ferocity with which they opened their career.  A handful of them were on some mission to the Emperor.  The town was besieged from the landward side by the barbarians, and the Asiatics obtained leave to take part in a skirmish.  The first Turk galloped out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then, lying down beside him, proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified the man’s comrades that they could not be brought to face such uncanny adversaries.  So, from opposite sides, those two great races arrived at the city which was to be the stronghold of the one and the ambition of the other for so many centuries.

And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are those that disappear.  There is something there which appeals most powerfully to the imagination.  Take, for example, the fate of those Vandals who conquered the north of Africa.  They were a German tribe, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country.  Suddenly they, too, were seized with the strange wandering madness which was epidemic at the time.  Away they went on the line of least resistance, which is always from north to south and from east to west.  South-west was the course of the Vandals—­a course which must have been continued through pure love of adventure, since in the thousands of miles which they traversed there were many fair resting-places, if that were only their quest.

They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the more adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the old Roman province.  For two or three generations they held it, much as the English hold India, and their numbers were at the least some hundreds of thousands.  Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those flickers which showed that there was still some fire among the ashes.  Belisarius landed in Africa and reconquered the province.  The Vandals were cut off from the sea and fled inland.  Whither did they carry those blue eyes and that flaxen hair?  Were they exterminated by the negroes, or did they amalgamate with them?  Travellers have brought back stories from the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid race with light eyes and hair.  Is it possible that here we have some trace of the vanished Germans?

It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland.  That also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic questions in history—­the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my eyes to see across the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point (or near it) where the old “Eyrbyggia” must have stood.  That was the Scandinavian city, founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to be a considerable place, so much so that they sent to Denmark for a bishop.  That would be in the fourteenth century.  The bishop, coming out to his see, found that he was unable to reach it on account of a climatic change which had brought down the ice and filled the strait between Iceland and Greenland.  From that day to this no one has been able to say what has become