BIBLIOGRAPHY 300

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“‘I will tell you where there is plenty of it’” (in color)
          
                                                  Frontispiece

         &nb
sp;                                                  FACING
          
                                                  PAGE

“’And Freya came from Asgard in her chariot drawn by two cats’” (in color) 4

“Nils marked out an inscription in Runic letters” 30

“The miniature globe took form as the children watched, fascinated” 44

“He proposed that Caonaba should put on the gift the
Spanish captain had brought” 78

“A sapling, bent down, was attached to a noose ingeniously hidden” 86

“The natives seemed prepared to traffic in all peace and friendliness” (in color) 132

“Cortes flung about his shoulders his own cloak” 146

“Moteczuma awaited them in the courtyard” (in color) 162

“Cartier read from his service-book” 176

“The creatures darkened the plain almost as far as the eye could see” 190

“‘Gentlemen, whence does this fleet come?’” 204

“Drake was silent, fingering the slender Milanese poniard” 226

“If he had to wear her fetters, they should at least be golden” 244

“The Grand Master of the day entered the dining hall” 266

DAYS OF THE DISCOVERERS

I

ASGARD THE BEAUTIFUL

A red fox ran into the empty church.  In the middle of the floor he sat up and looked around.  Nothing stirred—­not the painted figures on the wooden walls, nor the boy who now stood in the doorway.  This boy was gray-eyed and flaxen-haired, and might have been eleven or twelve years old.  He was looking for the good old priest, Father Ansgar, and the wild shy animal eyeing him from the foot of the altar made it only too clear that the church, like the village, was deserted.

Father Ansgar was dead of the strange swift pestilence that was called in 1348 the Black Death.  So also were the sexton, the cooper, the shoemaker, and almost all the people of the valley.  A ship had come into Bergen with the plague on board, and it spread through Norway like a grass-fire.  Only last week Thorolf Erlandsson[1] had had a father and mother, a grandmother, two younger sisters and a brother.  Now he was alone.  In the night the dairy woman and the plowmen at Ormgard farm had run away.  Other farms and houses were already closed and silent, or plundered and burned.  Ormgard being remote had at first escaped the sickness.