Or again on the first Sunday in May all would assemble for the sport called _Chateau d'Amour_ of ancient Celtic origin. In the midst of a green field or in the square before the _Hotel de Ville_, a wooden fortress was erected, surrounded by a little moat and with high towers and a donjon. Maidens and more maidens, smiling and flower-crowned and with white arms outstretched, poured down a rain of arrows and wooden lances from the battlements, or oftener pelted their lovers the assailants with showers of roses. Then at a given signal, in a sudden escalade, the besiegers broke over the walls, each to receive a kiss and a rose as prize of victory. Then besiegers and besieged together burned the fortress, and the day ended with bacchic libations and with dances. Meeting by moonlight nights to sing their love songs and rhymed legends in the city square, the Gruyere people better loved their dances, the long Celtic Korols (or Coraules), when, singing in chorus in wild winding farandoles, they went dancing over vales and hills, day in and day out until human strength could bear no more. Such was the famous dance quaintly recounted in ancient French by a Gruyere chronicler. "It happened one day that the Count de Gruyere returning to his castle, found thereby a great merry-making of young lads and maidens dancing in Koraule. The same Count, greatly loving of such sport, forthwith took the hand of the loveliest of the maidens and joined the company. Whereupon, no one tiring, they proceeded, dancing always, through the hard-by village of Enney up to Chateau D'Oex in the Pays-d'en-Haut, and wonderful was it to see the people in all the villages they passed joining in that joyous band. Seven hundred were they when they finished, having danced continuously for three days over the mountain leagues between Gruyere and Chateau D'Oex, and great was the fame of Count Perrod and his dancing in this _Grande Coquille_." Such was life in this idyllic country, the beloved _Grevire_ of the melodious Romand speech, where "the houses are high with roofs leaning far towards the ground, where the plums are so ripe they fall with the breeze, where there are oats and tressed wheat, cows black and white and rich cheese, black goats, too, and horned oxen--and beautiful maids who would wed." Nourished on rich milk smelling of the aromatic grasses of their pastures, white and pink as the apples of their orchards; light-footed and vigorous from their mountain life, their dancing and their athletic sports, the Gruyere people developed a beauty celebrated even in the grave pages of the historians. From their hearts warm with the sun, their fancy fed by the beauty of their ravishing country, issued songs witty and sad, and always melodious with their soft Italian vocables, a literature in Romand patois. Thus the golden age of chivalry, rhyming harmoniously with the golden age of the herdsmen, in the blue circle of the Gruyere heights, grew to its noon day.