A 540047

HTTW ºf NTTT
Eº
É
EIILITIllllllllº '..ſº lºsº, MWºlbºlūīIIIHIII:
~ §§§ \ 㺠d tº: www.
* rºa
ſº
É
º
º ºs ºs s ºr sº s ºs s º ºs º ºs ºr sº º ºs º sº s º ºs º ºs º sº sº º sº as “ sº * * * * * * * * * * is as s = * * * * * * * * * * * * *
HºrrºristºtlºttlºbluntrillºtterrupturºurtrºſºftcºrruptuºuntritºrintIIIIllinº
f

THE OLD TOWN

Th;2X&e.
~S. O
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON - BOM BAY - CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
:：：：：：
“Post OFFICE.”

THE OLD TOWN
BY …
rº ..?
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF “THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN,” “How
THE OTHER HALF LIVEs,” “THE BATTLE witH
THE SLUM,” ETC.
WITH II, LUSTRATIONS
BY W. T. BENIDA.
Neſø ºgork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909
All rights reserved
CopyRIGHT, 1909,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1909.
Nortogob 33regg
J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO ALL WHO LOVE
THE OLD HOME AND THE
OLD FRIENDS
THE OLD AND THE NEW
How Small this world of ours is, and how close
we are, all unknowing, to one anotherl I had
set out to write the story of the Old Town with
no thought that it touched the land across the
Seas and its people in any closer way than through
these pages, and through the abiding affection
of a few of its children who, like myself, have
wandered far from home. And while I wrote
there fell into my hands the account of a sale of
Some building lots half a dozen years ago, in
Jersey City, part of a property which for three
hundred years had belonged to the Van Riepen
family. And the Van Riepen name was shown to
mean “from Ribe” — the Old Town itself. This
is the historical record:
From the port of Ribe there sailed in April,
1663, a ship bearing the name Te Bonte Koe, mean-
ing “The Brindle Cow,” bound for New Amster-
Vll
viii THE OLD AND THE NEW
dam with eighty-nine passengers aboard. Among
them was one Juriaen Tomasson, a citizen of Ribe,
who, four years after reaching these shores, mar-
ried Pryntje Hermans — to be exact, on May 25,
1667; and died on September 12, 1695. From
their union sprang two well-known families, one
that twisted the Danish name of Jörgen (Juriaen
in the record) into Jurianse, which later became
Yearance; and the other the Van Riepen, or Van
Ripen, family, which thus preserved the name of
the Old Town in its purity of pronunciation. For
Ribe is pronounced Reebé. The Germans to this
day call it Ripen on their maps.
It did more than preserve the mere name — it
kept its spirit alive. In the chronicles of the
Revolution preserved in his home state we read
of a Lieutenant Daniel Van Riepen," one of the
descendants of the Juriaen who came over in Te
Bonte Koe, being captured by the Royalists and
imprisoned in the old Sugar House with other
* The full story may be read in the “History of Hudson
County,” where my friend, Rev. R. Andersen, of the Danish
church in Brooklyn, an indefatigable delver, unearthed this
chip of the old block.
THE OLD AND THE NEW ix
patriots. He must have borne the marks of the
hardships they suffered there, for when he was
brought before a court-martial in Hoboken to be
tried and shot as a rebel, he was ragged and with-
out uniform or distinctions of rank. Asked by
the presiding judge why he came thus, being an
officer, he made reply: “It is not clothes or arms
that make the man.”
“What then?” sneered his accuser, one Van
Horst.
“This, sir!” said Van Riepen, and smote his
breast proudly. Whereat the British officer who
attended ordered that he be released.
“He is a man,” he said. “Were I ten times a
prisoner, I could give no better answer.” And
the patriot went free.
So the old world and the new have met, and the
Old Town won the day once more, this time far
from home, with the best of all weapons, – the
manhood that is its hall-mark wherever its chil-
dren are found.
CONTENTS
THE OLD AND THE NEw .
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX. OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER
KING FREDERIK AT HOME
xi
PAGE
Wii
26
49
78
104
143
169
186
229
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“POSt Office ’’ . ſe & tº e te . Frontispiece
- PAGE
“Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls” . e 9
“The old Domkirke reared its gray head’” . facing 12
The Causeway in a Storm . © * e © e . 15
Fanö Women . & . 21
Seal of the Old Town in the Thirteenth Century . . 26
An Old House e & & e g tº g . 31.
The Iron Hand . {e o © gº * e e . 32
A Watchman . * * e º & ſº * . 38
“He found his prisoner faithfully guarding the gun when
he came back * tº © e e to . facing 48
“Eyes that spoke of things unseen by the crowd” . . 49
Peer Down's Slip e & e e e . facing 50
Neighbor Quedens e tº © tº ſº gº . 52
The Good Dean of the Domkirke . * © e . 58
The Wife of the Middle-miller . g © © e . 60
Venus . ge º º * & © e © e . 61
“Did the honors on ceremonial occasions” . facing 62
Liar Hans . tº & e & e o 65
The Old Family Doctor
* º e facing 74
“They crept about, the old men with their staffs’’ &
77
The Christmas Sheaf . e wº * ... • e . 78
The Nisse . e * & {º © gº . facing 80
“Blowing in Yule from the grim old tower” . • 23 84
“The whole family turned to and helped ” e • 35 92
“We joined hands and danced around the tree” • 22 95
“We “smashed ' the New Year in ’’ • 35 100
“We caught them napping there one dark night" . , 102
Getting Ready for the Review . º g * g . 104
xiii
xiv. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Stork came in April . • o e . facing
A Girl from the North Sea Islands . e * • 99
“There were booths with toys and booths with
trumpets” e e o e º º o • ??
The Girl Market. e o © e º e ??
Where the Cows go in through the Street Door
“Trenchers of steaming sausage"
“I threw the last pebble” .
King Harald's Stone . © º
“In my dreams I sit by the creek” tº o o ©
Where I shot my First Duck . o e . facing
Picking Rävlinger in the Moor . e o
Dagmar's Despoiled Tomb . © © e © & ©
In Holme Week—The Old Ferry Raft . . facing
Cruising up to the Seem Church o e o
Riberhus º e º e
The King's Ride over the Moor. e Q
“For God and the King” . . . . facing
“The King and his men knelt upon the battlefield” ,
Danish Women ransomed their King. e © • 3)
“Comforted the King in sorrow and defeat”
Jackdaws in Council . ©
“Hal you were just going to fire it "
The Latin School Teachers
The Chimney-sweep . e ©
“We saw it on moonlight nights”
The North Gate . º O e º © e e
The Emperor's Birthday . . . . . facing
“It’s come". © © & © º o e
The Accursed Candlestick .
A Strange Figure in Kilts . e e © e 0.
The Restored Domkirke . e e º . facing
The Cat-head Door . e o º c º • 99
The Old Cloister-church
King Christian comes from Church
King Frederik .
PAGE
104
112
115
119
121
180
141
143
146
147
158
159
162
167
169
176
179
180
181
181
186
195
198
207
209
212
215
227
229
234
285
237
239
249
259
THE OLD TOWN
THE OLD TOWN
CHAPTER I
THE other day, when I
was busy in my garden,
I heard the whir of Swift
wings and saw a flight
of birds coming from the
hills in the east. Some-
thing in the way in which
they flew stirred me with
a sudden thrill, and I
stood up, feeling forty years younger all at once.
“Blackbirds,” said Mike, looking aloft, but I
knew better. I watched them wistfully, with eager
hope, and when they were over me and I saw their
orange bills, I knew that I had not been mis-
taken. They were starlings, beloved friends of
my boyhood, come across the seas at last after
all these years, looking for me, perhaps. It

