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Wherein Phillips tells of the many beautiful excursions from Stockholm, and soon takes Judicia into the heart of Dalecarlia, noted for the fertility of its soil and the bright costumes of its maidens. He also rehearses the romantic story of Gustavus Vasa, involving the treacherous cruelty of Christian II and the many hairbreadth escapes of Gustavus, until he roused the Swedes to fight for and win their freedom.

Mora, Dalecarlia, January 10.

My Dear Judicia,

I told you in a former letter, did I not, about the pretty maidens from Dalecarlia whom one often meets in their bright costumes on the streets of Stockholm, as well as the “Member from Dalecarlia,” who relieves the solemn monotony of the Riksdag with his ancient provincial costume. Attracted by these brilliant birds of passage, I am going to take you to-day to the very heart of Dalecarlia, where they live, for it is the most interesting province in all Sweden.

Stockholm has the distinct advantage, not only of being a most interesting city in itself, but of being a center from which you can easily make excursions to any part of Scandinavia, east or west, or north or south; and, believe me, in whichever direction you start you will have no regrets that you did not take some other excursion, for each one has its own peculiar fascination.

A story is told of a young English couple who came to Stockholm for their honeymoon. They thought a week would be sufficient to exhaust the attractions of the city and its environs. Without guide or guide book they started out one morning, taking one of the little steamers, not knowing or caring whither they went or where they would bring up. So delighted were they with this trip that the next day they took another, and the next still another, and so on every day for three months they made a different excursion over the waterways of Sweden, coming back to Stockholm every night; and even then they had not exhausted the possible trips. Indeed there are more than two hundred of these little steamers that ply through the canals and the lakes, and along the Baltic coast. One of the delights of Sweden is its infinite variety.

If it were summer time we would take one of these little steamers along the coast directly north to Gafle; but at this time of year it is more convenient to take the comfortable train, which in a few hours will land us in the very heart of Dalecarlia, or Dalarne, as the Swedes usually call it.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Some Girls of Dalecarlia.

The province has many attractions. Smiling valleys, which one can see even under their blanket of snow must be abundantly productive, are frequently crossed by strong rivers rushing to the Baltic. The Dal especially is a splendid stream, while Lake Siljan, a great sheet of water in the very heart of the province, with peaceful shores sloping gently back from its blue waters on every side, adds the last touch to the sylvan scene. I am writing of it as it is in summer, but I am always in doubt whether these Swedish landscapes are more beautiful in white or green.

The quaint costumes of the Dalecarlians, as you can imagine, add immensely to the interest of the country. It is the only province of Sweden, so far as I know, that retains its ancient dress and glories in it. In some parts each parish has its own peculiar costume, and, as is natural and appropriate, the ladies are far brighter in plumage than the men.

As you know, I am not good at describing a lady’s dress. How often have you upbraided me for not being able to tell you what the bride wore? Let me then borrow the description of a connoisseur in these matters: “Bright bits of color were the maidens we met along the road. The skirts of their dresses were of some dark-blue stuff, except in front. Here, from the waist down, for the space that would be covered by an ample apron, the dress was white, black, yellow, red, and green, in transverse bars about two inches wide. Each bar was divided throughout its entire length by a narrow rib or backbone of red, and these gaudy stripes repeated themselves down to the feet. The waist of these dresses was very low, not much more than a broad belt, and above this swelled out their white chemise, covering the bust and arms, and surmounted with a narrow lace collar around the neck. Outside the collar was a gaudy kerchief, caught together on the breast by a round silver brooch with three pendants. On their heads was a black helmet of thick cloth, with a narrow red rib in the seams. The helmet rose to a point on top, and came low down in the neck behind, where depended two black bands ending in red, woolly globes that played about their shoulders. Under the helmet might be seen the edge of a white kerchief bound about their brows, and beneath the kerchief escaped floods of golden ringlets that waved above bright blue eyes and adown brown, ruddy cheeks. In cold weather the maids and the matrons also wear a short jacket of snowy sheepskin with the wool inside.”

But the greatest charm to me about Dalecarlia is not in the lovely pastoral scenery, or even in the bright costumes and brighter faces of its maidens, but in its noble, soul-stirring history, for here is where Sweden’s Independence Day dawned, and to the devout Swede every foot of the province is sacred soil.

To get fully into this tonicky, patriotic atmosphere we must go around the great lake to Mora, on its northwestern shore. Then we will walk a mile out into the country, for you will not mind a little walk through the snow on a beautiful crisp morning like this, until we come to a square, stone building, which is peculiar in having a large door but no windows. The custodian, who lives near by, unlocks the massive door, and we find on entering that what we have come to see is all underground.

