That evening they said Mass, and they absolved the body laid out upon a bier before the altar, and surrounded, as custom is, with lights, and the women also sang. And when the morning came they put the body of Martin upon a boat draped with hangings as fitted the greatness of the man and of his office and of all the evangelization of the Gauls. And certain skilful men having been chosen from among the river people to guide the boat over the turning of the flood water, they brought it down to Tours, and there they buried him amid a great concourse of the people, and all his monks lamenting him from the caves beyond the river. Then, when some years had passed, the devotion of his successors built a little chapel over that famous grave, and a bishop from foreign parts sent a sculptured marble for the tomb, and later still another church was raised in memory of the apostle. And one hundred years and another hundred years and another went by to the added glory of his tomb, until pagan savages of the north came and ruined it; and when it had risen again in splendour above him, other enemies, heretics, came and ruined it again, leaving it all desolate and bare walls, and at last only two towers of what had been his shrine. But for the third time, and in our day, men built the shrine again, and there it is, as you may see it if you go. And so it will be, perhaps, for many lives of men to come--the Church rising and falling, and the tomb of Martin continuing in the midst. THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS (_December 25_, A.D. 496) The great plains of Champagne were white with snow, and the small rivers of that land made little black ribbons across the desert of frost. Upon the high hills that overlook the plain from the west the deep forest of leafless trees stood out as black against the sky in frost. The town of those flats, all square, with its low Roman walls and plain arched gates, was dark against the snow in the midst of the level. The straight arrow of the road making for the western gate was dark also against the snow by the passage of so many feet and of so many wheels and horsemen, for an army had gone past. It was in the Christmas time of the year 496. The army was the army of that king from the Netherlands, a leader of the Frankish auxiliaries and their master in the forces of Rome. His rough name of a Flemish sort his soldiers repeated as Clodveg, or some such sound. For us and for history it is Clovis, and there followed him in that band of auxiliaries men, some of his own small tribe which lay round Tournai and the Lowlands, some from the Seine. Four thousand of them, perhaps: a column marching to his orders and ready to support his government, for government there must be. Rome no longer truly governed.