B 1
2 THE OLD TOWN
seemed as if it must be so, and I dropped Spade and
trowel, and took up hammer and saw to make
boxes for them as I used to, so that they might
know I was waiting to welcome them. I am wait-
ing now. Every day I look to see if my feathered
chum is there, perched at my window. And he
will come, I know. For he cannot have forgotten
the good times we had in the long ago.
You see, we grew up together. Almost the
earliest thing I remember is the box at my bed-
room window which the first rays of the rising sun
struck in spring. Then, as soon as ever the winter
snows were gone and the daffodils peeped through
the half-frozen crust, some morning there would
be a mighty commotion in that box. Black shad-
ows darted in and out, and a great scratching and
thumping went on. And while I lay and watched
with heart beating fast, — for was not here my
Songster playmate back with the summer and the
Sunlight on his burnished wing? — out he came
on the peg for a sidelong peep at my window,
and sat and whistled the old tune, nodding to
the bare trees he knew with his brave promise that
THE OLD TOWN 3
presently Jack Frost would be banished for good,
and all would be right. Was he not there to
prove it 2 And it was even so. The summer
was right on his trail always.
The weeks passed, and the Old Town lay buried
in a dreamy sea of blossoming elders. In field and
meadow the starling was busy from early dawn till
the sun was far in the west; for his young, of
whom there was always a vigorous family, - and
oh ! the glorious blue eggs we loved to peep at
before Mrs. Starling had taken them under her
wing, — had a healthy appetite and required no
end of grubs and worms. But whether they went
to sleep early or he thought they had had enough,
always when the setting sun gilded the top of the
old poplar, he would come with all his friends and
sing his evening song. In the very top branches,
swaying with the summer wind, they would sit
and whistle the clear notes in the minor key I
hear yet when I am worn and tired, and that tell
me that some day it will all come back, the joy and
the sunshine of the young days. It was for him
I turned my boyish hands to their first labor of
4 THE OLD TOWN
love. I made him a house of an empty starch box,
and later on, when I had learned carpentering, I
built for his family a tenement of three flats that
hung by my window many years after I knew it
no more. I had long been absorbed in the fight
with tenements made for human kind by builders
with no such friendly feelings, when my father
wrote that the winter storms had blown down the
box and broken it, and that written inside in my
boyish hand, they found these words:
“This box is for starlings, but, by the great
horn spoon, not for sparrows.
“JACOB RIIs.”
We did not like sparrows. They were cheeky
tramps, good only to eat when there were enough
of them. The starling was a friend.
I suppose it was the near approach of the time
of his going away, with the stork and the swallow,
to leave us in the grip of the long winter, that
made me in desperation try to cage him once.
How I could, I don't know. Boys are boys every-
where, I suppose. I made the cage with infinite
THE OLD TOWN 5
toil, caught my starling, and put him in it. But
when I saw him darting from side to side strug-
gling to get out to the trees and the grass and
the clouds, my heart smote me, and I tore the
cage apart and threw open the window. It was
many days before I could look my friend in the
eye, and I was secretly afraid all winter that he
would not come back. But he was a generous
bird and bore no grudge. Next spring he was
there earlier than ever, as if he knew.
Never have I forgotten it; it is to me as vivid
as if it were yesterday, that black day when, with
the instinct to “kill something” strong in me, I
had gone out with my father's gun, and coming
through the willows, met a starling on joyous
wing crossing the meadow on the way to his nest.
Up went the gun, and before I knew, I had shot
him. I can see him folding his wings as he fell at
my feet. I did not pick him up. I went home
with all the sunlight gone out of the day. I have
shot many living things since, more shame to me,
but never one that hurt like that. I had slain my
friend. -
6 THE OLD TOWN
But neither have I forgotten the long peaceful
twilights of summer when we drifted down the
river in our boat, listening to the small talk of the
mother duck with her young, and to the chattering
of uncounted thousands of starlings in the reeds
where they had settled for the night, settling too,
as was proper, the disputes of the day before they
went to sleep. If only men were always so wise.
In the midst of it we would suddenly get on our
feet and shout and clap our hands, and the flock
would rise and rise and keep rising, farther and
farther down the river, until the sky was darkened
and the twilight became night, while the rush of
the million wings swelled into rolling thunder.
We stood open-mouthed and watched the mar-
Vellous sight, while the youngest crowded up
close, half afraid.
Ah, well ! they were the old days of sweet mem-
ories, and here they have come back to me on the
Wings of the black starling. Who brought him,
or how he came, I do not know, but glad am I.
And while I am waiting for him to sound his mes-
Sage of cheer and good-will at my window, let me
THE OLD TOWN 7
try and hold fast awhile the Old Town we both
loved, and from which it must be that he has
come straight. Else, why should he seek me out?
Where the northernmost boundary post of the
German empire, shaken by the rude blasts of the
North Sea, points its black menacing finger tow-
ard the little remnant of stricken Denmark, it
stood a thousand years, a lonely sentinel with its
face toward the southern foe. Kings were born
and buried within its portals, proud bishops ruled
it, armies fought for it, and over it, but all these
things had passed away. Centuries before it had
bidden good-by to the pageantry of royalty and
courts, and had gone to sleep with its mouldering
past. And it had slept ever since save when the
tramp of armies stirred uneasy dreams; but they
halted no longer at its gates. The snort of the
iron horse, hitched to the nineteenth century,
had not yet aroused it in my day. No shriek of
Steam whistle, scarce a ripple from the great world
without, disturbed its rest. There was, indeed, a
factory in town, always spoken of as the factory, a
Cotton mill of impossible pretensions, grotesque in
8 THE OLD TOWN
its mediaeval setting, and discredited by public
opinion as a kind of flying in the face of tradition
and Providence at once that invited sure disaster.
When disaster did come, though it took the
power of two empires to bring it about, — it was
an immediate result of the war of conquest waged
by Germany and Austria against Denmark that
drew the boundary line and built custom-houses
within sight of the factory windows, - it was ac-
cepted as a judgment any one could have foretold.
But even that bold intruder had never been guilty
of the impropriety of whistling. The drowsy clat-
ter of mill-wheels where blossoming lilacs dipped
over garden walls into the loitering stream was
the only sound of industry that broke the pro-
found peace. The flour-mills were among the
privileged traditions of the town. They had been
handed down from father to son in unbroken suc-
cession since the exclusive right to grind the flour
of the community had been granted to them by
the early kings. No one had ever disputed that
right. Perhaps it was not worth contending for;
anyhow, it would have been useless. Could a
THE OLD TOWN 9
clearer title to possession be imagined than that
the thing had been there before any one could
remember 2
“WHERE BLossom ING LILACs DIP ovKR GARDEN walls.”
Red-legged storks built their nests on the tiled
roofs of the quaint old houses, and swallows reared

