We will not follow our explorer through all his voyages and experiences. They are numerous and wide. He carries his investigations even to the far North, where Eric of Pomerania wears the triple crown, placed on his head by the great Margaret. His wife is Philippa of England, niece and namesake of the mother of Henry of Portugal. It is, in part, interest in the family of that prince, his first intimate acquaintance in Europe, which leads the African on this distant journey. But he soon finds that neither pleasure nor profit is to be had in the dominions of Eric, an untamed savage, who beats his wife and ruins his subjects. The great men who rule under him are as bad as himself. Some of them have been noted sea-robbers; even the prelates are not ashamed to increase their revenues by the proceeds of piracy. The traveller gives but a glance to the miseries of Sweden, where the people are perishing under Eric's officials, who extort tribute from them by the most frightful tortures, and where women, yoked together, are drawing loaded carts, like oxen.
He returns to England, where he finds preparations making for a solemn sacrifice. He hears, not without emotion, that the victim selected for this occasion is the stately man who once stood with him in front of the great cathedral. He visits the place chosen for the celebration, and sees the pile of wood prepared to feed the fire, over which the victim is to be suspended by an iron chain. He cannot bring himself to witness the sacrifice, but he afterwards hears that it was performed with great pomp in the presence of many illustrious persons. The king himself, it seems, once superintended a similar ceremony in the lifetime of his father, by whom this species of sacrifice had been reinstituted after a very long disuse. It is customary to choose the victim from among the Lollards, as it is thought that the chance of serving on these occasions will contribute to deter people from adopting, or at least from proclaiming, the unsafe opinions of that sect.
The African traveller's last visit is to France. He made an earlier attempt to see that country, but, finding it ravaged by invasion and by civil war, deferred his design to a quieter time. Such a time does not arrive; but he cannot leave one of the most important countries of Europe unseen. On landing in France, he finds the condition of things even worse than he had anticipated. But he resolves to penetrate to Paris, in spite of the dangers of the road. He passes through desolated regions, where only the smoke rising from black heaps gives sign of former villages, and where the remaining trees, serving as gibbets, still bear the trophies of the reciprocal justice which the nobles and gentlemen of the country have been executing on each other.