rulers are not like-minded with the men of old, and are pulling down the state into ruin."

By the time that this conversation was ended, the household of Onégesh had awoke, and the door was unbarred. Priscus obtained an interview with the minister and delivered the presents, which were graciously received. It is needless to transcribe the memoranda, almost tediously minute, which Priscus has kept of his various conversations. The general drift of them was, on the Roman side, to press for an interview with the king of the Huns, and to urge Onégesh to undertake in person the return embassy, and win for himself eternal glory and much wealth by bringing his candid and impartial mind to bear upon the points in dispute, and settling them in favor of the Romans. Onégesh indignantly repudiated the idea that any arguments of the Romans could ever induce him to betray his master, to forget his Scythian life, his wives, and his children, or to cease to consider servitude with Attila preferable to wealth among the Romans. He could be far more useful to them, he said, by remaining at Attila's court and mollifying his resentment against their nation, than by coming to Byzantium and negotiating a treaty which his master might very probably disavow. On the other hand, he pressed them repeatedly with the question, “What man of consular dignity will the Emperor send as ambassador ?" The fact that Maximin, a man who had never filled the office of consul, should have been selected as envoy, evidently rankled in the mind of the barbarian king, sensitive, as all upstarts are, about his dignity. And at length, Attila having named three, Nomus, Anatolius, and Senator, any one of whom would be, in the language of modern diplomacy, a persona grata at his court, declared that he would receive no one else. The envoys replied that to insist so strongly on the selection of these three men would bring them into suspicion at the Imperial Court; a charming piece of inconsistency in the men who were constantly petitioning that Onégesh and no one else might undertake the return embassy. Attila answered moodily, "If the Romans will not do as I choose, I shall settle the points in dispute by war."

While diplomacy was thus spinning her tedious web, the ambassadors saw some sights in the barbarian camp which deserved to be recorded by the careful pen of the professor of rhetoric.

One day he had an audience of the Queen Kreka, the chief in dignity of the wives of Attila, and mother of three of his sons. Her palace was built of well-sawn and smoothly-planed planks, "resting on the ends of logs." Arches at certain intervals, springing from the ground and rising to a pretty considerable height, broke the flat surface of the wall. Here Kreka was to be found, lying on a soft couch, and with the floor around her covered with smooth felts to walk upon. Carpets were evidently still an unwonted luxury in Hun-land. There was no trace of the Oriental seclusion of women in the palace of Kreka. A large number of men-servants stood in a circle round her, while her maids sat on the floor in front, and were busied in dyeing linen of various colors, intending afterwards to work it up into ornamental costumes of the barbarian fashion.

When Priscus had offered his gifts and emerged from the queen's dwelling, he heard a stir and a clamor, and saw a crowd of men hurrying to the door of Attila's palace. These were the signs that the king was coming forth, and the rhetorician obtained a good place to watch his exit. With a stately strut Attila came forth, looking this way and that. Then he stood with his favorite Onégesh in front of the palace, while all the multitude of his people who had disputes one with another came forward and submitted them to him for his decision. Having thus in true Oriental fashion administered justice "in the gate," he returned into the interior of his palace in order to give audience to some barbarian ambassadors who had just arrived at his

court.

Scarcely was this scene ended when Priscus fell in with the ambassadors of the Western Empire, with whom he naturally began to compare notes. "Are you dismissed," said they, “or pressed to remain?" "The very thing," he answered, "that I myself want to know, and that keeps me all day hanging about near the palisading of Onégesh. Pray has Attila vouchsafed a gentle answer to your petition?" "No; nothing will turn him from his purpose. He declares he will either have Silvanus or the sacred vessels, or else will make war." Priscus then expressed his wonder at the folly of the barbarian; and Romulus, who was an old and experienced diplomatist, answered, "His extraordinary good fortune and unbounded power have quite

turned his head: so that he will listen to no argument which does not fall in with his own caprices. For no former ruler of Scythia or of any other land has ever achieved so much in so short a time as this man, who has made himself master of the islands in the ocean, and besides ruling all Scythia has forced even the Romans to pay him tribute." Then Romulus proceeded to tell the story of Attila's intended Persian campaign, to which reference has already been made. The Byzantine ambassadors expressed their earnest desire that he would turn his arms against Persia and leave Theodosius alone; but Constantiolus, a Pannonian in the retinue of Romulus, replied that he feared if Attila did attack and overcome, as he assuredly would, the monarch of that country, "he would become our lord and master instead of our friend. At present," said he, "Attila condescends to take gold from the Romans and call it pay for his titular office of General in the Roman armies. But should he subdue the Parthians, and Medes, and Persians, he would not endure to have the Roman Empire cutting in like a wedge between one part and another of his dominions, but would openly treat the two Emperors as mere lackeys, and would lay upon them such commands as they would find absolutely intolerable. Already he has been heard to remark, testily, "The generals of Theodosius are but his servants, while my generals are as good as emperors of Rome." He believes also that there will be before long some notable increase of his power; and that the gods have signified this by revealing to him that sword of Mars, a sacred relic much venerated by the Huns, for many years hidden from their eyes, but quite lately rediscovered by the trail of the blood of an ox which had wounded its hoof against it, as it was sticking upright in the long grass."

