es that history speaks of within these walls.

We can hear about them when the song is silent, when those friendly
forms disappear, and the festal lights are extinguished: from the
pages of history that tale resounds with a clang of horror. It was in
those times, which the many still call poetic--the romantic middle
ages--that bards sang of its most brilliant periods, and covered with
the radiance of their genius the sanguinary gulf of brutality and
superstition. Terror seizes us in Upsala's palace: we stand in the
vaulted hall, the wax tapers burn from the walls, and King Erik the
Fourteenth sits with Saul's dark despondency, with Cain's wild looks.
Niels Sture occupies his thoughts, the recollection of injustice
exercised against him lashes his conscience with scourges and
scorpions, as deadly terrible as they are revealed to us in the page
of history.

King Erik the Fourteenth, whose gloomy distrust often amounted to
insanity, thought that the nobility aimed at his life. His favourite,
Goran Persson, found it to his advantage to strengthen him in this
belief. He hated most the popularly favoured race of the Stures, and
of them, the light-haired Niels Sture in particular; for Erik thought
that he had read in the stars that a man with light hair should hurl
him from the throne; and as the Swedish General after the lost battle
of Svarteaa, laid the blame on Niels Sture, Erik directly believed it,
yet dared not to act as he desired, but even gave Niels Sture royal
presents. Yet because he was again accused by one single person of
having checked the advance of the Swedish army at Baehues, Erik invited
him to his palace at Svartsjoe, gave him an honourable place at his
royal table, and let him depart in apparent good faith for Stockholm,
where, on his arrival, the heralds were ordered to proclaim in the
streets: "Niels Sture is a traitor to his country!"

There Goran Persson and the German retainers seized him, and sat him
by force on the executioner's most miserable hack; struck him in the
face so that the blood streamed down, placed a tarred straw crown on
his head, and fastened a paper with derisive words, on the saddle
before him. They then let a row of hired beggar-boys and old
fish-wives go in couples before, and to the tail of the horse they
bound two fir-trees, the roots of which dragged on the ground and
swept the street after the traitor. Niels Sture exclaimed that he had
not deserved this treatment from his K