But this was the exception. The rule was for the trader to winter wherever he happened to be. In the long, cheerless evenings men liked to associate with compatriots who spoke the same tongue, and had the same interests and customs. These men of the Middle Ages were specially distinguished by their social instincts. They were bound together also by the element of a common religion, by the desire to worship together, to fulfil, perchance, some holy vow made in an hour of great danger, to bury, with the familiar rites of his own Church and country, some less fortunate comrade who had expired on foreign soil. Thus were formed those Guilds, or Hanse, as they were called, of merchants on alien soil, clustering, as a rule, around a church erected by them, and having besides a general living and storehouse for the safe custody of their goods. There is nothing strange in the fact that such settlements should have been formed; what is strange is the power they acquired in the course of time, until at last, in some places, they dictated terms to the natives of the country; nay, they even made and unmade their rulers, until in the end their sway extended from Bergen in the north to Venice in the south, from Novgorod and Smolensk in the east to York and London in the west. [Illustration: NORMAN VESSEL FROM BAYEUX TAPESTRY.] FOOTNOTES: [1] [Greek: hê thalassa hagiazetai]. II. FEDERATION. The free ocean, owned by no king or ruler, has from earliest times been the highroad of nations, and in the life and movement of the last eighteen hundred years the Baltic takes a scarcely less important place than the lovelier, more poetical, and oft-sung Mediterranean. Even to-day it is more frequented than most of the seas; the traffic through the Sound being second to that of no other strait. The Baltic has had its singers too. We need only turn to the strong, rugged Norse Saga to find that sea extolled as the nurse of mighty heroes, or the scene of giant combats; and the wilder element that pervades these heroic tales is in keeping with the rugged iron-bound coasts that skirt its waters, which do not invite the cooing of idyls, nor lap the fantasy in luscious dreams. Here all is stern life and movement; here man must fight hand to hand with nature if he would extort from her even the bare necessities for his daily nourishment. The contrast between the North and the South is nowhere more strikingly seen than in the different characteristics of the two seas, and the races they have produced. Nor could these characteristics be better illustrated than by a comparison between the great commercial Republics of Italy and the Hanseatic federation of Germany. The former, though individually great, never became a corporate body. Jealousy and rivalry were ever rife among them, and in the end they destroyed themselves. Where nature is kind men can better afford to be cruel, and need not hold together in such close union. Thus it was here.