dancing festivals at Midsummer Eve, and their dress is the most
gorgeous in Sweden, but one thinks of them rather as a serious and
solid community given to the plow and conservative habits of
thought. They were good Catholics once; now they are stalwart
defenders of Lutheranism, a community not easily persuaded but,
once aroused, resolute to act and carry through to the uttermost.
One thinks of them as the people who at first gave a deaf ear to
Gustaf Vasa's appeal to drive out the Danes, but who eventually
followed him shoulder to shoulder through the very gates of
Stockholm, to help him lay the foundations of modern Sweden. Titles
of nobility have never prospered in Dalecarlia; these stalwart
landed peasants are a nobility unto themselves. The Swedish people
regard their Dalecarlians as a reserve upon whom to draw in times
of crisis.

"Jerusalem" begins with the history of a wealthy and powerful
farmer family, the Ingmarssons of Ingmar Farm, and develops to
include the whole parish life with its varied farmer types, its
pastor, schoolmaster, shopkeeper, and innkeeper. The romance
portrays the religious revival introduced by a practical mystic
from Chicago which leads many families to sell their ancestral
homesteads and--in the last chapter of this volume--to emigrate in
a body to the Holy Land.

Truth is stranger than fiction. "Jerusalem" is founded upon the
historic event of a religious pilgrimage from Dalecarlia in the
last century. The writer of this introduction had opportunity to
confirm this fact some years ago when he visited the parish in
question, and saw the abandoned farmsteads as well as homes to
which some of the Jerusalem-farers had returned. And more than