ors for land--more land.

"Give us land," they said to the Romans, and when land was denied them
and the gates of cities disdainfully closed upon their messengers, not
land, but vengeance, was their cry; and hordes of half-naked barbarians
trampled down the vineyards, and rushed, a tumultuous torrent, upon
Rome.

The Romans could not stand before this new and strange kind of warfare.
The Gauls streamed over the vanquished legions into the Eternal City,
silent and deserted save only by the Senate and a few who remained
intrenched in the Citadel; and there the barbarians kept them besieged
for seven months, while they made themselves at home amid
uncomprehended luxuries.

Of course Roman skill and courage at last dislodged and drove them
back. But the fact remained that the Gaul had been there--master of
Rome; that the iron-clad legions had been no match for his naked force,
and a new sensation thrilled through the length and breadth of Gaul.
It was the first throb of national life. The sixty or more fragments
drew closer together into something like Gallic unity--with a common
danger to meet, a common foe to drive back.

Hereafter there was another hunger to be appeased besides that for food
and land; a hunger for conquest, for vengeance, and for glory for the
Gallic name. National pride was born.

For years they hovered like wolves about Rome. But skill and superior
intelligence tell in the centuries. It took long--and cost no end of
blood and treasure; but two hundred years from the capture of Rome, the
Gauls were driven out of Italy, and the Alps pronounced a barrier set
by nature herself against barbarian encroachments.

Italy was not the only country suffering from the destroying footsteps
of the Western Kelts. There had been long before an overflow of a
tribe in Northern Gaul (the Kymrians), which had hewed and plundered
its way south and eastward; until at the time of Alexander (B.C. 340)
it was knocking at the gates of Macedonia.

Stimulated by the success at Rome fifty years earlier, they were, with
fresh insolence, demanding "land," and during the centuries which
followed, the Gallic name acquired no fresh lustre in Greece.
Half-naked, gross, ferocious, and ignorant, sometimes allies, but
always a scourge, they finally crossed the Hellespont (B.C. 278), and
turned their attention to Asia Minor. And there, at last, we find them
settled in a province called Gallicia, where they lived without
amalg