Oh! Beautiful to the eye is the moor of Kennor, still ruddy and smoking an hour after it is set on fire and consumed to the very root of its heather! Splendid brasier three leagues wide, strewn with thousands of Frankish bodies, shapeless, charred. Warm quarry above which already flocks of carrion-crows from the forest of Cardik are hovering! Glory to you, Bretons! More than a third of the Frankish army met death on the moor of Kennor. "What a war! What a war!" also exclaims Louis the Pious. Aye, a merciless war; a holy war; a thrice holy war, waged by a people in defence of their freedom, their homes, their fields, their hearths; Oh, ancient land of the Gauls! Oh, old Armorica, sacred mother! Everything turns into a weapon in the hands of your rugged children against their barbarous invaders! Rocks, precipices, marshes, woods, moors on fire! Oh, Brittany, betrayed by those of your own children who succumbed to the wiles of the Catholic priests, stabbed at your heart by the sword of the Frankish kings, and pouring out the generous heart blood of your children, perchance, after all, you will feel the yoke of the conquerer on your neck! But the bones of your enemies, crushed, burned and drowned in the struggle, will tell to our descendants the tale of a resistance that Armorica offered to her casqued and mitred invaders! CHAPTER VIII. THE VALLEY OF LOKFERN. Decimated by the conflagration of the moor of Kennor, the Frankish army flees in disorder in the direction of the valley of Lokfern, that lies slightly below the vast plateau on which an hour before the three Frankish divisions have joined, confident that their trials are ended. Escaped from the disaster of the conflagration and carried onward by the impetuosity of their steeds, a portion of the Frankish cavalry that follows Louis the Pious in his precipitate flight, arrives at the confines of the plateau. Driven by a terror that left them no thought but to outstrip one another, the fleeing riders seem to give no heed to the sight that unfolds before them. At the foot of the slope that they are about to descend, stands the numerous Breton cavalry, drawn up in battle array, under the command of Morvan and Vortigern. It is only a cavalry of rustics, yet intrepid, veterans in warfare, perfectly mounted. Carried by the headlong course of their horses beyond the edge of the plateau and down the slope to the valley, the Franks rush in confused order upon the Breton cavalry that is drawn up as if to bar their passage; they rush onward, either unable to restrain their still frightened steeds, or conceiving a vague hope of crushing the opposing Bretons under the irresistible violence of their impetuous descent. The Breton cavalry, however, instead of waiting for the Franks, quickly parts in two corps, one commanded by Morvan, the other by Vortigern. One corps seems to flee to the right, the other to the left. The space from the foot of the hill to the river Scoer being thus left free by the