CHAPTER VII.
TOURS AND HER SAINT.
In a few days, at early dawn, the journeys of Baithene and Ethne began again.
Eleazar hired a boat, and they went up the Loire to the city of Tours, where they landed.
This was the first city the captives had ever seen, and it impressed them greatly; the high walls, the tall houses, the villas of the Roman officials and rich citizens, in which it was set as if in a cluster of gems. They wondered how much more magnificent the great Rome itself could be. They were still among people of their own race, and language not quite unfamiliar was around them; but being on the south side of the river, in the kingdom of Theodoric, the Visigoth, the town had escaped the ravages of the other Gothic tribes, and also, now, of the Huns in northern and eastern Gaul. There, also for the first time, they saw a cathedral, the only sacred building they had yet beheld having been the round cell of hewn stones in Ireland, and the little chapel with the bell-tower on the sandy shore in Cornwall.