st
years. It is related that once when he was mounting his horse to go
hunting he fell into a deep reverie, and remained standing with his
foot in the stirrup a long time, while his men wondered, not daring
to disturb him. At last one of them went to remind him that the sun
was low in the west. The King awoke from his dream, and bade him go
at once to a wise old hermit who lived in a distant part of the
country. "Ask him," he said, "what King Valdemar was thinking of
just now, and bring me his answer." The knight went away on his
strange errand, and found the hermit. And this was the message he
brought back: "Your lord and master pondered as he stood by his
horse, how his sons would fare when he was dead. Tell him that war
and discord they shall have, but kings they will all be." When the
King heard the prophecy he was troubled in mind, and called his sons
and all his great knights to a council at which he pleaded with them
to keep the peace. But though they promised, he was barely in his
grave when riot and bloodshed filled the land. The climax was
reached when Abel inveigled his brother to his home with fair words
and, once he had him in his power, seized him and gave him over to
his men to do with "as they pleased." They understood their master
only too well, and took King Erik out on the fjord in an open boat,
and killed him there, scarce giving him time to say his prayers.
They weighted his body with his helmet, and sank it in the deep.

Abel made oath with four and twenty of his men that he was innocent
of his brother's blood, and took the crown after him. But the foul
crime was soon avenged. Within a few years he was himself slain by a
peasant in a rising of his own people. For a while his body lay
unburied, the prey of beast and bird, and when it was interred in
the Slesvig cathedral there was no rest for it. "Such turmoil arose
in the church by night that the monks could not chant their vigils,"
and in the end they took him out, and buried him in a swamp, with a
stake driven through the heart to lay his ghost. But clear down to
our time when people ceased to believe in ghosts, the fratricide was
seen at night hunting through the woods, coal-black and on a white
horse, with three fiery dogs trailing after; and blue flames burned
over the sea where they vanished. That was how the superstition of
the people judged the man whom the nobles and the priests made
king, red-handed.

Christopher, the youngest of the t