ying tax. Her husband says scornfully that Danish kings have never
had need of such measures, and never will. He is plainly getting
bored, and when she keeps it up, and begrudges the husbandman more
than "two oxen and a cow," he loses his temper, and presumably there
is a matrimonial tiff. Very likely most of this is fiction, bred of
the popular prejudice. The King loved her, that is certain. She was
a beautiful high-spirited woman, so beautiful that many hundreds of
years after, when her grave was opened, the delicate oval of her
skull excited admiration yet. But the people hated her. Twenty
generations after her death it was their custom when passing her
grave to spit on it with the exclamation "Out upon thee, Bengerd!
God bless the King of Denmark"; for in good or evil days they never
wavered in their love and admiration for the king who was a son of
the first Valdemar, and the heir of his greatness and of that of the
sainted Absalon. Tradition has it that Bengerd was killed in battle,
having gone with her husband on one of his campaigns. "It was not
heard in any place," says the folk-song wickedly, "that any one
grieved for her." But the King mourned for his beautiful queen to
the end of his days.

Bengerd bore Valdemar three sons upon whom he lavished all the
affection of his lonely old age. Erik he chose as his successor, and
to keep his brothers loyal to him he gave them great fiefs and thus,
unknowing, brought on the very trouble he sought to avoid, and set
his foot on the path that led to Denmark's dismemberment after
centuries of bloody wars. For to his second son Abel he gave
Slesvig, and Abel, when his brother became king, sought alliance
with the Holstein count Adolf,[4] the very one who had led the
Germans at the fatal battle of Bornhoeved. The result was a war
between the brothers that raged seven years, and laid waste the
land. Worse was to follow, for Abel was only "Abel in name, but Cain
in deed." But happily the old King's eyes were closed then, and he
was spared the sight of one brother murdering the other for the
kingdom.

[Footnote 4: That was the beginning of the Slesvig-Holstein question
that troubled Europe to our day; for the fashion set by Abel other
rulers of his dukedom followed, and by degrees Slesvig came to be
reckoned with the German duchies, whereas up till then it had always
been South-Jutland, a part of Denmark proper.]

Some foreboding of this seems to have troubled him in his la