One more strain, that of the heroes of the Nibelungen, the blond Burgundian giants who had forced the Romans to share with them a portion of their conquered territories, was destined to add height and virile force to the Celto-Roman people of this country. Strangely differing from their ancient enemies the merciless Teutons, these mighty Burgundians, most human of all the vandal hords, in an epic of tragic grandeur rivaling the classic tales of mythology, for a century maintained an autonomous and mighty kingdom. Gentle as gigantic, indomitable in war, invading but not destroying, their greatest monarch, Gondebaud, who could exterminate his rival brothers, and enact a beneficient code of laws which forms the basis of the Gallic jurisprudence, was their protagonist and prototype. Beside his figure, looming in the mists of history, is Clothilde, his niece, the proselyting Christian queen, who fled in her ox cart from Geneva to the arms of Clovis the Merovingian, first king of France. Enthroned at Lyons, Gondebaud issued the laws which regulated the establishment of his people in their new domains, which spread over what was later the great French Duchy of Burgundy, the whole extent of occidental Switzerland and Savoy. "Like brothers," it is related by the Latin chroniclers, they mingled with the resident inhabitants, dividing lands and serfs by lot, marrying their daughters, and quickly adopting their language and their Christian faith. Thus the whole of Romand Switzerland was deeply impregnated with the Burgundian influence, assimilating its vigorous race type and ruled by its laws. Although the country later passed under the universal domination of Charlemagne, the character of the people was little affected by the distant rule of the great monarch, and when the Carlovingian Empire fell apart and Rodolph I, of the second Burgundian line, crowned himself king in the monastery of St. Maurice, his subjects were of the same race and customs as those of his predecessors. Differing in blood from the early Burgundian rulers, these Rodolphian kings, allied to the Carlovingian emperors and long governors of lower or Swiss Burgundy, ruled pacifically and under the beloved Rodolph II and his still better loved Queen Berthe, and their son Conrad, resisted the Saracen invasion and preserved for a hundred and fifty years the autonomy of their kingdom. Nobles with their serfs and freemen already divided the land, their prerogatives and vassalage long since established by the laws of Gondebaud. The Oberland, or Pays-d'en-Haut, Hoch Gau, or D'Ogo, in the German tongue, a country no longer wild but rich in fertile valleys and wooded mountain sides, was given to a Burgundian lord, under the title of King's Forester or Grand Gruyer; Count he was or Comes D'Ogo, first lord of the country afterwards called Gruyere. Although Burgundian, the subjects of Count Turimbert were of different races. In the country of Ogo, called Haute Gruyere, they were