We have been passing across Lake Malar. But now, at seven in the evening, we enter a lock, and the Gota Canal begins. The village of _Sodertelje_ receives us here. So sweet does it seem to be, in its quiet repose, that every house appears to invite you to stop and make a visit. It was at this point that St. Olaf, when a viking, was shut in by the fleets of the Swedes and Danes, and he cut his way out, not through the enemies’ fleets, but by digging a canal to the Baltic! This was in the eleventh century, and no such feats of rapid canalling were known from that time down to the Dutch Gap ditch, during the late war in America. The story of the saint is history, and the other one will not be forgotten. The passage of the lock from the lake to the canal is tedious, but in the mean time the villagers come on board and greet friends, the children, as in all other countries, ply their sales of cake and fruit, till we are out and enter the Gota Canal. The banks for some time are fifty feet high, but they slope away gradually, and are beautiful in their green sod. Neat cottages and wooded walks and gardens, signs of taste and culture, and plenty, are on our right hand and left; and these dwellings are so near that the canal seems a street like those of Venice, where you step from the gondola to the marble threshold of your house. Passengers on board recognize their acquaintance, and exchange salutations. Now and then an old mansion, with many out-buildings, shows that an extensive farm is behind; and occasionally we pass a village which appears to be of modern creation, as if progress was making even in Sweden. We are following the course of the very same canal that St. Olaf, the viking, cut in such a hurry eight hundred years ago, and we soon come to the end of it, and run again into the sea, or a bay of the Baltic, and keep along the coast, among a wilderness of islands, touching now and then at one of them to drop or take a passenger. Heaps of rock on the points are painted white to guide us in the mazes of these intricate passes, and sometimes trees have been moored in the water to mark the pathway of the ship. Ruins of castles, each one of which has its legends as romantic as those of the Rhine, still haunt these rocks. Stegeborg Castle is the most picturesque in its solitary grandeur and desolation, and the traditions of the country associate it with many a hard-fought fight in times so far gone by that history is rather too romantic to be credited.