Finding all right in Scotland, we visited Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the ancient Scandinavia, the land of Odin, and home of the most strongly-marked devil-worship to be found in history. With all my study and experiments, I was far below many mesmerizers I found among the natives of these countries. I found operative the spirit of the old Vikings, the Berserkirs, and the Sagas, which had made the Norsemen the nobility of Europe, and the plunderers of every maritime district, which had precipitated Gustavus Adolphus upon the Empire to perish at Lützen, and Charles the Twelfth upon Russian Peter, to meet his fate at Pultowa. It still survives, hardly restrained by the Christian profession, and capable of being kindled up anew, and set to work in all its pristine vigor. Of these northern countries I felt sure, and that I might safely leave them to themselves. We passed on to St. Petersburg, and had an interview with the Czar of all the Russias. We found him one of the noblest-looking men in Europe, simple, affable, intellectual, and well-informed. He treated us with distinction on account of our country, with which he said he and his predecessors had always been on friendly terms, and whose unexampled prosperity he saw with pleasure. He could understand our politics, and respected them, for they were based on a principle—a wrong principle he believed—nevertheless a principle, consistently carried out. He believed the Russian system, under which one man governs, is far preferable to ours, under which all govern. However, we might honestly disagree with him. Apparently he was the most bitter as well as the most powerful enemy of our revolutionary plans; but we did not despair of him. He seemed wedded to the _status quo_; but we felt that when once we had destroyed that, we could make him and his legions do our work, for we found him a sort of Pope in his own dominions, and not indisposed to supplant the Pope of Rome. He was, if a friend to Papacy, the enemy of the real Pope, and that was enough for us.