Such was the conversation between the representatives of Ravenna and Constantinople, amid the log-huts of the Hungarian plain. Later on in the same day they all received an invitation to be present at a banquet of the great conqueror.

"Punctually at three o'clock we, together with the ambassadors of the Western Romans, went to the dinner and stood on the threshold of Attila's palace. According to the custom of the country, the cup-bearers brought us a bowl of wine, that we might drink and pray for the good luck of our host before sitting down.

Having tasted the bowl, we were escorted to our seats. Chairs were ranged for the guests all around the walls. In the center Attila reclined on a couch, and behind him a flight of steps led up to his bed, which, hidden by curtains of white linen and variegated stuffs tastefully arranged, looked like the nuptial bed, as the Greeks and Romans prepare it for a newly-wedded couple. "The seat of honor on the right hand of Attila's couch was occupied by Onégesh. We did not receive even the second place, that on his left, but saw Berich, a Hun of noble birth, placed above us there. Opposite to Onégesh, on a double chair, sat two of the sons of Attila. His eldest son sat on the king's couch, not near to him, however, but on the very edge of it, and all through the banquet he kept his eyes fixed on the ground in silent awe of his father.

"When we were all seated the cup-bearer came in and handed to Attila his ivywood drinking-cup, filled with wine. Remaining seated, the king saluted the one nearest to him in rank. The slave standing behind that person's chair advanced into the center of the hall, received the cup from the hand of Attila's cupbearer, and brought it to the guest, whom etiquette required to rise from his seat and continue standing till he had drained the cup and the slave had returned it into the hands of Attila's cupbearer." This process of salutation and drinking was gone through with each guest and in the intervals of every course. The length of the solemnity, and perhaps the tediousness of it, seem greatly to have impressed the mind of Priscus, who describes it in much detail. After the banqueters had all been "saluted" by Attila, the servants began to bring in the provisions, which were set upon little tables, one for every three or four guests, so that each could help himself without going outside. the row of seats. "For all the rest of the barbarians," says Priscus, "and for us, a costly banquet had been prepared, which was served on silver dishes; but Attila, on his wooden plate, had nothing else save meat. In all his other equipments he showed the same simple tastes. The other banqueters had drinking-cups of gold and silver handed to them, but his was of wood. His clothes were quite plain, distinguished by their cleanness only from those of any common man: and neither the sword which was hung up beside him, nor the clasps of his

shoes (shaped in the barbarian fashion), nor the bridle of his horse, was adorned, as is the case with other Scythians, with gold or jewels, or anything else that is costly.

"When evening came on, torches were lighted, and two barbarians coming in, stood opposite to Attila and chanted verses in praise of his victories and his prowess in war. The banqueters, looking off from the festal board, gazed earnestly on the minstrels. Some gave themselves to the mere delight of the song; others, remembering past conflicts, were stirred as with the fury of battle; while the old men were melted into tears by the thought that their bodies were grown weak through time, and their hot hearts were compelled into repose." After tears laughter, and after the tragedy a farce. A mad Hun next came in, who by his senseless babble made all the guests laugh heartily. Then entered a Moorish dwarf named Zercon, humpbacked, clubfooted, with a nose like a monkey's. Almost the only anecdote that is preserved to us about Bleda, Attila's brother, records the inextinguishable mirth which this strange creature used to awaken in him, how he had him always by his side at the battle and in the banquet, and how when at last the unlucky dwarf tried to make his escape together with some other fugitives, Bleda disregarded all the others, and devoted his whole energies to the recapture of the pygmy. Then when he was caught and brought into the royal presence, Bleda burst into another storm of merriment at seeing the queer little creature in the dignity of chains. He questioned him about the cause of his flight: the dwarf replied that he knew he had done wrong, but there was some excuse for him because he could get no wife in Hun-land. More delicious laughter followed, and Bleda straightway provided him with a wife in the person of a Hunnish damsel of noble birth who had been maid of honor to his queen, but had fallen into disgrace and been banished from her presence. After Bleda's death, Attila, who could not abide the dwarf, sent him as a present to Aetius. He had now come back again, apparently to beg to have his wife restored to him, a prayer which Attila was not inclined to grant.

This strange being came into the banquet-hall, and by his grotesque appearance, his odd garb, his stuttering voice, and his wild promiscuous jumble of words, Latin, Hunnish, Gothic,