Her perfect beauty and the stateliness of her person would have revealed the sovereign under the humblest dress. Surrounded by her Court ladies, she took her seat under the canopy prepared for her. Immediately the king at the head of his nobles entered the ring and rode round it, saluting with his lance all the ladies, who had risen at his coming. Gustavus-Adolphus IV. was at that time in his twenty-second year. He was well built, had a martial bearing, and a noble and frank countenance. He was anxious to copy Charles XII., and, to enhance the likeness, he wore, as a rule, a blue coat, buttoned to the chin, and had his hair brushed up from the roots. But with the sword that performed such wonders at Bender, he lacked the strong arm that had so often made the sword victorious, and the genius that had directed it. When he passed before the queen, in his magnificent costume, with head erect and proud mien, and holding his lance with a firm grip, his horse reared. Gustavus tried to quiet it, but an accidental touch of the spurs made matters worse, and he was within an ace of being thrown. It was the same animal he had ridden on the day of his coronation at Upsala, and which had nearly killed him--an accident that, as a matter of course, had furnished the superstitious among his subjects with a thousand conjectures regarding the future of his reign. The cause of the mishap was, however, sufficiently simple. The groom or equerry entrusted with the training of the animal for the ceremony stopped every day before the shop of a shoemaker, whose wife, a young Finnish woman, amused herself by giving it a piece of bread and salt. The handsome charger got thoroughly used to stopping at the hospitable door, and when Gustavus, the crown on his head and sceptre in hand, proceeded to the cathedral, it refused to pass the shop without its usual ration. The king, thinking it was a mere whim on the animal’s part, put the rowels into its flesh; the horse reared, crown and sceptre rolled into the dust, and without the prompt assistance of a page walking by the monarch’s side, who by clutching at his boot restored his equilibrium, Gustavus would have gone the way of the royal insignia. At the news of the accident, the fortune-teller, Arvidson, exclaimed, it was said, with tears coursing down her cheeks: ‘The race of Wasa has ceased to reign in Sweden.’[75] At the slightest uncommon event of that reign, the prediction of the fortune-teller was ‘trotted out’; as a matter of course the spectators at the tournament at once added this omen to the rest.