traceable.  The strong hands, turned to dust, held a silver chalice in which lay his episcopal ring.  They are there to be seen to-day, with remnants of his staff that had partly crumbled away.  No Dane approaches his grave without emotion.  “All Denmark grieved for him,” says a German writer of that day, “and commended his soul to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, for that in his lifetime he had led many who were enemies to peace and concord.”  In his old cathedral, in Roskilde town, lies Saxo, according to tradition under an unmarked stone.  When he went to rest his friend and master had slept five years.

Esbern outlived his brother three years.  The hero of so many battles met his death at last by an accidental fall in his own house.  The last we hear of him is at a meeting in the Christmas season, 1187, where emissaries of Pope Gregory VIII preached a general crusade.  Their hearers wept at the picture they drew of the sufferings Christians were made to endure in the Holy Land.  Then arose Esbern and reminded them of the great deeds of the fathers at home and abroad.  The faith and the fire of Absalon were in his words: 

“These things they did,” he said, “for the glory of their name and race, knowing nothing of our holy religion.  Shall we, believing, do less?  Let us lay aside our petty quarrels and take up this greater cause.  Let us share the sufferings of the saints and earn their reward.  Perhaps we shall win—­God keeps the issue.  Let him who cannot give himself, give of his means.  So shall all we, sharing the promise, share also the reward.”

The account we have says that many took the cross, such was the effect of his words, more likely of the man and what he was and had been in the sight of them all throughout his long life.

KING VALDEMAR, AND THE STORY OF THE DANNEBROG

To the court of King Ottocar of Bohemia there came in the year 1205 a brilliant embassy from far-off Denmark to ask the hand of his daughter Dragomir for King Valdemar, the young ruler of that country.  Sir Strange[1] Ebbesoen and Bishop Peder Sunesoen were the spokesmen, and many knights, whose fame had travelled far in the long years of fighting to bring the Baltic pagans under the cross, rode with them.  The old king received them with delight.  Valdemar was not only a good son-in-law for a king to have, being himself a great and renowned ruler, but he was a splendid knight, tall and handsome, of most courteous bearing, ambitious, manly, and of ready wit.  So their suit prospered well.  The folk-song tells how they fared; how, according to the custom of those days, Sir Strange wedded the fair princess by proxy for his lord, and how King Ottocar, when he bade her good-by, took this promise of her: 

     In piety, virtue, and fear of God,
     Let all thy days be spent;
     And ever thy subjects be thy thought,
     Their hopes on thy care be bent.