of a small, though brave people, on the borders of France and
Belgium, he grew by degrees to be the founder of the great French
monarchy. His queen, Clotilda, was a Christian, and long tried in vain
to bring him over to her faith. "The gods whom you worship," she said,
"are nothing, and can profit neither themselves nor others; for they are
graven out of stone, or wood, or metal, and the names which you give
them were not the names of gods but of men. But He ought rather to be
worshipped who by His word made out of nothing the heavens and the
earth, the sea and all that in them is." Clovis does not seem to have
cared very much about the truth, one way or the other; but he had the
fancy (which was common among the heathens, and which is often mentioned
in the Old Testament), that if people did not prosper in this world, the
god whom they served could not have the power to protect them and give
them success. And, as he lived in the time when the Roman empire of the
west came to an end, the fall of the empire, which had now been
Christian for more than a hundred and fifty years, seemed to him to
prove that the Christian religion could not be true.

Clotilda persuaded her husband to let their eldest son be baptized. But
the child died within a few days after, and Clovis said that his baptism
was the cause of his death. When another prince was born, however, he
allowed him too to be baptized. Clotilda continued to press her husband
with all the reason that she could think of in order to bring him over
to the Gospel. Some of her reasons were true and good; some of them were
drawn from the superstitious opinions of these times, such as stories
about miracles wrought at the tomb of St. Martin at Tours. Perhaps the
bad reasons were more likely than the good ones to have an effect on a
rough barbarian prince such as Clovis; but Clotilda could make nothing
of him in any way.

At length, in the year 496, he was engaged in battle with a German
tribe, at a place called Tolbiac, near Cologne, and found himself in
great danger of being defeated. He called on his own gods, but without
success, and at last he bethought himself of the God to whose worship
Clotilda had so long been trying to convert him. So, in his anxiety, he
stretched out his arms towards the sky, and called on the name of
Christ, promising that, if the God of Clotilda would help him in his
strait, he would become a Christian. A victory followed, which Clovis
ascribed t