the river dividing the two kingdoms.  In the middle of the river was an island and the negotiations were carried on in a tent erected there, the French and the Dutch being the arbitrators.  The envoys of Sweden and Denmark sat on opposite sides of the boundary post where the line cut through, each on the soil of his own country.  So bitterly did they hate one another that they did not speak but wrote their messages, though they could have shaken hands where they sat.  Even that was too close quarters, and they ended up by negotiating at second hand through the foreign ambassadors, all at the same table, but each looking straight past the other as if he were not there.

Another touch of comedy relieves the gloom of that heavy day.  It was the conquest of the Saernadal, a mountain valley in Norway just over the Swedish frontier, by Pastor Buschovius who, Bible in hand, at the head of two hundred ski-men invaded and captured it one winter’s day without a blow.  He came over the snow-fields into the valley that had not seen a preacher in many a long day, had the church bells rung to summon the people, preached to them, married and christened them, and gave them communion.  The simple mountaineers had hardly heard of the war and had nothing against their neighbors over the mountain.  They joined Sweden then and there at the request of the preacher, and they stayed Swedes too, for in the final muster they were forgotten with their valley.  Very likely the treaty-makers did not know that it existed.

King Christian died four years later, in 1648, past the three score and ten allotted to man.  He was not a great leader like Gustav Adolf, and he was very human in some of his failings.  But he was a strong man, a just king, and a father of his people who still cling to his memory with more than filial affection.

GUSTAV ADOLF, THE SNOW-KING

The city of Prague, the capital of Bohemia, went wild with excitement one spring morning in the year 1618.  The Protestant Estates of Germany had met there to protest against the aggressions of the Catholic League and the bad faith of the Emperor, who had guaranteed freedom of worship in the land and had now sent two envoys to defy the meeting and declare it illegal.  In the old castle they delivered their message and bade the convention disperse; and the delegates, when they had heard, seized them and their clerk and threw them out of the window “in good old Bohemian fashion.”  They fell seventy feet and escaped almost without a scratch, which fact was accepted by the Catholics of that strenuous day as proof of their miraculous preservation; by the Protestants as evidence that the devil ever takes care of his own.