they will all be.”  When the King heard the prophecy he was troubled in mind, and called his sons and all his great knights to a council at which he pleaded with them to keep the peace.  But though they promised, he was barely in his grave when riot and bloodshed filled the land.  The climax was reached when Abel inveigled his brother to his home with fair words and, once he had him in his power, seized him and gave him over to his men to do with “as they pleased.”  They understood their master only too well, and took King Erik out on the fjord in an open boat, and killed him there, scarce giving him time to say his prayers.  They weighted his body with his helmet, and sank it in the deep.

Abel made oath with four and twenty of his men that he was innocent of his brother’s blood, and took the crown after him.  But the foul crime was soon avenged.  Within a few years he was himself slain by a peasant in a rising of his own people.  For a while his body lay unburied, the prey of beast and bird, and when it was interred in the Slesvig cathedral there was no rest for it.  “Such turmoil arose in the church by night that the monks could not chant their vigils,” and in the end they took him out, and buried him in a swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his ghost.  But clear down to our time when people ceased to believe in ghosts, the fratricide was seen at night hunting through the woods, coal-black and on a white horse, with three fiery dogs trailing after; and blue flames burned over the sea where they vanished.  That was how the superstition of the people judged the man whom the nobles and the priests made king, red-handed.

Christopher, the youngest of the three brothers, was king last.  His end was no better than that of the rest.  Indeed, it was worse.  Hardly yet forty years old, he died—­poisoned, it was said, by the Abbot Arnfast, in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the Ribe cathedral.  He was buried in the chancel where the penitents going to the altar walk over his grave.  So, of all Valdemar’s four sons, not one died a peaceful, natural death.  But kings they all were.

Valdemar was laid in Ringsted with his great father.  He sleeps between his two queens.  Dagmar’s grave was disturbed in the late middle ages by unknown vandals, and the remains of Denmark’s best-loved queen were scattered.  Only a golden cross, which she had worn in life, somehow escaped, and found its way in course of time into the museum of antiquities at Copenhagen, where it now is, its chief and priceless treasure.  There also is a braid of Queen Bengerd’s hair that was found when her grave was opened in 1855.  The people’s hate had followed her even there, and would not let her rest.  The slab that covered her tomb had been pried off, and a round stone dropped into the place made for her head.  Otherwise her grave was undisturbed.

“Truly then fell the crown from the heads of Danish men,” says the old chronicle of King Valdemar’s death, and black clouds were gathering ominously even then over the land.  But in storm and stress, as in days that were fair, the Danish people have clung loyally to the memory of their beloved King and of his sweet Dagmar.