at home, and forced all men to bow to his sway or leave the land,
resolved to crush the wasps that stung him summer after summer in their
own nest. First of all he sent Kettle flatnose, a mighty chief, to
subdue the foe; but though Kettle waged successful war, he kept what he
won for himself. It was the old story of setting a thief to catch a
thief; and Harold found that if he was to have his work done to his mind
he must do it himself. He called on his chiefs to follow him, levied a
mighty force, and, sailing suddenly with a fleet which must have seemed
an armada in those days, he fell upon the Vikings in Orkney and
Shetland, in the Hebrides and Western Isles, in Man and Anglesey, in the
Lewes and Faroe--wherever he could find them he followed them up with
fire and sword. Not once, but twice he crossed the sea after them, and
tore them out so thoroughly, root and branch, that we hear no more of
these lands as a lair of Vikings, but as the abode of Norse Jarls and
their udallers (freeholders) who look upon the new state of things at
home as right and just, and acknowledge the authority of Harold and his
successors by an allegiance more or less dutiful at different times, but
which was never afterwards entirely thrown off.

It was just then, just when the unflinching will of Harold had taught
this stern lesson to his old foes, and arising in most part out of that
lesson, that the great rush of settlers to Iceland took place. We have
already seen that Ingolf and others had settled in Iceland from 874
downwards, but it was not until nearly twenty years afterwards that the
island began to be thickly peopled. More than half of the names of the
first colonists contained in the venerable Landnama Book--the Book of
Lots, the Doomsday of Iceland, and far livelier reading than that of the
Conqueror--are those of Northmen who had been before settled in the
British Isles. Our own country then was the great stepping-stone between
Norway and Iceland; and this one fact is enough to account for the close
connection which the Icelanders ever afterwards kept up with their
kinsmen who had remained behind in the islands of the west....

SUPERSTITIONS OF THE RACE.

The Northman had many superstitions. He believed in good giants and bad
giants, in dark elves and bright elves, in superhuman beings who tilled
the wide gulf which existed between himself and the gods. He believed,
too, in wraiths and fetches and guardian spirits, who followed