There was enough of that lying all about, for field and heath were dotted with the cairns that covered the ashes of the bold vikings. Off to the northeast from Gram, buried in a thicket of scrub-oak where once had been deep forest, lay a large boulder, twice as high as a big man, that always seemed to me to span the thousand years between the old days and ours as no dry books could. Stones are not common in that country; this one had come down from Norwegian mountains on an ice-floe in ages long past. But no geological speculation chained our imagination to it. It had a story of its own. Harald Blaatand, grandfather of Knud (Canute) the Great, had chosen it to put over the grave of his mother, Queen Thyra, and was hauling it across the country with an army of oxen and thralls, when word came that his son had risen against him to take the kingdom. He dropped it there to take up arms, and there it had been since. The top of it was split open. The priest in a neighboring parish had tried, a hundred years before, to quarry it for his parsonage, but like King Harald was halted before he had gone far. What was the matter with the parsons in those days, I cannot imagine. When they opened the graves of King Valdemar and Queen Dagmar, of whom I have told elsewhere, they found her tomb a jumble of broken brick and rubbish. A priest attached to the church, to make a nice roomy burial-place for himself, had calmly cut into the resting-place of Denmark’s best-beloved queen, throwing the bones he found there to the scrap-heap. A hundred years and over, the skull of the gentle Dagmar, which some one had picked up, lay about the church and was then carried off by a thief. A gold cross the queen had worn was saved, having “value” in the eyes of the vandals, and in the course of time found its way into the possession of the government and into the museum of antiquities, where it now is, its most precious relic. [Illustration: DAGMAR’S DESPOILED TOMB.]