aunt, the lady Margaret Sture, going by chance to the window, saw aunt Malin driving off in Sir Erik's sledge, she quickly cried out, 'Erik is surely running away with sister Malin!' She screamed so loudly that grandmother and aunt Sigrid, hearing her cries, came running in, thinking a child had fallen out of the window. Grandmother and aunt Sigrid sprang down stairs, but grandmother fainted on the doorway. When she came to, Countess Cecilia (sister to Erik) came running from her room to where grandmother was lying on the stairs, and regretted that her brother had done so, declaring her own innocence in the matter. 'Go to the devil!' replied my grandmother, 'or, if not, go after her.""

But to conclude with this never-ending elopement: when lady Sigrid reached the house where her sister was staying, the royal guards refused her entry. At last, on obtaining permission, she implored her sister to return, without effect. Malin sent back to her mother a piece of unicorn's horn, the only thing she had taken away with her from the home she leaves. "Can you," asked she,

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'promise that my mother will consent to our union?" "No," replied Sigrid. "Then the first sorrow is as good as the last." Malin was left in charge of Fru Cecilia, for Erik received a summons to appear before King John next day at Stockholm, to answer for his conduct at the complaint of lady Martha; and on his arrival he was arrested and dismissed the service. Old Archbishop Lars, too, urged by the enraged mother, forbad any clergyman in the land either to publish the banns of the offending couple or to marry them. In vain the king, the queen dowager Catherine Stenbock, the duke, and others implored the irate lady to be reconciled. She refused. So they, by the advice of the king,

passed over the frontier, and were there married by a Danish priest. The account of the return home of the delinquents is most amusing. Erik dragged himself on his knees before the aged countess. It was not till

the lady Malin bore her first child that matters really went right again. Malin very wisely never would believe herself forgiven; declared it was impossible any one could forgive her. She dressed in black, and wore no jewels for a year and more to come, sobbed and cried, cried and sobbed, till the old lady was quite worn out with her wailing. But if you had seen a portrait, as I have, hanging at Sko kloster, the ne plus ultra of espièglerie and fun, you would put very little faith in the repentance of this blue-eyed, fair-haired, runaway young daughter of "Kong Marta paå Hörningsholm."*

At the locks of Södertelje, passing under a swing bridge, the boat first enters lake Mälar. On we go by the manor where Queen Ragnild the Holy had her castle; coast and isle feathered to the very lake's edge with pine, birch, oak, and willow, of foliage various. There are country seats, wooden châlets, church-towers, and steamers in all directions. We pass by Kung's Hatt, perched on a pole above the cliff, where, says the legend, Erik Vaderhätt, pursued by his enemies,

* Sir Erik and Malin were "sisters' children;" hence the opposition of the lady Martha to the nuptials. The ladies Margaret and Christina are already known to us as the wives of Thure Bjielke and Gustaf Banér, victims of the Blood-bath of Linköping. The husband of lady Anna (Hogenschild Bjielke) lost his head for the same cause in 1605; Erik the runaway, alone escaping, died a fugitive in Denmark. The fate of lady Margaret's sons-how a curse hung over the Stures of the Natt och Dag dynasty!—will be told hereafter. A stern portrait of "King Martha in her white widow's dress hangs in the gallery of Sko kloster,

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leaped his charger from the precipice into the lake below, losing his hat-that hat which by waving in his voyages by sea, he made the breezes blow as he listed. On steams the boat-it is now dusk-houses are faintly depicted in the horizon—a black spire cleaves the air; we can see but little, till the vessel lies to by a line of steamers, and we land on the quay of Stockholm.

We bend our way onwards. Memory still at sea, though on terra-firma, vainly seeks some peg to hang its hat upon. A cast-iron tower shoots badly from an old church, making a false start,-sure, not as it used to be; then suddenly the eye falls on a wide building brightly illuminated, befriezed, and bestatued; oh! 'tis the Riddarhus; later the palace on its glorious site, the Norrbro, spanning the dark waters, Gustaf Adolf's Torg-and memory, disentangling these landmarks from a garde meuble of half-forgotten places, finds herself at home