scented hair of their gold-clothed knights seemed to shoot out rays under
the blaze of light that shone like many suns in the king's halls. Their
women's faces were very fair in red and white, their skins fair and half-
transparent like the marble of their mountains, and their voices sounded
like the rising of soft music from step to step of their own white
palaces.

Should not then their king be proud of such a people, who seemed to help
so in carrying on the world to its consummate perfection, which they even
hoped their grandchildren would see?

Alas! alas! they were slaves--king and priest, noble and burgher, just as
much as the meanest tasked serf, perhaps more even than he, for they were
so willingly, but he unwillingly enough.

They could do everything but justice, and truth, and mercy; therefore
God's judgments hung over their heads, not fallen yet, but surely to fall
one time or other.

For ages past they had warred against one people only, whom they could
not utterly subdue; a feeble people in numbers, dwelling in the very
midst of them, among the mountains; yet now they were pressing them
close; acre after acre, with seas of blood to purchase each acre, had
been wrested from the free people, and their end seemed drawing near; and
this time the king, Valdemar, had marched to their land with a great
army, to make war on them, he boasted to himself, almost for the last
time.

A walled town in the free land; in that town, a house built of rough,
splintery stones; and in a great low-browed room of that house, a grey-
haired man pacing to and fro impatiently: 'Will she never come?' he says,
'it is two hours since the sun set; news, too, of the enemy's being in
the land; how dreadful if she is taken!' His great broad face is marked
with many furrows made by the fierce restless energy of the man; but
there is a wearied look on it, the look of a man who, having done his
best, is yet beaten; he seemed to long to be gone and be at peace: he,
the fighter in many battles, who often had seemed with his single arm to
roll back the whole tide of fight, felt despairing enough now; this last
invasion, he thought, must surely quite settle the matter; wave after
wave, wave after wave, had broken on that dear land and been rolled back
from it, and still the hungry sea pressed on; they must be finally
drowned in that sea; how fearfully they had been tried for their sins.
Back again to his anxiety concerning Cissela, his dau