Hotel _Rydburg_ received us,—large enough to entertain two or three hundred guests,—and a curiously arranged house it was, the geography of which I have not learned, after its careful study of several days. I know that to get to my room I have to go up two flights of stairs, then out upon a balcony, then down one flight of stairs, then ring a door-bell and get admission into a room that is not mine, then across this apartment into my own, which is a spacious and handsomely furnished room,—sofa, lounge, ottomans, piano, secretary, bookcase containing a set of Voltaire’s works in _seventy_ French volumes, pictures, engravings, stuffed birds, and other specimens in natural history, all suggesting the idea that the mysterious passages through which I have been conducted have led me out of the hotel proper into some private house attached, and that some Swedenborgian philosopher has rented his premises to the hotel. He certainly has things comfortable if such be the fact, and I will use them as not abusing them while I stay. Scandinavia includes the peninsula of which Sweden is but a part, Norway and Denmark making up the rest of it; and its history, is it not all written by Pliny and Tacitus in pagan antiquity times? and a thousand years after they wrote of it, did not Saxo Grammaticus the Dane, and Snorrow Sturleson, of Sunny Iceland, bring down the story to their times? Not far from the same time when the Saxons invaded England, the Gothic tribes under Odin migrated to Sweden, and founded an empire on the borders of Lake Malar, with Sigtuna for its capital. Odin was a god, in his own esteem and that of his followers, and he combined in his sublime and mysterious person all the offices of priest and king and teacher; he was the law-giver and judge. With lofty aspirations for power, he conquered by his will, his arms, and his address, and finally he became the object of religious worship through the north of Europe. The Sagas, or sacred books of the ancient Swedes, give us the fullest insight into the views of the Scandinavians in religion, as to the creation of the world, the government of the universe, and the destiny of man. It was in the ninth century that Christianity was openly preached in Sweden for the first time, and the dynasty of pagan kings did not terminate till the beginning of the eleventh century, when Eric V., in 1001, being converted, destroyed the great temple at Upsala, where, to this day, are the graves of Thor and Woden and Freytag, on which this Eric, the first Christian king, was slain by his pagan people in their fury, excited by the destruction of their temple.