10 THE OLD TOWN
their young under the broad eaves, protected like
their loftier neighbors by the general good-will of
the people, and by the superstition that assigned
sure misfortune, even if nothing worse than a
plague of boils, to whomsoever should lay profane
hand upon them. In the silent halls of the old
cloister, where the echo of sandalled feet on stone
floors seemed always to linger, – steps of good
friars long since dust in forgotten graves, – they
flew in and out, and though they built two nests
for one, since they were given to raising two broods
in the brief summer, they did not wear their wel-
come out. The turnkey patiently put up an extra
shelf, for, old as was he, were not the swallows
tenants before him 2
Ponderous whale-oil lamps swung across the
streets in rusty chains that squeaked in every
vagrant breeze a dismal accompaniment to the
cry of the night watch. In such a setting tinder-
boxes and quill pens seemed quite the thing. I
well remember the distrustful resentment in which
old teachers held the “English” (steel) pens.
They still clung to the goose-quill, which no one
THE OLD TOWN 11
to-day would know how to cut. But the word
“penknife” had meaning in those days. En-
velopes were a still later discovery. Letters
were folded and sealed with Wax, and we boys
collected Seals as the boys of to-day collect stamps;
and a good deal more of variety and human in-
terest there was in the collection. I mind the
excitement when the first bottle of “Pennsyl-
vania oil” came into our house. I fetched it my-
Self from the grocer's, bottled like beer at eight
skilling a bottle. Very likely they were Lübeck
skilling, reminiscent of the middle ages when the
Hanse Towns so thoroughly monopolized all trade
in the North that their very coinage endured cen-
turies after their League had ceased to be. Other
things lasted. Their factors in foreign lands were
bachelors, whether from choice or compulsion I
do not know, and to this day the Danish word for
bachelor is “Pebersvend,” i.e. pepper clerk, spices
being a chief ware in their shops. As for the tele-
graph, people shook their heads at it as a more
than dubious American notion, though the un-
doubted success of the first sewing-machine that
12 THE OLD TOWN
had come to town had disposed them to lend a
lenient ear to its claims.
Above this little world of men the old Dom-
kirke reared its gray head, a splendid vision of
the great things that were. Travellers approach-
ing the town saw it from afar, a majestic pile
against whose strong walls the town leaned with
its time-worn old houses and crooked streets
as if seeking strength and comfort against the
assault of the gathering years. Its square red
tower was a landmark for skippers far out at
sea. The Dom itself was, and always had been,
the heart and soul of the Old Town. It was so
when the early Christian bishops built it in the
twelfth century, for though kings abode in its
shadow, they were their advisers and the real mas-
ters of the city. It was even more so after the
Reformation had clipped the wings of the clergy.
With their power went the commerce and the
prestige of the Old Town; there remained little
but the Domkirke and the Latin School that had
been part of it from the beginning, and about these
centred its life and all its normal interest. There
EAD.”
“THE OLD DOMKIRKE REARED ITS GRAY H


THE OLD TOWN 13
were those, it is true, who dreamed of a return of
the great days by wedding Ribe once more to the
Sea through a ship canal to deep water, but it was
a dream that ended when they built a harbor at
Esbjerg, a scant dozen miles away. After that
the Old Town slept on, undisturbed by the world
without.
They were mighty men who built the Domkirke,
and went far afield for the stone of which they
reared it. There is none in Denmark, so they sent
their ships over the North Sea and up the river
Rhine for the gray stone of which they built
the walls, and in quarries on the Weser they found
granite for the great pillars and Sandstone for the
lighter ones. They wrought in the fashion of
their day, but those that came after them and
raised the great tower of burned brick had learned
another that suited their purpose better; and so
while the gentler Roman curve was that of the
church, the tower stood forth in the massive
strength of the Goth, as it had need, for it was the
strong place of the burghers as the castle was the
King's stronghold. Watchmen kept a constant
14 THE OLD TOWN
lookout from it in times of war for an approaching
enemy, and the great bell hung there, the “storm
bell,” that called the people to arms. It had long
been dumb in my day, for it was feared that to
ring it would imperil the tower. But when the
autumn storms bellowed about the gables of the
Dom, sometimes we heard at dead of night a deep
singing note above the crash of falling tiles, and
then we hugged our pillows close and held our
breath to listen; for when the bell sang, it was
warning that the sea was coming in.
The Old Town stood on a wide plain, the fertile
marsh between it and the shore, behind it the
barren heath, with no tree or shrub to break the
sweep of the pitiless west wind. The very broom
on the barrows, beneath which slept the old vi-
kings, it cropped short on the side that looked
toward the sea they loved so well. Summer and
winter it piped its melancholy lay above their
heads. At sundown the sea-fogs, rolling in Over
the land in a dense gray cloud, wrapped them in
their damp embrace. There was no dike to pro-
tect the coast, but beyond the shallows lay a
THE OLD TOWN 15
string of islands that within historic times had
been torn from the mainland, and these stood the
brunt of the onset when the North Sea was angry.
But when the wind had blown hard from the west
for days, as was its wont, and then veered to the
north, so that the waters from the great deep were
THE CAUSEWAY IN A STORM.
massed in the inlet, then it was we heard the big
bell sing in the tower.
Morning broke after such a night, upon a raging
ocean where at sunset there had been meadows
and dry fields. Far as the eye reached only storm-
tossed waves were in sight. The shores Were


