The Edda gives an ancient account of Balder, the sun-god, who was slain because of the jealousy of Loki. Loki knew that everything in nature except the mistletoe had promised not to injure the great god Balder. So he searched for the mistletoe until he found it growing on an oak-tree "on the eastern slope of Valhalla." He cut it off and returned to the place where the gods were amusing themselves by using Balder as a target, hurling stones and darts, and trying to strike him with their battle-axes. But all these weapons were harmless. Then Loki, giving the twig of mistletoe to the blind god, Höder, directed his hand and induced him to throw it. When the mistletoe struck Balder it pierced him through and through and he fell lifeless.

Captain John Smith already had lived an exciting life by the time he joined the Virginia-bound colonists at the age of 26. He had left England at 16 to become a soldier of fortune on the continent of Europe. He fought with the Austrians against the Turks, and once in single combat he cut off the heads of three Turkish champions. A Transylvanian prince rewarded him with a coat of arms for his deeds. Later he was captured and given as a present to the wife of a Turkish pasha, but he escaped and made his way back to England.

Life in the United States has changed beyond recognition from life in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In thousands of ways people live differently. They work, they play, they eat, and they even sleep differently. Then, there was no station wagon in the garage to take the family to the beach or mountains over weekends and no telephone at hand to call a friend to ask how to do tomorrow’s algebra problem. Life was slower-paced than it is today, and was not complicated by the machines that have become masters as well as slaves of our society.

It is to be remarked that some of the most disturbed and disastrous epochs in our annals are those to which we have to go for records of the greatest exploits in gastronomy and lavish expenditure of public money on comparatively unprofitable objects. During the period from the accession of Rufus to the death of Henry III., and again under the rule of Richard II., the taste for magnificent parade and sumptuous entertainments almost reached its climax. The notion of improving the condition of the poor had not yet dawned on the mind of the governing class; to make the artizan and the operative self-supporting and self-respectful was a movement not merely unformulated, but a conception beyond the parturient faculty of a member of the Jacquerie.

In 1839 there was received at the Surrey Zoological Gardens, from Sumatra, a specimen of the Vampire Bat. He was rarely seen at the bottom of his cage, but suspended himself from the roof or bars of the cage, head downwards, his wings wrapped round his body; when spread, these wings extended nearly two feet. Although this specimen was the Vampire Bat to which so many bloodthirsty feats have been attributed, his appearance was by no means ferocious; he was active, yet docile, and the only peculiarity to favour belief in his blood-sucking propensity was his long pointed tongue.

Listen and obey!—You are forbidden to invent, to create. No more legends, no more new saints: we have had enough of them. You are forbidden to introduce new chants in your worship: inspiration is not allowed. The martyrs you would bring to light should stay modestly within their tombs, waiting to be recognised by the Church. The clergy, the monks are forbidden to grant the tonsure of civil freedom to husbandmen and serfs. Such is the narrow fearful spirit that fills the Church of the Carlovingian days.[4] She unsays her words, she gives herself the lie, she says to the children, “Be old!”

It was thought that the earth swarmed with millions of demons of both sexes, many of whom, like the human race, traced their lineage up to Adam, who after the fall was led astray by devils, assuming the forms of beautiful women to deceive him. These demons “increased and multiplied” among themselves with the most extraordinary rapidity. Their bodies were of the thin air, and they could pass through the hardest substances with the greatest ease. They had no fixed residence or abiding place, but were tossed to and fro in the immensity of space. When thrown together in great multitudes, they excited whirlwinds in the air and tempests in the waters, and took delight in destroying the beauty of nature and the monuments of the industry of man.

James the First gave orders that she should be buried "as cheaply as possible, without any solemnity or funeral." Nevertheless he made a contract with Nicholas Poutrain, the royal sculptor, for her monument, the cost of which was not to exceed one hundred and forty pounds. And we find that her coffin was very solemnly conveyed up the river by barge, covered with black velvet, accompanied by three other barges covered with black cloth and bearing many nobles, lords, ladies, and the officers-of-arms, to the Parliament stairs at Westminster.

In faraway Europe a simplistic view of the cruel and hostile primitives that inhabited the New World seemed adequate. But Bradford and his friends—known to history as the Pilgrims, who settled at Plymouth Massachusetts in 1620—were destined to see one group of North American Indians in a different way. Who were the Indians that greeted the Pilgrims and what can be told of their culture?

In all the range of doubtful personalities there is hardly any one whom convention has treated worse than it has the individual known in his time—and after—as The Chevalier d’Eon. For about a hundred and fifty years he has been written of—and spoken of for the first half century of that time—simply as a man who masqueraded in woman’s clothes.

