But they are not
all dead by any means, as you know also and you have even lately seen
and talked with one of the fair-haired fellows, who bears the name.
For the Children of the King have almost always had yellow hair and blue
eyes, though they have more than once taken to themselves black-browed,
brown-skinned Calabrian girls as wives. And this makes one, who knows
something more about your country than you do, Luigione--though in a
less practical way I confess--this makes one think that they may be the
modern descendants of some Norman knightling who took Verbicaro for
himself one morning in the old days, and kept it; or perhaps even the
far-off progeny of one of those bright-eyed, golden-locked Goths who
made slaves of the degenerate Latins some thirteen centuries ago or
more, and treated their serfs indeed more like cattle than slaves until
almost the last of them were driven into the sea with their King Teias
by Narses. But a few were left in the southern fastnesses and in the
Samnite hills, and northward through the Apennines, scattered here and
there where they had been able to hold their own; and some, it is said,
forgot Theodoric and Witiges and Totila and Teias, and took service in
the Imperial Guard at Constantinople, as Harold of Norway and some of
our own hard-fisted sailor fathers did in later years.
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