most unqualified assertor of his heathen privilege to extend his
domestic affections beyond the severe pale which should have confined
them to a single wife. His natural son Magnus then sat on the Danish
throne). The Jarl died as he had wished to die, the last man on board
his ship, with the soothing conviction that the Valkyrs would bear him
to Valhalla.

Hilda was left with an only daughter, whom Canute bestowed on
Ethelwolf, a Saxon Earl of large domains, and tracing his descent from
Penda, that old King of Mercia who refused to be converted, but said
so discreetly, that he had no objection to his neighbours being
Christians, if they would practise that peace and forgiveness which
the monks told him were the elements of the faith.

Ethelwolf fell under the displeasure of Hardicanute, perhaps because
he was more Saxon than Danish; and though that savage king did not
dare openly to arraign him before the Witan, he gave secret orders by
which he was butchered on his own hearthstone, in the arms of his
wife, who died shortly afterwards of grief and terror. The only
orphan of this unhappy pair, Edith, was thus consigned to the charge
of Hilda.

It was a necessary and invaluable characteristic of that
"adaptability" which distinguished the Danes, that they transferred to
the land in which they settled all the love they had borne to that of
their ancestors; and so far as attachment to soil was concerned, Hilda
had grown no less in heart an Englishwoman than if she had been born
and reared amidst the glades and knolls from which the smoke of her
hearth rose through the old Roman compluvium.