ntal Middle Ages, the books of Byzantine chivalry, the fantastic
tales of the Arab do not contain more improbable and dramatic
adventures than the warlike enterprises of these Argonauts coming from
the valleys of the Pyrenees, from the banks of the Ebro, and from the
Moorish gardens of Valencia.

"Eighty years," said Ferragut, terminating his account of the glorious
adventures of Roger de Flor around Gallipoli, "the Spanish duchy of
Athens and Neopatria flourished. Eighty years the Catalans governed
these lands."

And he pointed out on the horizon the place where the red haze of
distant promontories and mountains outlined the Grecian land.

Such a duchy was in reality a republic. Athens and Thebes were
administered in accordance with the laws of Aragon and its code was
"The book of Usages and Customs of the City of Barcelona." The Catalan
tongue ruled as the official language in the country of Demosthenes,
and the rude Almogavars married with the highest ladies of the country.

The Parthenon was still intact as in the glorious times of ancient
Athens. The august monument of Minerva converted into a Christian
church, had not undergone any other modification than that of seeing a
new goddess on its altars, _La Virgen Santisima_.

And in this thousand-year-old temple of sovereign beauty the _Te Deum_
was sung for eighty years in honor of the Aragonese dukes, and the
clergy preached in the Catalan tongue.

The republic of adventurers did not bother with constructing nor
creating. There does not remain on the Grecian land any trace of their
dominion,--edifices, seals, nor coins. Only a few noble families,
especially in the islands, took the Catalan patronym.

"Although they yet remember us confusedly, they do remember us," said
Ferragut. "'May the vengeance of the Catalans overtake you' was for
many centuries the worst of curses in Greece."

Thus terminated the most glorious and bloody of the Mediterranean
adventures of the Middle Ages,--the clash of western crudeness, almost
savage but frank and noble, against the refined malice and decadent
civilization of the Greeks,--childish and old at the same time,--which
survived in Byzantium.

Ferragut felt a pleasure in these relations of imperial splendor,
palaces of gold, epic encounters and furious frays, while his ship was
navigating through the black night and bounding over the dark sea
accompanied by the throbbing of machinery and the noisy thrum of the
screw, at t