satiated themselves with these savoury morsels, which they cut off with their daggers, they washed them down with deep draughts of mead, which they drank out of the skulls of their cowardly enemies. Into those halls the brave alone were admitted--the craven, and the coward, and those who fell not in the red and reeking ranks of battle, were doomed to dwell in the dark regions of Niflheim, where Hela, the terrible, reigned; where gaunt Famine stalked like a shadow beneath the vaulted dome; where Anguish ever writhed upon her hard bed, and dark Delay kept watch against the sombre doors which she never opened. Such were the eternal abodes those barbarians believed they should enter after death--the realms which their stormy spirits would soar into, when they could no longer guide their barks over the shadows of the overhanging rocks--when the tempestuous sea no longer bore them upon the thunder of its billows, and cast them upon some distant coast, to revel in carnage and slaughter;--it was then that they turned their dying eyes to the coveted halls of Valhalla, and that huge banquet-table on which the grisly boar lay stretched, surrounded by drinking-cups formed of human skulls. Those who had not courage enough to win an entrance into these envied realms by their own bravery, put one of their slaves to death, considering that such a sacrifice was acceptable to Odin, and a sure passport into this ideal world. They, however, believed that Valhalla would at last pass away; Odin himself perish; that the good and the brave would inhabit another heaven, called Gimle; and the evil and the cowardly be consigned to a more awful place of punishment than that over which Hela reigned; that the gods would sit in judgment; that Surtur, the black one, would appear; and an evil spirit be liberated from the dark cave in which he had been for ages bound with chains of iron. That for three years increasing snow would fall from all quarters of the world, and during this long winter there would be no interim of summer, neither would any green thing grow, but all mankind would perish by each other's hands. That two huge monsters would appear; one of which would devour the sun, the other, the moon; that mountains and trees would be torn up, and the earth shaken to its deepest foundations. That the stars would be blotted out of heaven, and one wide shoreless sea cover the whole world, over which a solitary ship would float, built of the nails of dead men, and steered by the tall giant Hrymer. Then would the huge wolf Fenris open his enormous mouth, the lower jaw of which would touch the earth, the upper the heaven, over which a serpent would breathe poison, while the sons of Muspell rode forward, led by the black Surtur. A blazing fire, spreading out its myriad tongues of flame, would burn before and behind him; his sword would glitter like the sun, and the bridge which spanned across heaven, be broken. Towards a large plain would these terrible forces