As gathering years told upon him, he seems to have felt that he had carried weight of crozier long enough--that busy Tours must now find a busier Bishop--that, for himself, he might innocently henceforward take his pleasure and his rest where the vine grew and the lark sang. For his episcopal palace, he takes a little cave in the chalk cliffs of the up-country river: arranges all matters therein, for bed and board, at small cost. Night by night the stream murmurs to him, day by day the vine-leaves give their shade; and, daily by the horizon's breadth so much nearer Heaven, the fore-running sun goes down for him beyond the glowing water;--there, where now the peasant woman trots homewards between her panniers, and the saw rests in the half-cleft wood, and the village spire rises grey against the farthest light, in Turner's 'Loireside.'[8] [Footnote 8: Modern Painters, Plate 73.] All which things, though not themselves without profit, my special reason for telling you now, has been that you might understand the significance of what chanced first on Clovis' march south against the Visigoths. "Having passed the Loire at Tours, he traversed the lands of the abbey of St. Martin, which he declared inviolate, and refused permission to his soldiers to touch anything, save water and grass for their horses. So rigid were his orders, and the obedience he exacted in this respect, that a Frankish soldier having taken, without the consent of the owner, some hay, which belonged to a poor man, saying in raillery "that it was but grass," he caused the aggressor to be put to death, exclaiming that "Victory could not be expected, if St. Martin should be offended." Now, mark you well, this passage of the Loire at Tours is virtually the fulfilment of the proper bounds of the French kingdom, and the sign of its approved and securely set power is "Honour to the poor!" Even a little grass is not to be stolen from a poor man, on pain of Death. So wills the Christian knight of Roman armies; throned now high with God. So wills the first Christian king of far victorious Franks;--here baptized to God in Jordan of his goodly land, as he goes over to possess it. How long? Until that same Sign should be read backwards from a degenerate throne;--until, message being brought that the poor of the French people had no bread to eat, answer should be returned to them "They may eat grass." Whereupon--by St. Martin's faubourg, and St. Martin's gate--there go forth commands from the Poor Man's Knight against the King--which end _his_ Feasting. And be this much remembered by you, of the power over French souls, past and to come, of St. Martin of Tours. NOTES TO CHAPTER I.