It did not remain a wilderness long; presently came the pacific Cæsars of a later day and the whole land became first the “kitchen-garden of Rome” and then the Newport of the Empire. Fine roads cut the forests in every direction, land was cleared, agriculture intensified, so that shortly the whole region was a garden dotted with private parks and estates. Trèves was made a great city, with palaces, temples, baths, amphitheatres, the summer capital of Europe and second in Gaul only to Lyons. A city of manifold pleasures and as many beauties; rich, sumptuous, sensuous, where from the shores of Tiber and Bosporus enervated and exhausted devotees of the joy of living came to cool themselves and restore their vitality in the fresh air and the green river valleys of this curiously picturesque retreat. All along the Moselle rose gorgeous villas with their rooms of sheeted marble and mosaic and gilded cedar and splendid fabrics, their terraced gardens and cool groves and wide-spreading parks. A golden day-dream focussed along the windings of a little river and destined, the sleepers dreamed, to endure for ever. And then the greater dream of empire began to turn into nightmare. The Gallic legions revolted against a weakening hand in Rome, and Cæsars of a day and a thousand votes fought back and forth over the land, and burned and murdered and died until peace came again, and restoration, with real emperors refreshing themselves in their imperial city of Trèves and their dim forests on the hilly walls of the winding Moselle. War again, and ruin, this time of a nature to last for generations and to leave the marble villas to the slow but kindly burial of trees and vines and moss. Out of the terrible east the Huns came like a flood with the deadly Attila at their head, blind terror before them, death and silence behind. Just to the west, at Châlons, they were beaten back and fled eastward again (men thought for ever), and what was left became part of the new Frankish kingdom. Of the makers of this nation and the stock from which sprang Merovings, Carolings, and most of [Illustration: SCHLOSS ELTZ] the other royal houses of Europe, the Reverend T. H. Passmore writes engagingly thus: