The girl said, ‘Let me see thy wound.’ Then Thormod sat down, and the girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw that there was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone. In a stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the wounded men of it to eat. But Thormod said, ‘Take it away; I have no appetite now for my broth.’ Then she took a great pair of tongs and tried to pull out the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold of. Now said Thormod, ‘Cut in so deep that thou canst get at the iron, and give me the tongs.’ She did as he said. Then took Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and bade her do with it what she liked. ‘It is a good man’s gift,’ said he. ‘King Olaf gave me the ring this morning.’ Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out. But on the iron was a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some white. When he saw that, he said, ‘The king has fed us well. I am fat, even to the heart’s roots.’ And so leant back and was dead. I shall not insult your intelligence by any comment or even epithet of my own. I shall but ask you was not this man your kinsman? Does not the story sound, allowing for all change of manners as well as of time and place, like a scene out of your own Bret Harte or Colonel John Hay’s writings; a scene of the dry humour the rough heroism of your own far West? Yes, as long as you have your _Jem Bludsos_ and _Tom Flynns of Virginia City_, the old Norse blood is surely not extinct, the old Norse spirit is not dead. LECTURE IV. THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay—as did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire—and, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say, See what a superior people you are now,—how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the Revolution of 1793. Well that would be on the whole true, thank God; but what need is there to say it?