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"Who are ye?" he added, addressing them. Ada looked round on the circle of men with a frightened glance, and cast down her eyes, but did not reply, while Hilda raised her eyes timidly to the King's face, but lacked courage to speak. "Come," said the King sternly, "let us have no false modesty. Ye are before Norway's King, therefore speak, and to the point. Who art thou?"
Imagine, he says, the heavy, ponderous quiet over a city asleep; only its breathing is heard like an open sluice miles away. It takes time; hours elapse, a seeming eternity; then the brute begins to stir, to wake up. Wasn't this rather promising? And Milde thinks it very promising; he has made his peace with Ojen long ago. Milde is busy on his caricatures to "Norway's Dawn."
It is manifestly against this method of negotiating matters, with its legal grounds and its premature threat to rupture the Union on Norway's side, that the Swedish Prime Minister appeals, when he speaks of a presupposition for negotiations on the Norwegian side »as incompatible with the Union and the Act of Union.» The Prime Minister can never have intended to contest the absurdity, that the Union cannot legally be dissolved, so that it was not on that account that he refused to negotiate.
To this the Norwegian negotiators have answered that they naturally concur in the opinion that the existing arrangement for the administration of Foreign affairs does not agree with Norway's justified claims on equality within the Union. It was therefore all the more evident that, on the part of Norway, no regulations could be accepted that were meant to bind it to this arrangement.
Some time ago greater and prouder things were needed to conquer them. There was a page here and there in Norway's history to prove that. Our young women had modified their demands considerably; they couldn't help it; their pride was gone, their strength sapped. The young woman had lost her power, her glorious and priceless simplicity, her unbridled passion, her brand of breed.
"Speech or no speech," said the King of the Cats, "I'm going to pay a royal visit to my subjects in Ireland." He went to the top of the cliff and he made a spring. He landed on the deck of a ship that was bringing the King of Norway's daughter to be married to the King of Scotland's son. The ship nearly sank with the crash of his body on it.
Thus he showed that below the ox-like calm exterior was the fighting beast; that he was like the men of the north, rugged, square-built, calm, slow to wrath, but when aroused "seeing red." When they ranked together by the lake that fall, the Fossekal sang his old song: When I am hiding Norway's luck On a White Storbuk Comes riding, riding,
The miles flashed by like roods till Sveggum's bridge appeared. The storm-wind now was blowing, but there was the Troll. Whence came he now, none knew, but there he was, hopping on the keystone and singing of Norway's fate and Norway's luck, Of the hiding Troll and the riding Buk. Down the winding highway they came, curving inward as they swung around the corner.
With sixty or seventy ships of war these foes of Norway's king lay hidden behind the little island of Svolder, in Olaf's track. For a number of days they awaited him with impatience. At last Olaf's transports appeared within view of the leaders of the hostile fleet, who were posted at an elevated point on the land.
The latter alternative he evidently found most acceptable, and in Norway's real interest, he warned them as to what the issue might be.
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