A hundred years after the Reformation! Was there a maniac epidemic that swept the world and swept men’s reason away, as the Black Death did their lives in that fatal century? Fifty years later still, they hanged the witches at Salem, Massachusetts. They did not burn them, so I was informed once, when I fell into the error, by a scandalized citizen of that righteous commonwealth. They were not savages, he would have me know. The Ribe Christians had some bowels too. They tied a pound of powder on the woman’s back before they flung her into the fire, and so cut her sufferings short. Surely the devil came out of his hiding-place that day and helped feed the fire. The house in which Maren lived stands unchanged, except for a coat of paint, across the way from the jail. She confessed, is the record. Oh, yes! the Seventeenth Century had not forgotten the ways of the Inquisition, any more than the Twentieth has the fire when its passions are aroused, though the merciful pound of powder is left out. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but there was no swallow’s nest in that hall, with hungry mouths of little ones gaping to be fed, and no peaceful stork upon the roof. Even the rats shunned it: a weasel lived in the attic. Poor Maren’s travail was brief, let us hope. Down the street there lived a man with whom it went through a life rich in benediction to his kind. A bishop was he, and a singer whose songs will live as long as the Danish tongue. He sang of human sorrow and travail and of the land yonder where the tears are wiped away, until one who did not know went to him once with a sneer. Easy for him to speak of trouble who had none--rich, well housed, all his lines cast in pleasant places! Bishop Brorson heard him out with a sad little smile. “Come with me,” he beckoned, when he had done, and led the way to the top story of the house. There, in a room made strong with iron bars, sat his son, caged like a wild beast, a raving maniac. “There,” he said, with a sigh that must have seared the man’s soul to his dying day--“there is my trouble.” The mark of the bars is there yet,--there were no insane asylums in those days,--but the good bishop’s troubles are long over.