16 THE OLD TOWN
strewn with perch and other fresh-water fish that
were driven up on the pavement in shoals by
the rushing tides. On the great causeway that
stretched north and south, high above the flood
level, cattle, hares, grouse, and field-mice huddled
together in wretched, shivering groups. With
break of day the butchers of the town went out, if
going was at all possible, to bleed the drowning
cattle that could yet be saved for food. Some-
times the trip had to be made in boats, and even
in the streets of the town these were in demand
when the “storm-flood '' was at its height. I
recollect very well seeing the water washing
through the ground-story windows of the houses
down by the harbor. By ordinary tides we were
there five miles from the sea. At such times,
when the flood had surprised the cattle yet in
the far-outlying pastures, we heard news of dis-
aster. The herders had been slow in gaining the
refuges provided for them, and had perished with
their herds.
If the flood came before the mail had got in,
an anxious outlook was kept at the town gate,
THE OLD TOWN 17
where the sea could be seen rising higher and
higher, threatening with each swell to wash
quite over the roadway. White-painted posts
were set on both sides of it to mark out the way
for the driver even if water covered it knee-
deep, but in spite of this precaution, the trip was
full of peril. If the coach were blown over, or
the team succumbed, the passengers had but a
slim chance of escaping with their lives. On
such nights a band of resolute men gathered in
the shelter of the farthest houses ready to go to
the rescue on the first warning of danger. I was
very proud to be one of these when I was a big
boy of sixteen. But big as I was when the sum-
mons came and we sallied forth to bring the ex-
hausted team in, it took all my strength to stand
against the furious blast. The waves beat upon
the causeway and were carried across it in a pelt-
ing rain of brine that stung like whip-lashes. In
water halfway to our waists, in utter darkness
and numbed with cold, we groped our way tow-
ard the lights of the town scarce a hundred
yards away. How that driver had lived through
C
18 THE OLD TOWN
it, I shall never understand. The relief when we
reached shelter was great, but greater my pride
when the stern old Amtmand, the chief govern-
ment officer of the county, caught me by the
shoulder and whirled me around to have a look
at the fellow who had lent him a hand in need.
“Strong boy,” he said, and rapped me smartly
with his cane; “be a man yet,” which was praise
indeed from him. And I forgot that I was cold
and wet through, in my pride.
They used to tell a story of another Amtmand
who, fresh from his snug berth at the capital, had
come out to take the post in the Old Town, as ill
luck would have it a passenger in the mail on just
such a night. It was too much for him. He
waited only till the tide fell enough to clear the
way, then fled the town, with the parting shot
that “Ribe might be good enough for ducks and
geese, but not for men.” He never came back,
but set up his office in another town where he
was out of reach of the North Sea. Well for
him he was not there on that awful Christmas
Eve when the water reached the very Domkirke
THE OLD TOWN 19
itself, and rose five feet or more over its floor.
Many years before, another flood had torn thirty
parishes from the coast. The sea swallowed them
up. It stands in the old records as “de grote
Mandranck” (1362) because of the loss of life
it caused. Shortly before the Reformation the
water rose so high in the streets that the cloister
of the Black Friars stood in a lake, and the
monks caught fish for their supper in the por-
tico that enclosed their garden. One may be
permitted the hope that this flood came on a
Friday to fitly replenish their larder.
Indeed, the history of the Old Town was one
long succession of such disasters that had craved
lives and wasted treasure without end, yet had
never taught the people the lesson their southern
neighbors had learned early. “Preserve, O Lord,
the dikes and dams in the King's marshlands;
” read
watch over the widows and the fatherless,
a. petition in our old prayer-book. The King's
marshlands went their way when the Germans
stole them, but the Old Town stood, and stands
still in its undiked plain, heedless alike of warn-
20 THE OLD TOWN
ing and experience. One may see all I have
written here, by evil chance this very winter,
if he cares to go and risk it.
When after a storm-flood the waters ebbed
out, field and beach were covered with the drift
of the Gulf Stream, driven in by the long gale,
and amid the snows of the northern winter we
boys roasted our potatoes, and an occasional
dead bird, over bonfires built of the bleached
husks of the cocoa-palm, banana stalks, water-
logged Brazil-nuts, and other wreck of the
tropics.
It could not well be otherwise than that the
sea, which knocked upon our doors so often and
so rudely, played a great part in the lives and in
the imagination of the people. From the islands
I spoke of the whole male population was absent
in summer, and often enough the year round.
They were sailors, all of them, and a Fanö skip-
per to-day walks the bridge of many a ship that
ties up at its pier in New York or Philadelphia.
| Fanó and Manó are the two islands just outside the Old
Town.
THE OLD TOWN 21
The women, left in charge of the little farms, did
all the chores, including the getting in of such crops
as they raised in their sand-dunes and tending to
the stock. The Old Town, too, left stranded by
FANö WOMEN.
the Sanding in of the mouth of the river, never-
theless furnished its full quota to the merchant
marine of more lands than Denmark. The sea
gave it lime to build its houses with, and the
lime that was burned of sea-shells held what it
was laid to bind. It gave the fisherman a living,

