"Vanquished, he is vanquished, the nephew of Charles! There is his sword, which I will carry off to Arabia." He knew not the power of the dying hero. "And as he makes to draw the steel, A something does Sir Roland feel; He opes his eyes, says nought but this, 'Thou art not one of us, I wis,' Raises the horn he could not quit, And cracks the pagan's skull with it.... And then the touch of death that steals Down, down from head to heart he feels; Under yon pine he hastes away On the green turf his head to lay; Placing beneath him horn and sword, He turns towards the Paynim horde, And there, beneath the pine, he sees A vision of old memories; A thought of realms he helped to win, Of his sweet France, of kith and kin, And Charles, his lord, who nurtured him." And here let us take our leave of Roland the brave, whose brief story of fact has been rounded into so vast a story of fiction that the actual histories of few men equal in extent that of this hero of romance. _CHARLEMAGNE AND THE AVARS._ Striking is the story which the early centuries of modern Europe have to tell us. After the era of the busy building of empire in which the sturdy old Romans were the active agents, there came an era of the overthrow of empire, during which the vast results of centuries of active civilization seemed about to sink and be lost in the seething whirlpool of barbarism. The wild hordes of the north of Europe overflowed the rich cities and smiling plains of the south, and left ruin where they found wealth and splendor. Later, the half-savage nomades of eastern Europe and northern Asia--the devastating Huns--poured out upon the budding kingdoms which had succeeded the mighty empire of Rome, and threatened to trample under foot all that was left of the work of long preceding ages. Civilization had swung downward into barbarism; was barbarism to swing downward into savagery, and man return to his primitive state?