112 THE BALTIC FOLK 



by straits of famine to exercise a varied skill as 

 fishers, hunters and farmers with the changing 

 seasons. As these people always bred more 

 bairns than they could feed, their overcrowd- 

 ing led to bickerings, and mutual recrimina- 

 tion weeded out all but the best fighters, while 

 pestilence swept away those who were not 

 not quite hardy. The blue-eyed, fair-haired 

 ruddy folk of Cloudland grew tenacious of life, 

 and very hard to kill, thrifty, austere, fiercely 

 self-governing. Never has the world known 

 men more formidable, adventurous, abler or 

 more daring than these Vikings of the northern 

 seas, and pioneers by land who set forth out of 

 Cloudland to find homes. They had a strong 

 preference for other people's homes. 



To realise the temper of the Baltic, glance for 

 a moment at the old quest for cod, and the 

 curing stations for stock-fish which formed a 

 series of stepping-stones to bridge the North 

 Atlantic, and so led to the discovery of North 

 America. The founding by blonde adventur- 

 ers of the Hohenstaufen and Romanov dynas- 

 ties, and of the British kingdom, are Baltic 

 roots from whence have grown the German, 

 Russian, British and American world powers 

 holding dominion over half the Earth. All that 

 steam is to the mechanism^of the planet, or to 



