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. Footnotes: [7] Pronounced as Strangle, with the l left out. [8] Pronounced Reebe, in two syllables. [9] A coin, probably. [10] 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. 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 tale of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years’ sleep by the kiss of her lover prince. The prince who awoke the slumbering heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name. [Illustration: THE HEATH AS IT WAS FIFTY YEARS AGO]