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Today's Featured Biography
Gustavus Vasa
 Three or four hundred years ago the little country of Denmark was of much greater importance than it is to-day. It had the mightiest navy in the world, and its rule over the seas was undisputed. Its appearance on the map was also very different then, for it not only extended over much of the German territory now surrounding it, but also held all Norway as a province. Sweden, too, though often rebelling, and being punished with terrible cruelty, was, up to the year 1523, a dependency of the Danish crown.
Naturally the Danes rather looked down on the conquered Swedes, and made them the subject of many rude jests and taunts. There was in the beginning of the sixteenth century at the great Danish university at Upsala a Swedish boy, who with the rest of his countrymen must have suffered many such insults. His proud, brave, little heart rebelled against this treatment; and one day, when his teacher had driven him beyond endurance with his severe punishments and bitter sneers, the boy snatched out his little sword and plunged it straight through the master's book. "I will teach you something, too," he cried; "teach you that the Swedes are no cowards, for some day I will gather them together and treat every Dane in Sweden as I do your book." Then he rushed out of the school, never to return.
Many lads have, in some moment of passion made big boasts of what they would do "some day." Few ever made so tremendous a vaunt; fewer still ever so completely...
...read more of the Biography of Gustavus Vasa
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