to the world. He paid the price with his life, but he would
have asked no better fate. A soldier of God, he met a soldier's
death on the field of battle, in the hour of victory.

A man of destiny he was to his people as to himself. Long years
before his birth, upon the appearance of the comet of 1577, Tycho
Brahe, the astronomer, who was deep in the occultism of his day, had
predicted that a prince would appear in Finland who would do great
things in Germany and deliver the Protestant peoples from the
oppression of the popes, and the prophecy was applied to Gustav
Adolf by his subjects all through his life. He was born on December
9, 1594, old style, as they still reckon time in Russia. Very early
he showed the kind of stuff he was made of. When he was yet almost a
baby he was told that there were snakes in the park, and showed
fight at once: "Give me a stick and I will kill them." With the
years he grew into a handsome youth who read his books, knew his
Seneca by heart, was fond of the poets and the great orators, and
mastered eight languages, living and dead. At seventeen he buckled
on the sword and put the books away, but kept Xenophon as his
friend; for he was a military historian after his own heart. He was
then Duke of Finland.

The King, his father, was a stern but observant man who, seeing his
bent, threw him with soldiers to his heart's content, glad to have
it so, for it was a warlike age. From his tenth year he let him sit
in council with him and early delegated to him the duty of answering
ambassadors from foreign countries. The lad was the only one who
dared oppose the king when he was in a temper, and often he made
peace and healed wounds struck in anger. The people worshipped the
fair young prince, and his father, when he felt the palsy of old age
and bodily infirmities creeping upon him and thought of his
unfinished tasks, would murmur as his eyes rested upon the bonny
youth: "_Ille faciet_--He will do it." There is still in existence a
document in which he laid down to him his course as a sovereign.
"First of all," he writes, "you shall fear God and honor your father
and mother. Give your brothers and sisters brotherly affection; love
your father's faithful servants and requite them after their due. Be
gracious to your subjects; punish evil and love the good. Believe in
men, but find out first what is in them. Hold by the law without
respect of person."

It was good advice to a prince, and the king