As a young prince, Gustav Adolf fell deeply in love with Ebba Brahe, the beautiful daughter of one of Sweden’s most powerful noblemen. The two had been play-mates and became lovers. But the old queen frowned upon the match. He was the coming king, she was a subject, and the queen managed, with the help of Oxenstjerna, who was Gustav’s best friend all through his life, to make him give up his love. “Then I will never marry,” he cried in a burst of tempestuous grief. But when the queen had got Ebba Brahe safely married to one of his father’s famous generals, he wedded the lovely sister of the Elector of Brandenburg. She adored her royal husband, but never took kindly to Sweden, and the people did not like her. They clung to the great king’s early love, and to this day they linger before the picture of the beautiful Ebba in the Stockholm castle when they come from his grave in the Riddarholm church, while they pass the queen’s by with hardly a glance. It is recorded that Ebba made her husband a good and dutiful wife. If her thoughts strayed at times to the old days and what might have been, it is not strange. In one of those moods she wrote on a window-pane in the castle: I am happy in my lot, And thanks I give to God. The queen-mother saw it and wrote under it her own version: You wouldn’t, but you must. ’Tis the lot of the dust. Footnotes: [12] This is the story as the page told it. He lived two days. KING AND SAILOR, HEROES OF COPENHAGEN Of all the foolish wars that were ever waged, it would seem that the one declared by Denmark against Sweden in 1657 had the least excuse. A century before, the two countries had fought through eight bitter years over the momentous question whether Denmark should carry in her shield the three lions that stood for the three Scandinavian kingdoms, the Swedish one having set up for itself in the dissolution of the union between them, and at the end of the fight they were where they had started: each of them kept the whole brood. But this war was without even that excuse. Denmark was helplessly impoverished. Her trade was ruined; the nobles were sucking the marrow of the country. Of the freehold farms that had been its strength scarce five thousand were left in the land. It could hardly pay its way in days of peace. Its strongholds lay in ruins; it had neither arms, ammunition, nor officers. On its roster of thirty thousand men for the national defence were carried the dead and the yet unborn, while the Swedish army of tried veterans had gone from victory to victory under a warlike king. To cap the climax, Copenhagen had been harassed by pestilence that had killed one-fifth of its fifty thousand people.