At Nyborg we embark on a miserable steamer for the passage of the Great Belt. It lasts an hour and a half, and is often most wretched. On landing at Korsor travellers are hurried into the train which is waiting for the vessel.
Now the country improves a little. Here and there we pass through great beech woods. Down the green glades of one of them a glimpse is caught of the college of Sorö. It occupies the site of a monastery founded by Asker Ryg, a chieftain who, when he departed on a journey of warfare, vowed that if the child to which his wife, Inge, was about to give birth proved to be a girl, he would give his new building a spire, but a tower if it were a boy. On his return he saw two towers rising in the distance. Inge had given birth to twin sons, who lived to become Asbiorn Snare, celebrated in the ballad of 'Fair Christal,' and Absalon, the warrior Bishop of Roeskilde—'first captain by sea and land.' Absalon is buried here in the church of Sorö, which contains the tomb of King Olaf, the shortlived son of the famous Queen Margaret; of her cruel father, Waldemar Atterdag, whose last words expressed regret that he had not suffocated his daughter in her cradle; and of her grandfather, Christopher II., with his wife, Euphemia of Pomerania. Soon we pass Ringsted, which is scarcely worth stopping at, though its church contains the fine brass of King Erik Menred (1319) and his queen, Ingeborga, and though twenty kings and queens were entombed there before Roeskilde became the royal place of sepulture. Amongst them lies the popular Queen Dagmar, first wife of Waldemar II., still celebrated in ballad literature, for there is scarcely a Dane who is ignorant of the touching story of 'Queen Dagmar's Death,' which begins
Queen Dagmar is lying at Ribé sick,
At Ringsted is made her grave,
and which contains her last touching request to her husband, and her simple confession of the only 'sin' she could remember—
Had I on a Sunday not laced my sleeves,
Or border upon them sewn,
No pangs had I felt by day or night,
Or torture of hell-fire known.