Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
The Locks, Borenshult, Göta Canal.
Mr. Von Heidenstam, in Swedish Life in Town and Country, says: “It is a common saying that you cannot stand on any given spot in these districts without having a lake in view somewhere, for by the side of the giant lakes smaller ones abound, spread over the face of the whole country. Of the hundred and ten millions of acres forming the surface of the country, over eight and a half millions are covered by lakes. Large and small, they dot the green earth with blue wherever the eye turns. The peasants call them the ‘eyes of the earth,’ and limpid and blue they are, like the eyes of the northern maidens.”
If you will consult the map you will easily understand our tortuous but delightful course across southern Sweden from Stockholm to Gotenburg.
The deep cut which I have told you about that leads from Lake Mälar to the Baltic Sea was soon passed (for in order to reach the great canal we must first get into the Baltic), and we found ourselves sailing among the beautiful islands and past the charming villas which dot the coast in this region. A few hours more and we entered another long, narrow gulf or fjord, until at Norrköping we struck the canal again. Before long we came to the fifteen steps by which our steamer climbs from little Lake Roxen to the level of the Vettern.
This is indeed the most delightful hill-climbing that I have ever enjoyed. From one lock to another the steamer rises, while the passengers can either stay on deck or they can get off and stroll up on foot.
We had plenty of time to visit Vreta Klosterkyrka, which is celebrated as the place where Ebba Leijonhufvud spent her widowhood and died in 1549. I do not know that Ebba was particularly celebrated for her exploits or for beauty of face or form, but she was the mother-in-law of Gustavus Vasa, and even that oft-derided relationship adds an interest to the place.
The beautiful church, which is built upon the ruins of the old cloister, contains the ashes of several kings, but these old forgotten worthies are not of so much interest as the coffins that we saw in another chapel of the church. There are five of them, piled one above the other, and each one contains a Douglas. The most famous Douglas of them all, a younger son of the head of the great Scottish clan, fought under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War. For his bravery he was made a Swedish count, and many a Swedish noble with Douglas blood in his veins lives in Sweden to-day.
By the time we had sauntered slowly up the hill and had visited the site of Gustavus Vasa’s mother-in-law’s cloister, and ruminated sufficiently on the past, we were ready to take the steamer again for another lovely sail down an arm of Lake Vettern to Vadstena, and here we had time enough to go ashore and see another castle of Gustavus Vasa’s, who seems to have sprinkled his residences all over this part of Sweden. Here, we are told, “he celebrated his marriage with his third wife, Catarina, a blushing bride of sixteen, though the bridegroom was almost four times as old, and this, too, notwithstanding that the girl was already betrothed to a noble youth, and ran away and hid herself in her father’s garden when the old king came to court her.”[4]
In Vadstena are two churches, each some five hundred years old, one of which is famous as the last resting place of St. Bridget, to whom I have already introduced you, for here she had founded the celebrated nunnery, whose inmates had to take such strict, ascetic vows.