"And what else?" asked Joel laughing and shrugging his shoulders. "Five thousand bags of oats." "And what else?" "Five hundred barrels of hydromel." "Of course," said the brenn laughing louder, "they must also drink--and what else?" "A thousand heads of beef." "And, of course, the fattest--What else?" "Five thousand sheep." "That's right. One soon gets tired of beef only. Is that all, my boy?" "They also demanded three hundred horses to furnish new equipages to the Roman cavalry, besides two hundred wagons of forage." "And why not? The poor horses must be fed," continued Joel sneeringly. "But there must be some more orders. If they begin to issue orders, why stop at all?" "The provisions were to be taken in wagons as far as Poitou and Touraine." "And what is the wide maw that is to swallow up those bags of wheat, those muttons, those heads of beef and those barrels of hydromel?" "Above all," added the traveler, "who is to pay for all those provisions?" "Pay for them!" replied Albinik. "Why, nobody. It is a forced impost." "Ha! Ha!" laughed Joel. "And the wide maw that is to gulp up the provisions is none other than the Roman army, which is wintering in Touraine and Anjou." A shudder of rage mixed with disdain ran through the family of the brenn. "Well, Joel," the unknown traveler remarked, "do you still think that it is a long way from Touraine to Britanny? The distance does not seem to me long, seeing that the officers of Caesar come calmly and without escort, empty-pursed and swinging high their canes, to provision their army here." Joel no longer laughed; he dropped his head and remained silent. "Our guest is right," put in Albinik; "these Romans came empty-pursed and swinging high their canes. One of them even raised his cane over old Ronan, the oldest magistrate of Vannes, who, like you, father, objected strongly to the Roman exaction." "And yet, children, what else can we do but laugh at these demands. To levy these provisionings upon us and the neighboring tribes of Vannes; to force us to carry the requisitions to Touraine and Anjou with our oxen and horses which the Romans will surely keep also, and all that at the very season of the late sowing and of our autumn labors; to ruin next year's harvest;--why, that is to reduce us to living upon the grass that would have fed the cattle that they rob us of!" "Yes," said Mikael the armorer; "they want to take away our wheat and our cattle, and leave the grass to us. By the iron of the lance that I was forging this very morning, it shall be the Romans who, under our blows, will bite the grass on our fields!" "Vannes is now preparing to defend herself if attacked," added the mariner. "They have begun to throw up trenches in the neighborhood of the port. All our sailors are to be armed, and if the Roman galleys attack us by sea, never will the sea crows have had a like feast of corpses upon our beach."