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380
SPOLIATION OF THE
Chap. LV.
of Store Hedinge, where we purpose to pass the
night. The evening is dark, but the stars shine
brightly in the heavens; Karls Vogn—as is here
called our Charles’s Wain, or the Great Bear—with
his companion, Qvinds Vogn, or our Lady’s Waggon,
the Little Bear, glitter and twinkle in the celestial
hemisphere. The Pleiades too: and here ends my
astronomical learning; for Orion is pale and indistinct;
a month later he will come out bright in his full
glory: old people in out-of-the-way parts of Jutland
still term this brightest of constellations Freias Kok
(distaff), the only possession Freia, Venus of the
Scandinavian lands, still retains. Poor Freia! Never was
spoliation more complete. They took from you
everything—your stars, your flowers. That pretty golden
vetch,* which grows creeping and trailing among the
grass, known to every village child as ladies’ shoes and
stockings (our Lady’s it should be), once Freia’s, is now
termed Maries Guldsko (gold shoes). Even the gossamer
was taken from her, and became Jomfru traad—toile de
la Vierge in France. What tears poor Freia must have
shed at this spoliation of her belongings! and when she
wept, as all men know, each briny drop as it trickled
down became at once a nugget of the purest gold.
May be it is the tears of this pagan goddess which lie
scattered over the sheep-paths of our Australian colonies
and California. Loki, the Genius of Evil, fared better;
but then all his plants were rubbish, such as our English
botany awards to the devil—flowers of poisonous or
prickly nature, badly seeding; so nobody cared to have
* Lotus corniculatus.
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