The Goths had no alphabet, so Ulfila invented one, and then translated the Bible into their rude speech. A part of this translation is now preserved in Sweden, and is the earliest extant specimen of the Gothic language. Even to the unlearned observer, this Gothic version of the Lord's Prayer, written by Ulfila more than one thousand five hundred years ago, bears such strong marks of kinship to the German and English versions that it can be easily read by us to-day, and makes us realize how much of the Teuton has mingled with our own life and speech. The enormous vitality of the Teutons was evinced in their restless desire to extend themselves. They were not comfortable neighbors. The Franks made predatory incursions into Gaul, which they finally overran and possessed; the Allemani, into Italy; the Saxons, in the same manner, overran Britain; while the stalwart Goths addressed their blows to the Roman Empire--the common foe of all--until 410 _Anno Domini_, when, for a second time, Teuton feet trod the streets of Rome, this time not chained to the chariot of a Marius, but conquerors. And when the gates of the Eternal City yielded to the blows of Alaric, the Roman Empire virtually ceased to exist. So this rude people, which in the time of Julius Cæsar was buried in the forests of Central Europe, in six hundred years from his time occupied all of Europe, and was beginning to lay the foundations of a new empire upon the fragments of the old. There is not time to tell how the newly Christianized and civilized Goths were now in turn attacked by the Huns, a race vastly more fierce and terrible than they had ever been, who swarmed down upon them suddenly, like the locusts of Egypt, and under the leadership of Attila swept everything before them; then, after leaving a track of blood and ashes through Germany, disappearing again over the steppes of Russia, from whence they had mysteriously come; a tremendous upturning force, but bearing no relation to the future result more than the plough to the future grain. There had been no repose for Europe yet--incessant tribal changes; a surging mass of humanity pouring from one land into another. The troubled continent was a great, seething caldron, from which was to emerge a new civilization. But soon after this final convulsion of the Hunnish invasion the migrations ceased, and now, about the year 570, the foundations of the present European divisions began to appear. In Britain, subjugated by the Angles and Saxons, we see foreshadowed the Anglo-Saxon England of to-day; in the country lying east and west of the Rhine, France and Germany begin to be outlined; while the smaller German states are distinctly visible, some of them with geographical divisions almost the same as now. Modern Europe was beginning to crystallize. CHAPTER IV.