22 THE OLD TOWN
and the housewife cleaner and cheaper carpets
than our day knows of. Clear pine floors,
scrubbed spotlessly clean and with the white sea-
Sand swept in “tongues” over them, had a home-
like something about them which no forty-dollar
rug harbors.
The thunder-storms, which in the dog-days
were often very severe, came and went with the
tides. The same storm, having gone out to sea
with the ebb, would come back on the flood tide
and keep the farmers awake who lived under a
roof of thatch. Good cause; I have seen as
many as half a score of farm-houses burning after
a long night's storm. Thus, too, people died
when the tide ebbed. One who was on his death-
bed could not find rest while the tide was in, but
when it went out he went out with it. There
was something in all this of the old days when
Odin and Thor were worshipped where the Dom-
kirke now stood, something of the nature worship
and of the fatalism of pagan times. Was it Oli-
ver Wendell Holmes who said that we are omni-
buses in which all our ancestors ride? Sometimes
THE OLD TOWN 23
I find myself struggling with a “fate” which
I cannot bend to my will or purpose, and then
comes to me out of the past the Jute farmer's
calm “When a man's time is up, he must die;”
along with the recollection of a friend's experi-
ence, a clergyman in that country. A woman
with a child born out of wedlock sought poor
relief because of her handicap. When he re-
monstrated gently that she had saddled herself
with a needless burden, her curt reply was: “No
use talking that way; the children one has to
have, one will get.”
The philosophy of one of my teachers in the
Latin School was of a different kind. It was
custom in the Old Town for the members of the
Fire Company to get up and get ready at the
third heavy clap of thunder, and though my
father was not of the corps he followed the cus-
tom. Dressed for the street, with his insurance
and other valuable papers ready to hand, he sat
the storm out in his easy-chair, the better to
marshal his household in time of need. His
friend could not understand that any one should
24 THE OLD TOWN
break his sleep for a thunder-storm and go to all
that trouble. “What for ?” he asked.
“Suppose the lightning were to strike the
house,” said my father.
The other looked stunned. “Why,” he said,
“what beastly bad luck.”
With all this record of fight and fire and flood,
the Old Town was the reverse of strenuous. Its
prevailing note was of sweetness and rest. The
west wind that cut like a knife in November
was soft in June as the touch of a woman's hand.
The grass was never as green in meadow; the
wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank
were never so sweet; nor ever did bird sing in
forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate in
my childhood's home, as it soared toward the
sky. The streets in the Old Town were narrow
and crooked, and in their cobble-stone pave-
ments the rain stood in pools that tempted un-
wary feet. But there were lights in the windows
for glad home-comers. Neighbor knew neighbor
and shared his grief and his joys. No one was
rich, as wealth is counted nowadays; but then
THE OLD TOWN 25
no one was allowed to want for the daily bread.
“Good day and God help” was the everyday
salutation to a man at work; “God bless,” if he
were eating. They were ways of speech, it is
true, but they were typical of the good feeling
that was over and above all the sign of the Old
Town and its people.
CHAPTER II
SEAL OF THE OLD Town. IN THE
THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
IF war and war's alarms
creep into the story of the
Old Town on every page,
despite the fact that its
name to me is peace, the
reason is not far to seek.
I was not yet a month old
when my mother had to
fly from home with me in
her arms, on the outbreak
of war. A report ran
through the land that the “slaves,” that is, the
prisoners in the Holstein state prison, had been
freed by the Germans and were swarming north,
the vanguard of an army that looted and laid
waste where it went.
The women with little chil-
dren were hurriedly sent away, and the Old Town
prepared to give battle to the invaders. Barri-
cades were built and manned; the council requi-
26

THE OLD TOWN 27
sitioned two hundred pounds of powder from the
next town, to be carried in as he could by the vil-
lage express, who made his trips on foot, and they
dug up an old cannon that had done duty as a
hitching post a hundred years or more, to impress
it into the municipal defence. The unencumbered
women moulded bullets and boiled water and pitch
in the houses overlooking the route of the enemy's
Supposed advance. The parishes roundabout
Sent Squads of peasants to the defence armed
with battle-axes and spears. They will show you
those weapons yet in the Town Hall. They keep
the record there, too, of the council at which
peace prevailed, on the showing of military ex-
perts that it would cost two hundred daler" to
dam the river and flood the fields to stop an
army. That was voted to be too steep a price
to pay for being sacked, perhaps, in the end, as
a captured town. But it is not the whole story,
I am sure. Better sense must have dawned, I
imagine, at the sight of those armaments. That
they would have died on the barricades to the
* About one hundred dollars.
28 THE OLD TOWN
last man in defence of their homes I know, for
I knew them. How carefully and deliberately
they planned is shown by the erection of one of
the barricades in front of the drug store, where
Hoffmann's Drops would be handy “in case any
were taken ill.” It was not faint-heartedness,
but cool foresight.
When the summons came for the last time, I
was a half-grown boy. I remember it, that gray
October morning, when a gendarme, all dusty
and famished from his long, hard ride, reined
in his panting horse at the tavern in the market-
place, where the children were just then swarm-
ing with their school books. I hear the clatter
of the iron-shod hoofs in the quiet streets,
the clanging of his sabre as he leaped from
the saddle and spoke gravely to the inn-keeper.
Far and fast as he had come, riding farther and
riding farther; ghostly legions were even then
hurrying from the south on his trail to grieve the
echoes of the Old Town. I see the sudden awe
in the faces as the whispered message went from
mouth to mouth, “The King is dead,” — the
THE OLD TOWN 29
King whom the people loved as their friend, last
of his house, to whose life was linked inseparably
the destiny of Denmark. I see the solemn face
of our old Rector and hear the quiver in his
voice as he bade us go home, there would be no
School that day; a great Sorrow had come upon
the land.
I see our little band trooping homeward, all
desire to skip or play swallowed up in a vague
dread of nameless disaster. I live over again the
dark days when, in the hush of all other sounds
and cares, we listened by night and by day to the
boom of cannon coming nearer and nearer from
the Eider, where the little Danish flock was
matched in unequal combat against the armies
of two mighty empires. Then the flight of
broken and scattered regiments, hunted, travel-
worn, and desperate, through the town. The
bivouac in the Square, with shotted guns pointing
southward over the causeway. The Smile that
will come is followed by a tear as I recall the
trembling eagerness, the feverish haste of faith-
ful hands that packed our school arsenal —
30 THE OLD TOWN
twenty-five historic muskets of the Napoleonic
era — in boxes to be taken out to sea and sunk,
lest they become the prey of the enemy. They
are rusting there yet. After we had seen the
Prussian needle-guns, they were left to their
fate. And when the last friend was gone on his
way, the long days of suspense, the nightly vigils
at the South-gate, where at last we heard the
tread of approaching armies which none of us
should live to see return; for within our sight
Denmark was cut in twain by German bayonets.
So, a child of the Old Town may be forgiven
for calling up the Red Gods on occasion. In-
deed, they had left their tracks where he who
ran might read. The other day I heard how, in
restoring the Bishop's Manse, they had come upon
traces of the old spiral stairway, which even in that
house of peace wound to the right, as the custom
was, so that the man defending it might have
his right hand free, while the attacking enemy
had to strike from the left. Perhaps, though,
it was not always a house of peace, nor the enemy
all of the world and the flesh, for I read in the
THE OLD TOWN 31
archives of the Domkirke of a least one pitched
battle between the Brethren of the Chapter, that
is, the clerics attached to the cathedral, and
the Bishop, in which the latter had his robe torn
from his back. Three hundred years later I find
º
-
AN OLD HOUSE.
the Chapter uniting in a round-robin to the
Bishop, in which perjury, simony, and lewdness
are among the open offences laid at his door.
Unless he mend his ways, they give notice, they
will have him before the Pope.
Doughty scrappers were they ever, those old
Jutes. Doubtless there was reason for the Ribe


