(_House
Carles_), who were well paid, well drilled and disciplined, capable of
instantly quenching insurrection or breakage of the peace; and piously
endeavored (with a signal earnestness, and even devoutness, if we look
well) to do justice to all men, and to make all men rest satisfied with
justice. In a word, he successfully strapped up, by every true method
and regulation, this miserable, dislocated, and dissevered mass
of bleeding Anarchy into something worthy to be called an England
again;--only that he died too soon, and a second "Conqueror" of us,
still weightier of structure, and under improved auspices, became
possible, and was needed here! To appearance, Knut himself was capable
of being a Charlemagne of England and the North (as has been already
said or quoted), had he only lived twice as long as he did. But his
whole sum of years seems not to have exceeded forty. His father Svein
of the Forkbeard is reckoned to have been fifty to sixty when St. Edmund
finished him at Gainsborough. We now return to Norway, ashamed of this
long circuit which has been a truancy more or less.

CHAPTER IX. KING OLAF THE THICK-SET'S VIKING DAYS

King Harald Graenske, who, with another from Russia accidentally lodging
beside him, got burned to death in Sweden, courting that unspeakable
Sigrid the Proud,--was third cousin or so to Tryggve, father of our
heroic Olaf. Accurately counted, he is great-grandson of Bjorn the
Chapman, first of Haarfagr's sons whom Eric Bloodaxe made away with. His
little "kingdom," as he called it, was a district named the Greenland
(_Graeneland_); he himself was one of those little Haarfagr kinglets
whom Hakon Jarl, much more Olaf Tryggveson, was content to leave
reigning, since they would keep the peace with him. Harald had a loving
wife of his own, Aasta the name of her, soon expecting the birth of her
and his pretty babe, named Olaf,--at the time he went on that deplorable
Swedish adventure, the foolish, fated creature, and ended self and
kingdom altogether. Aasta was greatly shocked; composed herself however;
married a new husband, Sigurd Syr, a kinglet, and a great-grandson of
Harald Fairhair, a man of great wealth, prudence, and influence in those
countries; in whose house, as favorite and well-beloved stepson, little
Olaf was wholesomely and skilfully brought up. In Sigurd's house he had,
withal, a special tutor entertained for him, one Rane, known as Rane the
Far-travelled, by whom he could b