For season after season, their lands lay at peace. Spring came with a shout of wind and rush of rain, sunlight smote through and was victorious, wet earth went everywhere suddenly green, frogs whooped in the marshes, the wanderbirds returned. Summer brooded huge over grain fields tawny or whitening and leaves more manifold than the stars; clouds loomed on worldrim halfway up the sky, swan-hued but shadowy blue in their depths; the sea shimmered and blinked. Fall turned the world red, yellow, bronze, until wind stripped the bits of color off and whirled them away on its song. Winter stretched snow about bare trees and empty meadows, under leaden skies; nights lengthened, days shrank to glimpses of a sun low and wan in the south; but when weather cleared, frost glittered under the moon and the wheeling Wain.

Folk followed their lives. The yeoman plowed, sowed, reaped, slaughtered, filled crib and pen and stable with the wealth of his acres. The craftsman hammered, cut, fitted together, saw his work grow beneath his hands and found it good. The fisher cast his nets, the trader fared with his cargoes, bold men sought farther abroad than ever before and brought home tales of wonders. Their wives cooked, spun, wove, sewed, and raised strong children. At fairs and offerings, weddings and grave-ales, voices rose from the crowds as merrily as the smoke from their fires.

In Denmark King Hadding warded and tended it all. From shire to shire he rode. Wherever there were dwellings, though they stand on the least of the islands, he set foot now and then. The greater burghs and thorps saw him often. He sat in the Things, and he gave ear to anyone who bespoke him as he passed. None were too lowly. His judgments were strict but fair, with no more heed paid to rank than the law called for. If someone needed help and was worthy of it, that help was forthcoming. Withal, under his eye the chieftains, sheriffs, and their warriors went ruthlessly after illdoers. They hunted down robbers, they scoured out nests of vikings, they did not let a man who had been outlawed go freely about still bullying his neighbors. At last a maiden could walk alone, mile after mile, without fear.

Thus freed from strife and danger, folk did whatever they did best, and Denmark waxed rich. Trouble came yet, sickness, murrain, blight, wounds by mishap, the weakness of age, all the olden griefs. Men quarreled as always, and sometimes the quarrels became murderous. But such was the human lot. On the whole, they called this the happiest time ever known in the kingdom.

So did fourteen years go by.