32 THE OLD TOWN
justice that was proverbial throughout the days
when each town was a law unto itself. “‘You
thank God, Sonny,' is an old saw that has come
down to this day, ‘that you weren't punished by
Ribe law,’ said the old woman, when she saw her
son hung on the Warde gallows.” Warde was
THE IRoN HAND.
the next town, a little way up the coast. The
symbol of that justice was an iron hand over the
town gate which, tradition said, warned any who
might be disposed to buy up grain and food-stuffs
to their own gain, that for “cornering” the means
of living, in Ribe a man had his right hand cut off.
Good that the hand was never nailed on Trinity
Church or on the Chicago Board of Trade, elsewhat

THE OLD TOWN 33
a one-handed lot of men we should have there
and in Wall Street ! Whether that was the real
purpose of it or not, the Old Town was ruled
with an iron hand indeed in those days. Witness
the report, preserved in its archives, of the
conviction of a woman for stealing the hand-iron
which her thieving husband carried off with him
when he broke jail. She filed it off and threw
it into a neighbor's yard, and not only she, but
the neighbor, too, was convicted of theft. And
stealing was a hanging matter. Stealing less
than two dollars’ worth of property took a man
to the gallows straight; but a woman, “for de-
cency's sake,” was buried alive in the gallows
hill. For murder, counterfeiting and adultera-
tion of honey, - why specially honey, I do not
know, - and for eloping with another's wife, a
man's head was chopped off with the big sword
that still hung in the Town Hall. There were
holes in the end of it, so that it might be weighted
and made to “bite.” The bigamist was merely
turned out of town and mulcted in half his be-
longings. But even the iron hand did not stop
D
34 THE OLD TOWN
brawling, and other measures had to be adopted.
A man was accused of knocking another on the
head with a spear, – prodding was the fashion
of murder only, - but legal evidence was lacking.
Nevertheless, the “jury of the North-gate” found
him guilty on the principle that for an eye an
eye was due, and he was sentenced to pay dam-
ages to the injured man, to the King, and to the
town, and to stand committed “until such time
as he catches another in his place.” And he in
jail!
It seems almost jolly by comparison, certainly
it has a more modern, not to say familiar sound,
to find another jury acquitting a malefactor in
the face of convincing evidence of his guilt upon
grounds that seem delicately suggested in the
question from the bench why they, the jurymen,
“had demanded a keg of beer of the prisoner.”
The record mentions one obstinate juryman,
perhaps the original prohibitionist, who entered
an ineffectual protest against the verdict.
With all their staid solemnity there is a comic
vein in some of these old records. As, for in-
THE OLD TOWN 35
stance, when Jep Bennedsen, appearing to prose-
cute a horse thief, swears that “the dappled mare
which is here present, he bought of Anders Munk
and it is God’s and his own horse.” Or, when a
man charged with the theft of a neighbor's axe
proceeds to swear “on his soul and Salvation and
his uplifted hand, and asks God to curse him and
push him in under the foot of Lucifer if he ever
had the axe '’; then, suddenly reflecting, adds,
“Wait; if I did, I will give it back to him.” But
the musty pages in which these facts are set down
with minutest care betray no appreciation of
their humor.
The stern old Ribe justice had but a leg and a
half left to stand on, as it were, in my day. The
effective police force of the town consisted of
two able-bodied night-watchmen and a beadle
with a game leg, but with a temper and an Oaken
staff that more than made up for his other de-
fects. In ordinary times, always excepting New
Year's Eve, when it was the privilege of the Old
Town to cut up as it saw fit, this was quite suffi-
cient to preserve the public peace, for brawling
36 THE OLD TOWN
as an occupation had long ceased, and crime
was almost unknown. The commotion that was
caused by a real burglary when I was a little lad
can therefore be understood. As a matter of
fact there was nothing very alarming about the
crime. The thief had merely forced a door, that
was fastened after the simple fashion of the day
and place with a wooden whorl, and taken some
money from an open drawer; but he had cut his
hand in doing it, and there were smears of blood
on the wall that made the mystery ever so much
more dreadful to us all. To cap the climax, it
was public property he had taken, the King's
money, for it was the custom-house he had robbed.
The whole community was aroused, and the town
council met promptly to consider the emergency.
It is fair to state that it distinctly rose to it. The
records of that meeting are still in existence. The
business in hand, so they state, being to catch
the thief, it was suggested by a member that this
could not be done while the watchmen clattered
about at night in wooden clogs and cried the
hours; for so they gave warning to any evil-
THE OLD TOWN 37
doer who might be lurking around. To this the
meeting agreed, and it was resolved that they
must henceforth cease bawling and put on boots
— and rubbers. The sum of four daler was voted
to equip the force with these police accoutre-
ments, and was duly entered in the budget of
the town to be raised by taxation.
The thief, if I remember rightly, was never
caught, but the event proved that the departure
from the ancient landmarks was too radical.
Thief or no thief, the town could by no possibil-
ity sleep without being awakened hourly by the
cry of the watchmen; or if it did go to sleep it
didn't know it, which was almost, if not quite, as
bad. Universal insomnia threatened to wreck
its peace. Within a month the entire community,
headed by the councilmen themselves, petitioned
the municipality to unloose again the watchmen's
tongues. A compromise was made upon the
basis of the boots, and was religiously kept till
within a year, when, I am told, the crying of the
hour finally ceased.
I am sorry it did, for it was a picturesque relic
38 THE OLD TOWN
of its mediaeval past, which after all is the real
setting of the Old Town. It was not a mere
A WATCHMAN.
t
-
t
:
-
i
.
-
- -
: ,
cry, or senseless shout.
In its mournful mel-
ody, that took kindly
to the cracked and
weather-beaten voices
of the singers, I live
over again those long
and lonesome nights
when I lay awake, lis-
tening to the buffeting
of the winds, and fol-
lowed the ships on
their course over the
sea where it swept
unchecked, wondering
what the great world
in which they moved
might be like. People
went to bed early in those days, and the watch-
man raised his voice at eight o'clock. From that
hour until four in the morning he sang his song,

