y child they
had; he himself had an only son, "by a bondwoman," Magnus by name, who
came to great things afterwards; of whom, and of which, by and by. With
this bright little boy, and a selected escort of attendants, he moved
away to Russia, to King Jarroslav; where he might wait secure against
all risk of hurting kind friends by his presence. He seems to have been
an exile altogether some two years,--such is one's vague notion; for
there is no chronology in Snorro or his Sagas, and one is reduced to
guessing and inferring. He had reigned over Norway, reckoning from the
first days of his landing there to those last of his leaving it across
the Dovrefjeld, about fifteen years, ten of them shiningly victorious.

The news from Norway were naturally agitating to King Olaf and, in the
fluctuation of events there, his purposes and prospects varied much.
He sometimes thought of pilgriming to Jerusalem, and a henceforth
exclusively religious life; but for most part his pious thoughts
themselves gravitated towards Norway, and a stroke for his old place and
task there, which he steadily considered to have been committed to him
by God. Norway, by the rumors, was evidently not at rest. Jarl Hakon,
under the high patronage of his uncle, had lasted there but a little
while. I know not that his government was especially unpopular, nor
whether he himself much remembered his broken oath. It appears, however,
he had left in England a beautiful bride; and considering farther that
in England only could bridal ornaments and other wedding outfit of a
sufficiently royal kind be found, he set sail thither, to fetch her and
them himself. One evening of wildish-looking weather he was seen
about the northeast corner of the Pentland Frith; the night rose to be
tempestuous; Hakon or any timber of his fleet was never seen more. Had
all gone down,--broken oaths, bridal hopes, and all else; mouse and
man,--into the roaring waters. There was no farther Opposition-line; the
like of which had lasted ever since old heathen Hakon Jarl, down to this
his grandson Hakon's _finis_ in the Pentland Frith. With this Hakon's
disappearance it now disappeared.

Indeed Knut himself, though of an empire suddenly so great, was but a
temporary phenomenon. Fate had decided that the grand and wise Knut was
to be short-lived; and to leave nothing as successors but an ineffectual
young Harald Harefoot, who soon perished, and a still stupider
fiercely-drinking Harda-Knut, w