in the low doorway, with
folded hands, with a smile on her mouth, rich in remembrances, legends
and songs, rich in her only lamb on which the cherry-tree strews its
flower-blossoms in the warm spring sun.

As a background to this picture lies the Vettern--the bottomless lake
as the commonalty believe--with its transparent water, its sea-like
waves, and in calm, with "Hegring," or fata morgana on its steel-like
surface. We see Vadstene palace and town, "the city of the dead," as a
Swedish author has called it--Sweden's Herculaneum, reminiscence's
city. The grass-turf house must be our box, whence we see the rich
mementos pass before us--memorials from the chronicle of saints, the
chronicle of kings and the love songs that still live with the old
dame, who stands in her low house there, where the lamb crops the
grass on the roof. We hear her, and we see with her eyes; we go from
the grass-turf house up to the town, to the other grass-turf houses,
where poor women sit and make lace, once the celebrated work of the
rich nuns here in the cloister's wealthy time.

How still, solitary and grass-grown are these streets! We stop by an
old wall, mouldy-green for centuries already. Within it stood the
cloister; now there is but one of its wings remaining. There, within
that now poor garden still bloom Saint Bridget's leek, and once ran
flowers. King John and the Abbess, Ana Gylte, wandered one evening
there, and the King cunningly asked: "If the maidens in the cloister
were never tempted by love?" and the Abbess answered, as she pointed
to a bird that just then flew over them: "It may happen! One cannot
prevent the bird from flying over the garden; but one may surely
prevent it from building its nest there!"

Thus thought the pious Abbess, and there have been sisters who thought
and acted like her. But it is quite as sure that in the same garden
there stood a pear-tree, called the tree of death; and the legend says
of it, that whoever approached and plucked its fruit would soon die.
Red and yellow pears weighed down its branches to the ground. The
trunk was unusually large; the grass grew high around it, and many a
morning hour was it seen trodden down. Who had been here during the
night?

A storm arose one evening from the lake, and the next morning the
large tree was found thrown down; the trunk was broken, and out from
it there rolled infants' bones--the white bones of murdered children
lay shining in the grass.

The pio