The Eskimos gathered on the shore and wept as the ship bore their friend away.  They never saw him again.  He lived in Denmark eighteen years, training young men to teach the Eskimos.  They gave him the title of bishop, but so little to live on that he was forced in his last days to move from Copenhagen to a country town, to make both ends meet.  His grave was forgotten by the generation that came after him.  No one knows now where it is; but in ice-girt Greenland, where the northern lights on wintry nights flash to the natives their message from the souls that have gone home, his memory will live when that of the North Pole seeker whom the world applauds is long forgotten.  Hans Egede was their great man, their hero.  He was more,—­he was their friend.

GUSTAV VASA, THE FATHER OF SWEDEN

A great and wise woman had, after ages of war and bloodshed, united the crowns of the three Scandinavian kingdoms upon one head.  In the strong city of Kalmar, around which the tide of battle had ever raged hottest, the union was declared in the closing days of the Thirteenth Century.  Norwegian, Swede, and Dane were thenceforth to stand together, to the end of time; so they resolved.  It was all a vain dream.  Queen Margaret was not cold in her grave before the kingdoms fell apart.  Norway clung to Denmark, but Sweden went her own way.  In the wars of two generations the Danish kings won back the Swedish crown and lost it, again and again, until in 1520 King Christian II clutched it for the last time, at the head of a conquering army.  He celebrated his victory with a general amnesty, and bade the Swedish nobles to a great feast, held at the capital in November.

Christian is one of the unsolved riddles of history.  Ablest but unhappiest of all his house, he was an instinctive democrat, sincerely solicitous for the welfare of the plain people, but incredibly cruel and faithless when the dark mood seized him.  The coronation feast ended with the wholesale butchery of the unsuspecting nobles.  Hundreds were beheaded in the public square; for days it was filled with the slain.  It is small comfort that the wicked priest who egged the King on to the dreadful deed was himself burned at the stake by the master he had betrayed.  The Stockholm Massacre drowned the Kalmar Union in its torrents of blood.  Retribution came swiftly.  Above the peal of the Christmas bells rose the clash and clangor of armed hosts pouring forth from the mountain fastnesses to avenge the foul treachery.  They were led by Gustav[1] Eriksson Vasa, a young noble upon whose head Christian had set a price.

[Footnote 1:  The older spelling of this name is followed here in preference to the more modern Gustaf.  Gustav Vasa himself wrote his name so.]