Thus was the issue of the Western world decided, and soon after all the land of the Veneti was in Roman hands, their great men put to the sword, and such of their people as had not fled sold into slavery, for a terror to all the other dwellers along the coasts of the sea. THE DEATH OF ST. MARTIN (_November 11_, A.D. 400) Where the river Loire runs shallow or suddenly rising over its broad bed, broken by willowed banks of sand that stand above the summer stream and are, in spates, drowned up to their topmost branches; where it goes between sharp, low green hills on either side, wherein caves are a habitation for men; all down its valley by Tours there was a murmuring and a noise. It was November, and there were storms in the valley. The suddenly risen water drummed against the wooden piles of the long bridge of Tours, and was swirling brown and thick up to the lower branches of the trees in the islands. Nor could a boat go easily against it, though towed by strong horses. Men were passing backward and forward to the north and to the south over that long bridge of trestles from Tours, the town, with its low roofs of spread red tiles, to the caves upon the farther shore, where was a hive of monks: all out of their cells to-day and eagerly hearing the news in the market-place. The very old man, Martin, the bishop of the city, was dying at Candes, miles away up river. He had not been able to come back to his own. He was more than a king here, for he was also an ambassador of heaven, and when he had gone along the streets muttering to himself and blessing rapidly those who knelt before him, men felt that they had met not a man only but a spirit. The Emperor’s Count who took the Pleas was small before him. The city held to Martin, and it was his own. Its walls were filled not only with his long presence, but with the stories, grown greater through days of marching, of his strange missions into the eastern woods: into the Morvan, and the dark Vosges; and of dead men risen, and of lights seen in the sky. Also the army remembered him. He knew the quarters outside the walls where the huts of the barbaric soldiers were, and whence passed into and out of the gates of the city the gentlemen, their officers, marked upon their armour with silver and with gold. The soldiers had both songs and tales of Martin as he had been sixty years before, riding at the head of a column in his purple cloak; and those who had visited the German mountains and the valleys below the Danube could remember the portents of his birth.