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One gets hints here and there of what manner of men they were, from the evil day, when, one hundred and two years before Christ, the Kempers and Teutons, ranging over the Alps toward Italy, 300,000 armed men and 15,000 mailed knights with broad sword and lances, and in their helmets the same bulls'-horns, wings, and feathers, which one sees now in the crests of German princes, stumbled upon Marius and his Romans, and were destroyed utterly, first the men, then the women, who like true women as they were, rather than give up their honour to the Romans, hung themselves on the horns of the waggon-oxen, and were trampled to death beneath their feet; and then the very dogs, who fought on when men and women were all slain from that fatal day, down to the glorious one, when, five hundred years after, Alaric stood beneath the walls of Rome, and to their despairing boast of the Roman numbers, answered, 'Come out to us then, the thicker the hay, the easier mowed, for five hundred years, I say, the hints of their character are all those of a boy-nature.
It might be, also, that they desired to teach a lesson for the benefit of the wild robber border folk and the yet more ruffianly kempers who foregathered in this strange inn of Erdberg on the borders of the Mark. I summoned the maids that they might look on. For I wot the scene was a curious and pleasing one, and I could see that the eyes of the Lady Ysolinde glittered.
This point made, they boldly went a step farther, and declared that the United States were actually at war with Spain. The affair of the Kempers, and of Flanagan in Louisiana, the obstruction of the Mobile Kiver, the depredations upon our commerce by Spanish privateers, were sufficient proof of a state of war. We had a right to meet force by force.
They might have done it before that again, when Hermann slew Varus and his legions in the Teutoburger Wald; or before that again, when the Kempers and Teutons burst over the Alps, to madden themselves with the fatal wines of the rich south. And why did the Teutons not do it? Because they were boys fighting against cunning men.
A still Sow eats all the Draff. All things hath a beginning, God excepted. A blind man should not judge of colours. A good fellow tint never, but at an ill fellows hand. All the Corn in the Country is not shorn by the Kempers. A good beginning makes a good ending. As many heads as many wits. A black shoe makes a blythe heart. A Vaunter and a Lyar is both one thing. A dum man wan never land.
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