hree brothers, was king last. His
end was no better than that of the rest. Indeed, it was worse.
Hardly yet forty years old, he died--poisoned, it was said, by the
Abbot Arnfast, in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the
Ribe cathedral. He was buried in the chancel where the penitents
going to the altar walk over his grave. So, of all Valdemar's four
sons, not one died a peaceful, natural death. But kings they all
were.

Valdemar was laid in Ringsted with his great father. He sleeps
between his two queens. Dagmar's grave was disturbed in the late
middle ages by unknown vandals, and the remains of Denmark's
best-loved queen were scattered. Only a golden cross, which she had
worn in life, somehow escaped, and found its way in course of time
into the museum of antiquities at Copenhagen, where it now is, its
chief and priceless treasure. There also is a braid of Queen
Bengerd's hair that was found when her grave was opened in 1855. The
people's hate had followed her even there, and would not let her
rest. The slab that covered her tomb had been pried off, and a round
stone dropped into the place made for her head. Otherwise her grave
was undisturbed.

"Truly then fell the crown from the heads of Danish men," says the
old chronicle of King Valdemar's death, and black clouds were
gathering ominously even then over the land. But in storm and
stress, as in days that were fair, the Danish people have clung
loyally to the memory of their beloved King and of his sweet Dagmar.

HOW THE GHOST OF THE HEATH WAS LAID

On the map of Europe the mainland of Denmark looks like a beckoning
finger pointing due north and ending in a narrow sand-reef, upon
which the waves of the North Sea and of the Kattegat break with
unceasing clamor and strife. The heart of the peninsula, quite
one-fourth of its area, was fifty years ago a desert, a barren,
melancholy waste, where the only sign of life encountered by the
hunter, gunning for heath-fowl and plover, was a rare shepherd
tending a few lonesome sheep, and knitting mechanically on his
endless stocking. The two, the lean sheep and the long stocking,
together comprised the only industries which the heath afforded and
was thought capable of sustaining. A great change has taken place
within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear
sight and patient devotion of one strong man, the Gifford Pinchot of
Denmark. The story of that unique achievement reads like the