"For what, Herr Major?"
"That we shall not be long in cantonments before you will commit something in the way of matrimony; though a wife is a deuced incumbrance to a soldier of fortune. In fact, long before we fight our way to Vienna, I expect to see you the delighted father of a little brood of bare-legged Scots, subsiding down into a staid old fellow, and a pattern of all the domestic virtues."
"In these I shall never be rivalled by you, Fritz."
"Der Teufel, no! If I have my pipe and my horse, my sword and a few dollars in my purse, a friend to chat to and an occasional pretty girl to toy with, the world, and all the domestic virtues to boot, may go and be hanged for aught that I would care."
Three miles from Elsineur the brave old King of Denmark came on horseback to meet us, accompanied by his Live Knecht, the Count of Rantzau, the Barons of Klosterfiörd, Fœyœ, and other knights of the Armed Hand. This stout monarch, who was still as keen an admirer of beauty as when a stripling of eighteen, first paid his respects to Ernestine, and, alighting from horseback, stood hat in hand at the door of the caleche. Unaware of all that had happened, he asked where her "pretty sister was."
Then Ernestine could no longer restrain her tears, and told her sorrowful story.
King Christian's solitary eye, glistened at her narrative. He kissed her hand, and then patted her on the head, as a father would have done; for though a king, and one as brave as ever wore a crown, or drew a sword, he was a good old soul.
"Poor child!" said he; "my heart bleeds for you, but, if possible, forget the past in contemplating the future. We cannot alter it; even the great Master of heaven and earth himself, with all his power and majesty, though he may avert the evils or change the events of the future, cannot control the past. It is unalterable."
From a hill above Elsineur the view was lively, beautiful, and even impressive. On one side lay the flat and low, but green promontory, grasping the narrow gate of the Baltic, with its white town spreading irregularly along the slope, and over looked by the square and massive castle of Cronborg, in the vaults of which, the legends say, old Holgier Danske and his long bearded Knechts have been seated round a stone table for centuries; and there the fat and well-fed Danish soldiers hear the occasional clash of their axes and hauberks, during the still, dark hours of their midnight guard.
Away on the west stretched the level shore of Denmark, with little tufts of coppice and gentle hills of sand, rising from immense plains, where wind-mills were tossing their light arms on the breeze. On the east, rough Sweden reared its mighty mountains and tremendous rocks, which the earthquakes and thunderbolts of an antediluvian world had cleft and rent into steep summits, starting boldly and bluffly forward from a sky of blue, and tinted with the rosy light of a setting sun; between these peaks, and beyond them, lay its deep dark vales and old primeval woods, its vast lakes and foaming rivers; its scenery stern and magnificent, like that of our mother Caledonia.