Far to the north, on New York City's westerly side—stands almost the sole American memorial to a super-woman. It takes the shape of a colonial dwelling, two and a half stories high, white, crowned by a railed gazebo, and with rear extensions and columns and the rest of the architectural fantasies wherein our new-world ancestors rejoiced. It is called the Jumel mansion, after Madame Jumel, although it originally belonged to Mary Morris, an earlier and more beautiful man-slayer, at whose dainty feet George Washington, with solemn, but futile, protestations, deposited his heart.

Later on, when the good King Alfred was on the English throne, there were greater comforts and luxuries among the Saxons. Descendants of the settlers had built halls for their families near the original homesteads, and the wall that formerly surrounded the home of the settler was extended to accommodate the new homes until there was a town within the enclosure. Yule within these homes was celebrated with great pomp. The walls of the hall were hung with rich tapestries, the food was served on gold and silver plates, and the tumblers, though sometimes of wood or horn, were often of gold and silver, too.

During the reign of Elizabeth the boar's head was the favorite holiday dish, and was served with mustard (then a rare and costly condiment), and decorated with bay-leaves and with rosemary, which was said to strengthen the memory, to clear the brain and to stimulate affection. Boars were originally sacrificed to the Scandinavian gods of peace and plenty, and many odes were composed in their honor.

No time in all the Twelve Nights and Days is so charged with the supernatural as Christmas Eve. Doubtless this is due to the fact that the Church has hallowed the night of December 24-5 above all others in the year. It was to the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night that, according to the Third Evangelist, came the angelic message of the Birth, and in harmony with this is the unique Midnight Mass of the Roman Church, lending a peculiar sanctity to the hour of its celebration. And yet many of the beliefs associated with this night show a large admixture of paganism.

The influence of that mysterious triad, the gold eagle, the silver dollar, and the copper cent, has been overestimated. Spiritual forces are more potent than the motors of materialism. The Sermon on the Mount outweighs the law of gravity. Ethics make safer builders than stocks. Two hundred years ago, commercial enterprise essayed to subdue the New World in the interest of greedy trade, hungering for an increase; but though officered by the brightest genius and the highest daring of the age, backed by court favor and bottomed on the deepest bank-vaults of London, the effort failed.

After the Turks took Constantinople, when the learned Greeks were scattered all over Southern Europe, when many genuine classical manuscripts were recovered by the zeal of scholars, it was natural that literary forgery should thrive. As yet scholars were eager rather than critical; they were collecting and unearthing, rather than minutely examining the remains of classic literature. They had found so much, and every year were finding so much more, that no discovery seemed impossible.  The lost books of Livy and Cicero, the songs of Sappho, the perished plays of Sophocles and Æschylus might any day be brought to light. This was the very moment for the literary forger.

A toast is drunk to the memory of the departed. The men sit about the fireplace smoking or weaving baskets; the women apart, knitting or spinning by the light of the fire and one candle. The children play with their gifts of apples and nuts. As the hour grows later, and mysterious noises begin to be heard about the house, and a curtain sways in a draught, the thoughts of the company already centred upon the dead find expression in words, and each has a tale to tell of an adventure with some friend or enemy who has died.

The wail of waters against a rocky coast has suggested the cries of the ocean maiden who seeks to lure the mariner to his destruction; the wreathing mists floating in fantastic shapes across the mountain valleys, has peopled their depths with a world of spirits or friendly or inimical to mortals. The imagination, which has been quickened by Nature, proceeds in turn to breathe into Nature a new life.

In the reign of Elizabeth an act was passed, which is to this hour probably on the statute book, restricting building in or near the metropolis. James I appears to have been in a chronic panic on this subject, and never lost an opportunity of dilating upon it. In one of his proclamations he refers to those swarms of gentry "who, through the instigation of their wives, or to new model and fashion their daughters who, if they were unmarried, marred their reputations, and if married, lost them—did neglect their country hospitality and cumber the city, a general nuisance to the kingdom."

It is recorded that certain women disguised themselves in male attire, and went to Academus to listen to the philosophy of Plato; and when this desire for knowledge began to prevail, it could not be long before it manifested itself in casting off the fetters prescribed by custom. Individuals there were, as there ever will be, of both sexes, who were in advance of the people among whom they lived. Beside the far-famed Sappho and Aspasia, there was Corinna, the Theban poetess, who is said to have five times carried the prize from Pindar; and there was Arete, daughter of Aristippus, who taught philosophy and the sciences to her son: from this circumstance the young man was called Metrodidactos, i. e. Taught-by-his-mother.