hills, beyond whose grey stony ridges I knew must lie
the fatal battle-field of Sticklestad. Every spot to me
was full of interest,--but an interest noways connected
with the neat green villas, the rectangular streets, and
the obtrusive warehouses. These signs of a modern humdrum
prosperity seemed to melt away before my eyes as I gazed
from the schooner's deck, and the accessories of an elder
time came to furnish the landscape,--the clumsy merchantmen
lazily swaying with the tide, darkened into armed galleys
with their rows of glittering shields,--the snug,
bourgeois-looking town shrank into the quaint proportions
of the huddled ancient Nidaros,--and the old marauding
days, with their shadowy line of grand old pirate kings,
rose up with welcome vividness before my mind.

What picture shall I try to conjure from the past, to
live in your fancy, as it does in mine?

Let the setting be these very hills,--flooded by this
same cold, steely sunshine. In the midst stands a stalwart
form, in quaint but regal attire. Hot blood deepens the
colour of his sun-bronzed cheek; an iron purpose gleams
in his earnest eyes, like the flash of a drawn sword; a
circlet of gold binds the massive brow, and from beneath
it stream to below his waist thick masses of hair, of
that dusky red which glows like the heart of a furnace
in the sunlight, but deepens earth-brown in the shadow.
By his side stands a fair woman; her demure and heavy-lidded
eyes are seldom lifted from the earth, which yet they
seem to scorn, but the king's eyes rest on her, and many