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Chap, VI.
ST. NIELS.
87
huus Domkirke, the city itself stands under the
protection of another saint, and he of Danish origin, who,
after a lapse of time, has become almost forgotten. I
allude to St. Niels—Niels the holy and the sainted—
canonised too by the Church of Rome, which our old
friend Erik never was, nor were one-half those in the
Northern calendar.
It was once, writes an early monkish chronicler,
when the Danish King Knud V. sojourned in the town
of Haderslev, he was called upon by a renowned
soothsayer, who pretended to have read in the stars that on
that very night should be conceived a boy who would
attain great renown, and be honoured both by God and
man. Hearing this, the King was seized with a most
ardent desire to become himself the father of that
wondrous child; so, passing over a few details
unnecessary to relate, the boy Niels was born, but at the cost of
his mother’s life. He was brought up and educated by
the King’s sister; and when at an early age it was told to
him how his mother had died in giving him birth, he
was greatly distressed, and from that hour avoided the
companions of his age, renounced the exercise of arms,
in which he excelled, and was never again seen to smile
—passing his time in lonely places, engaged in fasting
and prayer; in fact, he became a regular anchorite, and
retired to a monastery he had founded, holding
intercourse with no one but his friend Hugo, who became a
monk like himself. His death, in 1180, was preceded
by a revelation. Hugo, who slept in the same room
with Prince Niels, beheld at midnight a troop of young
priests enter the bedroom, arrayed in festive garb and
purple cloaks, bearing lighted tapers in their hands.
At this splendid sight Hugo rose from his bed, kneeled
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