er this fearful slaughter both parties were for the nonce more
cautious. Messengers were sent by each throughout the land to gain
recruits, but they were careful to avoid a general conflict. Skirmishes
and trickery were the order of the day. The patriots were frittering
away their chances for lack of a leader, and Krumpen was waiting for the
arrival of King Christiern. This was delayed only till the breaking of
the ice. Towards the close of April, 1520, Christiern set sail with a
large fleet for Sweden, having on board the Archbishop of Lund and some
other influential prelates, to lend to his expedition the aspect of a
religious crusade. Proceeding first to Kalmar, he called upon the castle
to surrender, but in vain. Seeing that his only mode of reducing the
castle was by siege, he resolved for the present to give it up, and
after issuing a broadside to the people of Vestergoetland, summoning them
to a conference to be held a month later, on the 3d of June, he advanced
to Stockholm and dropped anchor just outside the town. This was on the
27th of May, four days before the landing of Gustavus Vasa on the
Swedish coast.[44]

The arrival of Gustavus Vasa marks an epoch in the history of Sweden. It
is the starting-point of one of the most brilliant and successful
revolutions that the world has ever known. Other political upheavals
have worked quite as great results, and in less time. But rarely if ever
has a radical change in a nation's development been so unmistakably the
work of a single hand,--and that, too, the hand of a mere youth of
four-and-twenty. The events immediately preceding the return of Gustavus
prove conclusively, if they prove anything, how impotent are mere
numbers without a leader. For years the whole country had been almost
continuously immersed in blood. One moment the peasantry were all in
arms, burning to avenge their wrongs, and the next moment, just on the
eve of victory, they scattered, each satisfied with promises that his
wrongs would be redressed and willing to let other persons redress their
own. What was needed above all else was a feeling of national unity and
strength; and it was this feeling that from the very outset the young
Gustavus sought to instil in the minds of the Swedish people. As we now
follow him in his romantic wanderings through dreary forest and over ice
and snow and even down into the bowels of the earth, we shall observe
that the one idea which more than any other filled his