The Leif Ericson festival, held in Humboldt Park, was a great success. The Norwegians turned out by the thousands.

The main speaker of the day spoke as follows:

"Straight westward he gazes from the top of his carven boulder, hidden there among the low-growing bushes at the top of a small grassy knoll, straight westward with an intent and eagle look, as one who sees a new world lying like a smouldering cloud above the sunset-reddened horizon. Around him eddy and flow strong currents of the sons and daughters of the Norsemen. Children with fair hair and strong blue eyes laugh and play all summer, and all winter long rosy-cheeked skaters skim endlessly over the wide reaches of the icy Humboldt lagoon, while silver skate-music rings up familiarly to the ears of Leif, the son of Eric, who first saw the western world.

"Leif Ericson's statue seems to me one of the finest ever cast in brenze. The steady piercing look and that princely poise seem to lift it out of the world of metal into a thing of the spirit. At the time it was erected loud criticisms were voiced by discontented Norsemen who thought it too dandified for the great subduer of seas. But those angry voices seem to have faded away, and now not even their echoes break around the base of the granite boulder whereon in runic letters his name is carven deep.

"Northland's capital here is the corner of North and California Avenues. One cannot mistake them, these lean, smiling, clear-eyed Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians, so different in motion and at rest from the slower moving Poles and Russians further east and south. Great posters of Norge, Danevang, and Svealand hang in the windows; "Norske Kaffestova" signs denote restaurants where sons of the fjords gather for national dishes--Swedish smorgasbord, Danish smor og brod, and Norwegian flote grodt; delicatessen stores full of lute-fisk and huge white curling disks of Northland bread are offered and attended by young vikings who might have plied an oar or hurled spear or 3axe a thousand years ago on venturous forays into the rich south. Dark-haired and dark-eyed Swedes and Northmen abound, too; and these are descendants of those princesses of Rome borne away in dragon-ships from stormed and harried castles of Sicily and France. How many a wild wooing, how many a desperate captive girl, tamed by rough caresses into acquiescence in those long dark halls that fringed the Norway cliffs, lie back of those dark-haired viking children!

"Of the greatest part of Leif Ericson's vision, most people, it seems, are ignorant. For Leif Ericson had caught from Olaf, King of Norway, the vision of a world redeemed by Otto III, of a world where divisions were all to be healed and a common faith was to unite a common humanity in preparation for the dread year 1000, when Christ was expected to return in the clouds for judgement--that great vision was familiar to him, and perhaps he shared it. But in any event, Leif Ericson's foot first pressed these shores. Along the coasts of Vineland his glittering vikings trod; they were the first to hover above and sweep through our eastward seas.

"It was a son of the North--perhaps even one of the tribe of that Eric the Red who was Leif's sire--who first circled the world on the wings of the wind: Erik Nelson, numbered among the deathless crew of the airplane "Chicago" that made the trip.

"Honor to Leif, son of Eric, and to the blood of the vikings; to the clear eyes which first saw the New World under the western skies!

"History throbs and echoes within me as I look up at that statue among its leafage. Blood of fair-haired ancestors of my own long northern line awakes, and faint stirrings of those wild choruses they sang, careering under the foam-swept stars of the salt Atlantic, ring in my echoing veins.

"Skoal, Leif, Eric's son! Skoal! May your memory live forever."