_Behold now twice seven centuries.--That a Vandal hero bravest among warriors.--Founded this fortress.--This fortified city has since preserved the name of the Grue.--The stranger became the first count.--His descendants carried the Grue on their scarlet banners.--And on their hairy shields.--To the Vandal hero succeeded a long line of illustrious descendants.--Rich in fortune, rich in their piety.--These Counts won the order of the golden vest.--And for many centuries the posterity of Gruerius.--Chief of the sixteenth Vandal legion who lived in the year 436 governed our country._ PROLOGUE On the edge of a green plain around which rise the first steps of the immense amphitheatre of the Alps, a little castled city enthroned on a solitary hill watches since a thousand years the eternal and surpassing spectacle. Around its feet a river runs, a silver girdle bending northward between pastures green, while eastward over the towering azure heights the sunrise waves its flags of rose and gold. In the dim hours of twilight or by a cloudy moonlight, the city pitched amid the drifting aerial heights seems built itself of air and cloud, evanescent and unreal. By the fair light of noonday, sharp and clear upon its eminence, it is like a Duerer drawing, massed lines of crenelated bastions, sharp-pointed belfreys, and towered gateways completing a mediaeval vignette ideal in composition. Strange as the distant vision seems to the traveler fresh from the rude and time-stained chalets of the mountains, still more surprising is the scene which greets his arrival by the precipitous road, past the double towered gateway, within the city walls. Expressly set it seems for a theatrical _decor_ in its smiling gayety, its faultlessly pictorial effect. Every window in the blazoned houses is blossoming with brightest flowers, as for a perpetual fete. The voices of the people are soft with a strange Italianate patois, and the women at the fountain, the children at their play, the old men sunning themselves beside the deep carved doorways are seemingly living the happy holiday life which belongs to the picture. The one street in the city, opening widely in a long oval _place_, is bounded by stone houses fortified without and bearing suspended galleries for observation and defence, forming thus a continuous rampart along the whole extent of the hillside.