"Do you remember who was the son and successor of Gustavus Vasa?"
"Eric XIV. He was deposed by the Swedish parliament, kept a prisoner nine years, and then poisoned."
"Good! That is more than I could have told about him. Eric's father proposed to marry him to Queen Elizabeth of England; and Eric, while the negotiations were still pending, proposed to Mary, Queen of Scots, and to two other princesses. He was actually flirting with four ladies of royal blood at the same time. The accepting of either, he felt, would make trouble; and he relieved himself of any difficulty by marrying Miss Mänsdotter. She was a very pretty girl, the daughter of a petty officer of the Guards, who had attracted his attention while she was selling fruit in the market of Stockholm. She was sincerely attached to him, tyrant and oppressor as he was, and clung to him through his misfortunes. After his imprisonment she retired to Finland, and passed the remainder of her days in obscurity."
"That's a good story for a novelist to work upon," suggested Lincoln.
"Very likely the incidents of the career of Katrina have been used by the Swedish novelists; but I am not as familiar as I intend to be with them. I see that the works of Madame Schwartz, a celebrated Swedish writer, are now in process of translation in the United States. Several volumes have been published, and they are having a large circulation. This lady locates some of her stories, or parts of them, in Finland."
Many of the tombs in which the Finland worthies were buried are half above and half below the pavement of the church. The conductor of the little party opened the door of one of them, and the captain looked into the gloomy space. Within it several coffins were crumbling to decay. The man raised one of them, exhibiting the body of the occupant. The features of the face were well preserved, though the person had been dead three hundred years. They were of a brownish color, not unlike guano. Following the example of the conductor, the visitors touched the face, which was hard and rather spongy.
"I should think this body would decay," said the captain.
"No; there is something in the atmosphere which has changed it to adipocere. Sometimes bodies buried in the ground are petrified, or turned into stone. In Italy, and in some other countries, you will see the bodies of saints in the churches, though I remember none as perfect as this, for they are very black, and much shrivelled. In the vaults at Palermo vast numbers of the dead are preserved by the conditions of the vault in which they are buried."
Other monuments were examined, and the party left the church, giving the solemn man—who had not yet spoken a single word—a mark for his services, at which he solemnly bowed as he put the money in his pocket. Crossing the river, Dr. Winstock and Lincoln walked over the rest of the town, which, however, contained nothing worthy of note. There was nothing in the costume of the people to distinguish them, and the shops and houses were hardly different from those in England or America. The streets are paved with cobble stones, and a few droskies may be seen; but the people, who are more intensely Swedish than in the eastern provinces of Finland, do not take kindly to Russian customs and institutions. After the destruction of the university by fire, it was removed to Helsingfors, and the hostility of the province to their new ruler caused the transfer of the seat of government to the same place. The town wears an aspect of desolation in its streets, for very few people are seen in them; and, except on the wharf at the arrival of a steamer there, nothing of the bustle of business is seen. The place has lost much of its former importance.