THE OLD TOWN 39
every hour a new verse, supposed to have special
reference to the time of night. The curious com-
mingling of pious exhortation with homely ad-
vice on the everyday affairs of domestic life was
characteristic of the time and of the people.
At ten o’clock he put in a pointed reminder to
the laggard that it was time to turn in, thus:
ſh!! Aztalante.

| Wºº, | | |
IZACT" ºf Tº º | | | | | T]
[T I/TNT'ſ UT | " || || || N . . . | | | – |T]
[ \SLſ © zººl J. Llº !--- TTL*T22 gº III
U wº #s. • ‘T-s: Tº Te U-7
Ho, watchman I heard ye the clock strike ten ? This
n!}
| LZººLi | ——T —I l
LZM I" ſº Nº || || || || ſ |TI ſ | | ||
Lºſ ICTY TWT T] | || | T}_TI) | | < |
| \SLM , sº a a U (3 Cº L, a } alº ºl
U Uºy © ūy Cº UºZ CJ w
hour is worth the know-ing Ye house-holds high and
n! —l
L. L/ PT. I | | | | | | | —l T]
Hº- ––––––.--——-- H–––– I
HGB-1–2–3–2–H–H–ºf–E–F–C–2–2–H–E–F–H
U tºy vºy * 7 (º, wº -º-
low, The time is here and go -ing When ye to bed should
77t. dº º
n!
[ V ºf Li ſ * A. L T
IZI'ſ | | | N. N. N. | I
L If INTT, | | | | " " . Jº Nº || || | |
|-SP | g—l-G s—G--º N f |-- T]
gº tº -za- - - - - —-
~27- J. -62-e -G-
go; Ask God to guard, and say A - men I Be
n! 77ſ. tº tº & e . t
#º —l | | | —l | "
ºf 1 | | AT I | A | | I
[…] Iºwſ T. | } INTI ( , ETNL ; | | | I
LVSU } = | | * (J - I | ( / Za | ||
| ( ) w CJ vºy -- w -G- Cº




quick and bright, Watch fire and light, Our clock just now struck ten,
At one o'clock he sang:
Ho, watchman 1 Our clock is striking one.
Oh, Jesus, wise and holy,
40 THE OLD TOWN
Help us our cross to bear.
There is no one too lowly
To be beneath thy care.
Our clock strikes one; in darkest night
Oh, helpful friend,
Thy comfort send,
Then grows the burden light.
The Old Town was the county-seat, and the
county was large, but I do not remember that
there were at any time more than two lawyers.
One was good, the other bad. By bad I mean not
that he was a bad lawyer, but reputed to be tricky,
whereas the other was known to be honor itself.
It is therefore perhaps the best character I can
give my people when I record the fact – it was
so stated, and I have not the least doubt that it
was true — that when two farmers quarrelled,
each sure that he was right, they made haste to
hitch up to get first to the honest lawyer, and
usually that was the end of the quarrel; for the
last in the race was willing to make peace. They
used to tell of two well-to-do neighbors who had
fallen out over a line fence and started simulta-
neously for town. Both had good teams, and
THE OLD TOWN 41
they were well matched in the race. For half an
hour they drove silently alongside of one another,
each on his own side of the road, grimly urging
on their horses, but neither gaining a length. At
last, as the lights of the town came into sight,
for it was evening, a trace broke on one of the
rigs and the horses stopped. The other team
was whirled away in a cloud of dust.
“Hans !” the beaten one called after him, and
he halted and looked back.
“Are you going after Lawyer — ?” naming
the Square one.
“I am that,” came back.
“Then let's go back. I am beat; ” and back
home they went and made it up.
In contrast to this comedy of the highway
stands in my memory a human tragedy that
made a deep impression upon our childish minds,
though we little understood at the time. There
was in our street a public-house keeper with
whose pretty daughter we played at our daily
games until she grew out of short skirts into a
very handsome but flashy young woman. After
42 THE OLD TOWN
a while she disappeared, and rumors reached the
town that she was living in Hamburg upon the
wages of sin, whereat the little circle in which
she had spun her top buzzed mightily, and scan-
dalized mammas turned up their noses with an
“I told you so.” Her mother went about red-
eyed as if from much crying, but was rarely seen
outside her house. As for the father, publican
that he was, he said nothing, but grimly held
his peace.
Then one day a stylish carriage, the most
elegant the town owned, drove up to the door of
the public house, and a lady in silks and fur-
belows, and with a mammoth ostrich-feather
sweeping her shoulder, descended and went in.
Like a storm wind the report spread through the
street that Helene had come home a fine lady,
and we boys gathered to see the carriage and the
show. We were standing there when the door
of the house was opened, and the publican and
his daughter came out. She was weeping piti-
fully, and the feather drooped sadly as he gave
her his arm and, with face sternly set but with
THE OLD TOWN 43
the dignity of righteous fatherhood, led her to the
carriage, helped her in, and, closing the door,
bade the coachman drive on. At the window we
caught a moment's glimpse of the mother's tear-
ful face as the coach turned the corner; then
the door closed, and we saw and heard no more.
We knew, somehow, that a drama of human sin
and sorrow had been enacted in our sight, but
little else. Years after, I heard what had hap-
pened within. She had come in her paint and
her fripperies, unrepenting, to her old home;
but barely within its shelter had been met by
her father with the hard demand whether she
was living honestly.
“First answer me,” he said, barring the way
to her mother; “are you honest ?”
And when she was silent and hung her head,
he led her forth, an outcast without her mother's
kiss. The Old Town never saw her again.
Happily the ordinary tenor of life there ran on
a different plane. Neighborly kindness ruled;
on the basis of the square deal, however: to every
one his own. Stick up for your rights; these
44 THE OLD TOWN
Secure, go any length to oblige a neighbor. It
is a characteristic of the Danish people, who are
essentially honest, intolerant of pretence, stub-
bornly democratic, and withal good-natured to
a degree. Hence their apparent passion for
argument, which is all-pervading, but utterly
harmless, excepting as it delays action. Busi-
ness is held up; trains appear sometimes to stop
for argument between the station-master and
conductor. When the whistle blows, they part
with a nod and a cordial “Paa Gjensyn” — aw
revoir. When I was last there, I was a listener
to a conversation between two men, strangers to
one another, who were waiting for a train. The
one had overheard the other tell his name and
that of the town he hailed from. He turned
upon him straightway:
“Are you Christian Sörensen’” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“So you are that? And you are from Hvillinge-
bäk.”
“Yes, I am that,” patiently.
“So — I thought there was only one Christian
THE OLD TOWN 45
Sörensen in Hvillingebäk, and him I know,”
with strong emphasis on the “I.”
“Yes! Well, my name is Jens Christian Sören-
Sen.”
Two minutes after I saw them taking a stein
of beer together at the depot bar, on the friendliest
of terms.
Of such kind was the long-standing feud be-
tween the factory owner in the Old Town and
Knud Clausen, his next-door neighbor, who kept
cows. Knud's manure heap, which was his
wealth, for he had also a farm, was right under
the other's dining-room window and was not nice,
to put it mildly. The man of industry and
wealth tried to buy it many a time and oft, but
Knud would not sell; not he, for in an unguarded
moment the other had disputed his right to keep
it there at all, and he was merely standing upon
his undoubted rights. Had not his father kept
it there before him? So it was a drawn battle,
and the subject of many heart-burnings, until
the Palm Sunday when the manufacturer's
daughter went to confirmation. Knud loved
46 THE OLD TOWN
the ground she trod on, as did every one else in
the Old Town, and sought a way of showing his
good-will. He found it in the bone of contention
in his back yard. When the family, returning
from church, sat down to dinner, they beheld
the offensive pile hidden entirely under a layer
of grass and green leaves with daisies stuck in,
like silver stars on a green carpet, and Knud
himself beaming all over, presenting congratula-
tions in mimic show.
When the government undertook to replace
the deadly slow old hymns that were sung in
church on Sunday with some of more modern
cast, and to that end introduced a new hymn-
book, it came to a characteristic fight between
the conservative countryfolk, who wanted no
change, and their clergy carrying out the orders
from headquarters. The peasants flatly refused
to sing the new tunes. When the preceptor
struck up one, they calmly sang the old and
drowned him and the parson out. The battle
raged for years before the new prevailed, just
how I do not know. The government tried to
THE OLD TOWN 47
seize the old books and burn them, but it only
made matters worse. Some compromise was
made, without doubt, or they would be singing
the old tunes to this day.
The “stalwart Jutes” they called the country-
folk round about the Old Town, and stalwart they
are, as Germany is finding out trying to bend
those south of the Konge-aa to her will. She
may do it in Alsace and Lorraine perhaps, – I
don't know, - but not with them. They will
be Danes four hundred years hence, as they have
been these forty under daily persecution. They
will do nothing rash, but give in they never will.
It is their way. Let me end this battlesome
chapter, when I yearned only for peace, with
the characteristic tale of my old friend Rosen-
vinge, who was set to guard a prisoner in the war
of '49. The man was a disloyal burgomaster
or sheriff or something from one of the Schleswig
towns, brought in by order of the government,
to be kept and guarded in Ribe. Rosenvinge —
may his shadow never grow less he lives yet,
near the nineties if not in them, and goes his
48 THE OLD TOWN
daily rounds in the old cloister of which he is the
keeper — Rosenvinge was the sentinel. The call
for breakfast came after a night on the road, for
suspects had to be taken by stealth and under
cover of darkness. The sentinel was hungry.
Never was man a hero without his porridge.
No guard relief was in sight. There was but one
way, and he took it. He put his gun in the
corner with the prisoner, and went calmly across
the street to the tavern, whence came the com-
pelling savors of fried herring and hot Tvebak.
Nor did he hurry himself over his coffee, but took
his time. A soldier must have a good digestion,
or he will have no stomach for the stern duties
of war. Let it be recorded that he found his pris-
oner faithfully guarding the gun when he came
back and awaiting his turn at the herring. To
disturb a man's breakfast by running away – if,
indeed, it would have disturbed it — would have
been dishonorable; not to mention that thereby
he would have lost his own. A square deal and
nothing in haste was the good working plan of
the Old Town.
wº
-
-
HEN
“HE FOUND HIS PRISONER FAITH FULLY GUARDING THE GUN
* >
BIE CAME BACK,

