o him, had become connected by marriage with the Danes
and was devoted to the interests of the new king. It was a critical
situation for the friendless fugitive. His treacherous host craftily
welcomed him and pretended to approve his purpose, in which he offered to
assist him and to seek adherents to his cause among his neighbors.

The guest was conducted to a garret at the top of the house and here,
weary from his wanderings and gratified at having found a sympathizing
friend, he lay confidingly down and was soon lost in slumber. Meanwhile
Arendt, the treacherous host, sought a neighbor, Mans Nilsson, whom he
told of the rich prize he had found and asked his aid in capturing him
and gaining the high reward offered for him by the king. He was mistaken
in his man. Mans hated treachery. But Arendt found others who were less
scrupulous and in the early morning returned to his home heading twenty
men, collected to aid him in the capture of his unsuspecting guest. To
his utter surprise and dismay, on entering the garret to which Gustavus
had been led he was nowhere to be found. He had unaccountably
disappeared, and search as they could no trace of the fugitive was
forthcoming.

There was a woman concerned in this strange escape, which had happened
thus. Barbara, Arendt's wife, though Danish in her sympathies, had a
warm, romantic interest in Gustavus Vasa, and when she saw her husband,
on his return from his visit to Mans Nilsson, drive past the house and in
the direction of the house of the Danish steward, she suspected him of
treachery and determined to save their too-confiding guest.

Ordering Jacob, one of her men, to harness a sledge with all haste and
secrecy and keep it in waiting behind the building, she sought the
garret, woke Gustavus, and told him of his peril and of her desire to
save him. Not venturing to bring him down into the house, she opened the
window, and though it was eighteen feet from the ground, she aided him in
his descent with a long towel, such as were then in common use. Gustavus
then sprang into the sledge and was driven briskly off.

Arendt, when he learned of how his expected victim had fled, was
furiously angry with his wife, and, as we are told, never forgave her and
refused ever to set eyes on her again.

This was the most extreme danger that the fugitive patriot ever passed
through, and at that interval his hope of freeing his country from the
yoke of the foreigner seemed the sheerest m