Opening a trapdoor in the center of the building, our guide precedes us down half a dozen steps until we stand on the floor of a small cellar, less than ten feet square and perhaps seven feet high. Here was enacted the homely scene which was the turning point in Sweden’s history. The cackling geese that saved Rome, the spider that inspired Bruce to another heroic effort for Scotland’s freedom, were not more necessary to the story of these nations than was Margit, wife of Tomte Matts Larsson, who placed a big tubful of Christmas beer which she had been brewing over this trapdoor so that the bloodthirsty Danes, who were eagerly searching for Gustavus Vasa, never suspected that he was hidden in the cellar beneath.

But in order to understand the full significance of this rude cellar and the importance to the history of Sweden of Margit’s ready wit, we must go back to Stockholm in imagination and transport ourselves by the same ready means of conveyance back nearly four hundred years to the later months of 1520, when Christian II of Denmark, who was a Christian only in name, was crowned king of Sweden in the Church of St. Nikolaus at Stockholm.

Christian had been provoked by the opposition of the leading Swedes to the union of their country with Denmark and with their attempt to set up a king of their own. At last he determined to crush out all opposition, and with a great army he ravaged the country, conquered the provinces one after the other, and, as we have seen, was at last crowned king in Stockholm.

He appeared to be on especially good terms with the nobles of the country that he had conquered, and invited them all, together with the chief men of Stockholm and the most distinguished ecclesiastics of the country, to the great festivities connected with his coronation. Suddenly, and mightily to their amazement, they all found themselves arrested and thrown into various dungeons on the charge of treason to the king. The city was put in a state of siege. The muzzles of big guns threatened the people at every street corner. But the prisoners were not kept long in suspense. Soon the gates of the palace, in whose dungeons they were confined, were flung open and, surrounded by soldiers and assassins, they were marched to a central square.

First Bishop Matthias was brought forth. “As he knelt with hands pressed together and uplifted as in prayer, his own brother and his chancellor sprang forward to take a last farewell. But at that very moment the headsman swung his broadsword. The bishop’s head fell and rolled on the ground toward his friends, while his blood spurted from the headless trunk.”

One by one the other victims followed—twelve senators, three mayors, and fourteen of the councilors of Stockholm—until, before the sun set on that black Thursday, November 8, 1520, eighty-two of Sweden’s best and noblest men had paid the penalty of their love of freedom and their hatred of tyranny. This was but the beginning. Other outrages followed. The noble ladies of Sweden were carried off to Copenhagen and there thrown into dungeons. This massacre is called in history “Stockholm’s Blood Bath.”

The unchristian Christian by this massacre seems to have merely whetted his appetite for blood, for on his return to Denmark the next month he glutted his insane desire for the lives of his best people by many another murder.

A touching story is told of such a scene in Jönköping. He beheaded Lindorn Rabbing and his two little boys, eight and six years of age. The elder son was first decapitated. “When the younger saw the flowing blood which dyed his brother’s clothes, he said to the headsman, ‘Dear Man, don’t let my shirt get all bloody like brother’s, for mother will whip me if you do.’ The childish prattle touched the heart of even the grim headsman. Flinging away his sword, he cried: ‘Sooner shall my own shirt be stained with blood than I make bloody yours, my boy.’ But the barbarous king beckoned to a more hardened butcher, who first cut off the head of the lad, and then that of the executioner who had shown mercy.”

Do you wonder, Judicia, that the hearts of the Swedes were mad with grief and anger? Yet they seemed utterly cowed, stunned, so terrible were their disasters, and it appeared impossible that help should arise from any quarter.

But Sweden’s darkest day was just before its dawn, and the one who was to accomplish her deliverance from tyrants forever was a young man four and twenty years of age. His father, Erik Johansson, was one of the noblemen whose blood reddened the streets of Stockholm on that awful November day, while his mother and sisters were carried off to languish in the dungeons of Copenhagen. Just as the ax was about to strike its fatal blow, a messenger came in hot haste from the king offering pardon to Erik Johansson, but he would not accept it from such a monster, and he cried out: “My comrades are honorable gentlemen. I will, in God’s name, die the death with them.”

His son, Gustavus, had also been summoned to Stockholm by the king; but he suspected mischief, for he had already been a wanderer for two years in the wilds of Sweden to escape Christian’s wrath, so he did not obey the order. When he heard of the massacre, he at once fled from his hiding-place on the banks of Lake Mälar and sought refuge in Dalecarlia. Here he adopted the costume of the country as a disguise. He put on a homespun suit of clothes. He cut his hair squarely around his ears, and with a round hat, and an ax over his shoulder he started out to arouse the Swedish people to make one more last stand for liberty.

Here in beautiful Dalecarlia he had innumerable adventures. I should have to write a volume if I attempted to tell them all. On one occasion he was let down from a second-story window of a farmhouse by a long towel held by Barbro Stigsdotter, a noble Swedish woman whose husband had taken the side of the king. She deserves a place beside our own Barbara Frietchie, and I wish I were another Whittier to immortalize her. When her dastardly husband returned with twenty Danish soldiers to arrest the young nobleman, Gustavus was nowhere to be found, and we are told that Arendt Persson never forgave his wife this deed.

