e would seem fabulous to
an ordinary drinking man. He never let it interfere with his work, he
generally drank at night and on Sundays. Every night, as soon as his
chores were done, he began to drink. While he was able to sit up he
would play on his mouth harp or hack away at his window sills with his
jackknife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed
and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and
in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful
loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he
put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that,
because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their
vice, were cursed of God.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is
merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody
man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these, but he was
morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the hells of Dante.
As he lay on his giant's bed all the horrors of this world and every
other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a man who knew no
joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The skull and the
serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal futileness and of
eternal hate.

When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he was
not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out the
social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him because
of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering brows.
Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal treachery
of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle with the
promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear water
and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before autumn the
lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it
blisters and cracks open.

So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful stories
of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank.

They said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
of