It is a wide, winding, beautiful sheet of water,—one of the many noble lakes that Sweden holds in her bosom. Two islands in it come so nearly together, that a drawbridge for a railroad stretches across, and opens for us to pass through, and then we sweep out into another expanse of water, the shores skirted with pines and hemlock; no hills in sight, but the scenery is lovely, though lacking grandeur. We are going into the heart of Sweden. Now the shores are cultivated to the water’s edge, and fine farms rise to view, with here and there a red cottage, with a tile roof: all the peasant houses and fisherman cottages are painted with red ochre, cheap, but unpleasant to the eye. Now the shores are bolder, rocky, and great forest trees, fir and spruce, are abundant. The oldest place in Sweden, and that carries us back into far antiquity, is SIGTUNA, and we have come to it, on the shores of Lake Malar, about four hours from Stockholm. We are in the midst of the remains of the old pagan worship of Scandinavia, where the altars to heathen deities, whose graves (!) we are going to see to-day, have smoked with human sacrifices. Odin or Woden (whence comes our Wedensday or Wednesday), a hero of the north,—in time to which history, at least reliable history, runneth not back,—here established the seat of his power, and it took its name from his original title, which was Sigge, and Tuna, which is our word town. Here Sigge, or Odin, reared stone temples, of which the ruins are before us. Here his power became so great, and such the reverence of rude peoples for power, that the temples and altars which he reared to gods whom he worshipped, became, in the eyes and hearts of the people, dedicate to him, whom they came to revere and worship as a god. From this spot the worship of Odin, and afterwards of his son Thor (whence our Thursday), spread through the whole of the North of Europe, and, in spite of the subsequent triumph of Roman Christianity, and then of the Lutheran Reformation, the Odin superstition—a secret, unconfessed, but controlling reverence for those heroic human deities, the hero worship of the human soul—still obtains among the more ignorant classes of the people over all this northern country. The legends that have come down from sire to son, keep alive in successive generations the hidden fear of these false gods, and form the largest part of the unwritten poetry and romance of all Scandinavia.