unsettled realm, which Charlemagne had left in the hands of unqualified successors. From the shores of the North-Sea, where the ruins of Bremen spoke of their invasion, down to the southern point of Calabria, where the natives had to pay a ransom for each head,--fire and plunder marked their way.