new incursion into the interior, and not to return without bringing
Radiger with them as their prisoner. They did so; and after hunting
the defeated and distressed king from place to place, they succeeded,
at last, in seizing him in a wood, and brought him in to the
princess's encampment. He began to plead for his life, and to make
excuses for the violation of his contract by urging the necessities of
his situation and his father's dying commands. The princess said she
was ready to forgive him if he would now dismiss her rival and fulfill
his obligations to her. Radiger yielded to this demand; he repudiated
his Frank wife, and married the Anglo-Saxon lady in her stead.

Though the Anglo-Saxon race continued thus to evince in all their
transactions the same extraordinary spirit and energy, and met
generally with the same success that had characterized them at the
beginning, they seemed at length to find their equals in the Danes.
These Danes, however, though generally designated by that appellation
in history, were not exclusively the natives of Denmark. They came
from all the shores of the Northern and Baltic Seas. In fact, they
inhabited the sea rather than the land. They were a race of bold and
fierce naval adventurers, as the Anglo-Saxons themselves had been
two centuries before. Most extraordinary accounts are given of their
hardihood, and of their fierce and predatory habits. They haunted the
bays along the coasts of Sweden and Norway, and the islands which
encumber the entrance to the Baltic Sea. They were banded together in
great hordes, each ruled by a chieftain, who was called a _sea king_,
because his dominions scarcely extended at all to the land. His
possessions, his power, his subjects pertained all to the sea. It is
true they built or bought their vessels on the shore, and they sought
shelter among the islands and in the bays in tempests and storms; but
they prided themselves in never dwelling in houses, or sharing, in