But the long keels sailed away only to return again. Amid the gathering troubles of the Karolingian house, as years passed on, the cry rose up ever louder and louder from the desolated banks of Seine, and at last even from the inland cities of Reims and Soissons, perilously near the royal abode at Laon itself: “From the fury of the northmen, good Lord, deliver us!” It was not from Laon that deliverance was to come. The success of Charles the Bald at Angers, the more brilliant victory of his grandson Louis III. over Guthrum at Saucourt, were but isolated triumphs which produced no lasting results. At the very moment when the Karolingian empire was reunited under the sceptre of Charles the Fat came the crisis of the struggle with the northmen in West-Frankland; and the true national leader shewed himself not in the heir of Charles the Great, but in Count Odo of Paris, the son of Robert the Brave. It was Odo who saved Paris from the northmen when they besieged it with all their forces throughout the winter of 885; and by saving Paris he saved the kingdom. Before the siege was raised the possessions which his father had held as duke of the French were restored to him by the death of Hugh of Burgundy. A few months later the common consent of all the Karolingian realms deposed their unworthy Emperor, and the acclamations of a grateful people raised their deliverer Odo to the West-Frankish throne. The times, however, were not yet ripe for a change of dynasty, and the revolution was followed by a reaction which on Odo’s death in 898 again set a Karolingian, Charles the Simple, upon the throne; but though the monarchy of Laon lingered on till the race of Charles the Great became extinct, it was being gradually undermined and supplanted by the dukes of the French, the rulers of the great duchy between Seine and Loire. Paris was now, since the siege of 885, the chief seat of the ducal power; and in the new feudal organization which grew up around this centre, the cradle of the ducal house, the border-stronghold of Angers, sank to a secondary position. The fiefs which the dukes parcelled out among their followers fell to the share of men of the most diverse origin and condition. In some cases, as at Chartres and Tours, the Scandinavian settler was turned into a peaceful lieutenant of the Frankish chief against whom he had fought. In others the reward of valour was justly bestowed on men who had earned it by their prowess against the invaders. It may be that the old alliance of Count Robert the Brave with the Bretons had sowed the seeds of a mighty tree. In the depths of a gloomy forest-belt which ran along the Breton border at the foot of a range of hills that shelter the western side of the valley of the Mayenne, there dwelt in Robert’s day--so the story went--a valiant forester, Tortulf. He quitted the hardy, hazardous borderer’s life--half hunter, half bandit--to throw himself into the struggle of