Ethelred was but ten years old when he began reigning.  Sadly poor Dunstan crowned him, his own eyes still wet with sorrow over the cruel death of Edward.  He foretold that Ethelred would have a stormy reign, with sleet and variable winds, changing to snow.

During the remainder of the great prelate’s life he, as it were, stood between the usurper and the people, and protected them from the threatening storm.

But in 991, shortly after the death of Dunstan, a great army of Norwegians came over to England for purposes of pillage.  To say that it was an allopathic pillage would not be an extravagant statement.  They were extremely rude people, like all the nations of northern Europe at that time,—­Rome being the Boston of the Old World, and Copenhagen the Fort Dodge of that period.

The Norwegians ate everything that did not belong to the mineral kingdom, and left the green fields of merry England looking like a base-ball ground.  So wicked and warlike were they that the sad and defeated country was obliged to give the conquering Norske ten thousand pounds of silver.

Dunstan died at the age of sixty-three, and years afterwards was canonized; but firearms had not been invented at the time of his death.  He led the civilization and progress of England, and was a pioneer in cherishing the fine arts.

Olaf, who led the Norwegians against England, afterwards became king of Norway, and with the Danes used to ever and anon sack Great Britain,—­i.e., eat everybody out of house and home, and then ask for a sack of silver as the price of peace.

Ethelred was a cowardly king, who liked to wear the implements of war on holidays, and learn to crochet and tat in time of war.  He gave these invaders ten thousand pounds of silver at the first, sixteen thousand at the second, and twenty-four thousand on the third trip, in order to buy peace.

Olaf afterwards, however, embraced Christianity and gave up fighting as a business, leaving the ring entirely to Sweyn, his former partner from Denmark, who continued to do business as before.

The historian says that the invasion of England by the Norwegians and Danes was fully equal to the assassination, arson, and rapine of the Indians of North America.  A king who would permit such cruel cuttings-up as these wicked animals were guilty of on the fair face of old England, should live in history only as an invertebrate, a royal failure, a decayed mollusk, and the dropsical head of a tottering dynasty.

In order to strengthen his feeble forces, Ethelred allied himself, in 1001, to Richard II., Duke of Normandy, and married his daughter Emma, but the Danes continued to make night hideous and elope with ladies whom they had never met before.  It was a sad time in the history of England, and poor Emma wept many a hot and bitter tear as she yielded one jewel after another to the pawnbroker in order to buy off the coarse and hateful Danes.