Another good story is told about Gustavus at Isala not far away. Here the hunted fugitive was warming himself in the little hut of Sven Elfsson, while Sven’s wife was baking bread. Just at this unlucky moment the Danish spies who were searching for him broke into the hut. But with rare presence of mind and noble patriotism, with which Swedish women seem to have been preëminently endowed, she struck him smartly on the shoulder with the long wooden shovel with which she was accustomed to pull her loaves out of the oven, at the same time shouting in a peremptory voice: “What are you standing here and gaping at? Have you never seen folks before? Out with you into the barn!”

The Danish soldiers could not believe that a peasant woman would treat a scion of the nobility like that, and concluded that after all he was not the man they were looking for. Sven himself seems to have been as patriotic as his wife, for when the soldiers had retired for a little he covered Gustavus up deep in a load of straw and drove him out farther into the forest. But the suspicious soldiers could not be so easily put off their scent, and, suspecting that there might be somebody or something of importance under the straw, they stuck their spears into it over and over again. At last, satisfied that there was nothing there, they rode on.

But soon drops of blood began to trickle through the straw upon the white snow, and in order to allay the suspicions of the Danes, who might come up with him at any moment, Sven gashed his horse’s leg, that they might suppose that the blood came from the animal and not from anything concealed in his sledge. At Isala to-day we see the barn of good Sven Elfsson, and just in front of it a monument telling of Gustavus’ hairbreadth escape. Fortunately the wounds received by him under the straw were not serious, and after many days and many adventures he reached Lake Siljan and the little village of Mora, where we first saw him concealed in Larsson’s cellar, over whose door good Margit had put her tub of Christmas beer.

Christmas Day came at last in the sad year of 1520, as it has in many a glad year since for the people of Sweden, and the Dalecarlians flocked to the church at Mora. After the church service, as they streamed along the road to their homes, a young man of noble mien suddenly mounted a heap of snow by the roadside and in burning words, made eloquent and forceful not only by his bitter indignation but by his terrible sufferings as well, he rehearsed the perfidy and cruelty of the Danes, and urged the Swedes to assert their rights as free men and save their country.

But the people were tired of fighting and overawed by the savage Christian and his myrmidons, and they begged him to leave them in peace. The poor young nobleman had exhausted his resources; he had fired his last shot, and so in despair of arousing the people to fight for freedom, since in Dalarne of all the provinces he expected to find the spirit of liberty not quite dead, he fastened his long skis on his feet, took a staff in his hand, and disappeared into the forest.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

Where Gustavus Adolphus Rests among Hard-Won Battle Flags.

Day after day he made his solitary way through the woods and over the snow fields, for he knew that the spies of Denmark were on his track. He had almost approached the borders of Norway, where he intended to seek an asylum, when he heard a sound of approaching runners, and then the glad cry, which must have sounded like music in his ears: “Come back, Gustav; we of Dalecarlia have repented. We will fight for Fatherland if you will lead us.” We can imagine how gladly he responded and how eagerly he returned with the two ski-runners to Mora. Here the people elected him “lord and chieftain over Dalarne and the whole realm of Sweden.”

As a snowball grows in size as it rolls down the hill until it becomes an irresistible avalanche, so the peasants of Sweden gathered around Gustavus, sixteen at first, then two hundred. In a month there were four hundred, and he had won his first victory at Kopparberget. There he spoiled the Egyptians and divided the spoil among his followers, which of course did not diminish his popularity. Soon the four hundred grew to fifteen hundred, and the hundreds became thousands.

But the Danes were not to give up without a struggle. Six thousand men were sent out against the patriots, who had now mustered five thousand men to oppose them on the banks of the river Dal, on the edge of the province nearest to Stockholm. The Danes were mightily surprised when told that the Swedes were so determined to win that they would live on water and bread made from the bark of trees. One of their commanders cried out: “A people who eat wood and drink water, the devil himself cannot subdue, much less any other.”

The Danes were utterly defeated, their morale very likely being affected by these terrible stories of the wood-eating Dalecarlians. Some of them were driven into the river and drowned, and the rest flew helter-skelter, broken and defeated, back to their headquarters. Of course the war was not entirely over, but the young hero knew no defeat, and finally, on June 23, 1523, on Midsummer’s Eve, which is a holiday in Sweden second only to Christmas, Gustavus Vasa, who had been unanimously elected king by the Riksdag, rode triumphantly into his nation’s capital.

He showed his religious character by going first to the cathedral, where he kneeled before the high altar and returned thanks to Almighty God; and here in my story I may well leave the man who freed his country from the Danish yoke—the George Washington of Sweden.

You are such a stanch patriot, Judicia, and such a hater of tyrants, dead or alive, that I know I need not apologize for writing somewhat at length of this glorious period in Swedish history.

Faithfully yours,

Phillips.