The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-03-31

knOW you hlutIlCdlis Wol ohip tHt oo' dollar" She had gotten God and AL mighty confognded.
 While in Scandinavia I was greatly i'm pressed with the thought that I was in the Ultima Thule of old, that strange country the identity of which has for 2OO0 years been the subject of investigation and a matter of controversy. Pytheas was a Greek navigator and astronomer, wao was born as Marseiles nearly 400 years B. C., the extant fragments of his works containing our earliest authentic informa- ton relative to the northwestern coun- tries of Europe. He called the land Thule and from his remarks anent its longest day it must have been within the Arctic circle. The Romans supplied the prefix Ultima (farthesD and ever since poets and romancers have sung and writ ten of it as a mythical realm, or even goal, not necessarily geographical, to be attained. It constitutes fascinating thread of fancy running throughout the literature of the cultivated languages of Europe.
 The Greeks called this land Amber Is lands, Electrides and Glessariae, saying that its shores were covered with tide washed amber and in Nero's time a Roman fleet in a single visit collected 13.000 pounds of the precious 'glessum. ' The sailors brought back picturesque ac- counts of the natives picking up the glassy fossil at the fioodtide and in the pools left by the ebb "It is so light" they said that 1t rolls about and seems to hang in the shallow water" Pliny said that here the trees weep amber and called one of the islands Scandia, near Thule, a close approach to the name Scandinavia.
 Procopius called 1t Brittia. a ghastly re- zion whose inhabitants were not only fish ermen. but living ferrymen. who carried the souls of the dead to their desolate Isle Here the skeletons of drowned mariners nightly danced around faggot illumined tarn and the island was divided by a great wall on the one side of which no man could live as it was haunted by myriads of serpents and filled with noN- ious exhalations. The Northern Ocean was known as Morimarusa, or mare nor tuum (Sea of the dead) and where 1t washed the shore of Thule wailing cries were heard, lights were seen fiuttering around uncanny shadows and the natives saw pale. statue like figures and dead corpses wandering.
 Tzetze however while proud to claim Thule as his land, diyested 1t of its som
 bre environment and calls it a land of enchanting beauty. Behind the woods the golden sun dips and rises and joy, song and minstrelsy reign in the blessed region. There youths and maidens dance hand in hand on the dewy grass, all Is plenty and the golden age lasts ever. A murmuring Till flows from a living spring whence drink the spirits which find life In the draught. The cows give there milk in such abundance that they fill
 large ponds at single milking. A place all of glass floats in the air and receives within it's transparent walls the souls of | the blessed So difficult of access is 1t 1 that some speak of it as Aprositus, or I the Inaccessible. and three classes of hu- man beings were forever excluded from | It's joys; these were tailors. of whom it | takes nine to make a man, spending their days sitting, and whose hands, though | they labor, are white, the necromancers | and the usurers
 So effulgent became the praises of this strange land that 1t often sank to the
 level of satire and jest.
 l By the wits and punsters of the middle ages it was dubbed Schlaraffenland and ! Land of Cocoigne. or Cockaigne Literally | Cake Land), where 1t is always day and
 never night; there quarrelling and strife
 are unknown; there no people die; there | falls neither. hail. rain nor snow; neither | is thunder heard there nor clustering winds. The cloisters of the monks are |
 birds merriy singing, ready roasted fly l ing into hungry mouths, and there are 1 buttered larks prepared to please the
 palate: roasted geese go slowly down the streets turning themselves as though | upon spit and inviting the passers by tc | eat them: the shingles of the houses were
 of cake and there flowed a river of wine | The ladies were all exceedingly fair and
 every month were treated to wardrobe
 of new clothes. There bubbled foun-
 tain of perpetual youth able to restore | bloom and vigor to all who bathed in 1t | be they ever so old and ugly.
 The Teutons believed that in Thule was
 a huge glass mountain crowned by a | golden palace and in olden times they
 buried a set of bears claws with theil
 dead to assist them in climbing the crysta
 heights where glittered the golden dome | of the abode of the blessed.
 l The Irish, with their usual perversity place Thule at the bottom of the sea and
 most beautiful are their stories of its re appearance above the waves of its re | Easter day, or which can still be seer
 at moonlight in the still depths of a lake
 and If you listen then you may even hear
 the sivery notes of submerged chimes and strange is 1t that the Scandinavians them 1 selves account for the malestrom by the | presence of sunken querns which once churned gold and later turned out so much salt that its weight caused them to sink and is responsible for the brackishness of the oceans waters.
 Even the Norsemen dream of this land which they place still beyond Thule ant voyasers there go in boat destitute of