Then the king sprang carelessly into the saddle and set his horse to a gallop. His forehead was clear and his cheeks rosy, and his broadsword glimmered like a sunbeam. The Holsteiner looked after him. His bitter expression relaxed, and he murmured between his teeth, while he too mounted to the saddle and with his hand lifted to his hat raced by the sentry: “It is only joy for a hero to see a hero’s noble death.--Thanks, comrade!” THE QUEEN OF THE MARAUDERS The tocsin in the church tower at Narva had ceased. In a breach of the battered rampart lay the fallen Swedish heroes, over whose despoiled and naked bodies the Russians stormed into the city with wild cries. Some Cossacks, who had sewed a live cat into the belly of an inn-keeper, were still laughing in a circle around their victim, but the gigantic Peter Alexievitch, the czar, soon burst his way through the midst of the throng on street and courtyard and cut down his own men to check their misdeeds. His right arm up to the shoulder was drenched with the blood of his own subjects. Weary of murder, troop after troop finally assembled in the square and the churchyard. Under the pretext that the churches had been desecrated by the misbelievers who lay buried there, bands of soldiers began to violate and plunder the graves. Stones were pried up from the floor of the church with crowbars, and outside, the graves were opened with shovels. Pillagers broke the copper and tin caskets into pieces and threw dice for the silver handles and plates. The streets, where at the first mêlée the inhabitants had thrown down fire-brands and tiles, and where the blood of the slain was still swimming in the gutters, were for many days piled up with rusty or half-blackened coffins. The hair on some of the bodies had grown so that it hung out between the boards. Some of the dead lay embalmed and well preserved, though brown and withered, but from most of the coffins yellow skeletons grinned forth from collapsed and mouldered shrouds. People who stole anxiously among them read the coffin-plates in the twilight and now and then recognized the name of a near relative, a mother or a sister. Sometimes they saw the ravagers pull out the decayed remains and throw them into the river. Sometimes, again, protected by night, they themselves succeeded in carrying them off and burying them outside the city. So in the dusk one might encounter an old man or woman who came stealing along toilsomely with children or serving-maids, carrying a coffin.