CHAPTER III
| " . ; OUR house
| | | | | 1. was in Black
! / ; ; . . . . . :\| * -
; : : ; it * -º-; . . . ! | * ... -
tº . º | º: Friars' Street,
Sºlº" ji jºlliſºſºlſ||
Nº. º.º. right around the
cornerfrom Peer
Down's Slip in
the picture. The
Slip was a short
cut to school
sº ºſſº |
º º ji ſ º for us boys,
wº | º | -
| and we skipped
“EYES THAT SpokE OF THINGs UNSEEN throu gh it.
BY THE CROWD.”
lightly enough,
morning, noon, and evening. Mother never passed
it, but always went the other way. It stood
for the great sorrow of her life, for at the foot of
it, where the river ran swiftly, my younger brother
was drowned while at play. Theodore was ten.
E 49













50 THE OLD TOWN
Though my mother had a house full, I do not
believe she ever got over the shock of this first
great trouble. To me it calls up two things which
at the time caused me much wonderment. One
was the strange consideration, even deference,
with which I was treated by the boys who used
to fight me and call me names, in the long week
while they dragged the river for the body. Even
my arch-enemy, Liar Hans, who skinned cats
and hated me, let me alone. It gave me a queer
feeling of being deserted and cast out which I
made haste to get over when opportunity came.
The other had somehow to do with this same
experience, though I could not make out the
connection.
There was in the Old Town among the clergy
attached to the Domkirke one with whom my
father was on a war footing, so to speak. They
were not enemies, for they were Christians. But
Pastor Jacobi was a very bright and clever man
with a caustic wit of which he was in no wise
sparing. Father's mental equipment was not
unlike his in those younger days, and they
S SLIP.
ºz
>
C
C
2
±
ſā
º-

THE OLD TOWN 51
clashed often, taking instinctively opposite sides
in public discussion, until it had come to be under-
stood, among us boys, at least, that they were not
friends. Out of such a case we had an easy
way; they, being men, could not fight and were
forced to carry around their grievance unslaked.
Hence my astonishment may be understood
when, upon my father answering a knock at the
door while we were together in the first burst of
grief, I beheld Pastor Jacobi standing on the
threshold. Without a word he opened his arms,
and my father walked straight into them. So
they stood and wept. As I looked at them stand-
ing there, I felt that somehow, wholly irregular
and incomprehensible as it was, something good
had entered that house of mourning, a Sweetness
that took the sting out of our grief. They were
ever after friends.
The trees that hang over the wall of the Slip
grew in the garden of our neighbor, Quedens,
and our house abutted on it. We were his ten-
ants. Herr Quedens was one of the Solid mer-
chants of the town. He was an old man as far
52 THE OLD TOWN
back as I can remember, little, dried-up; but in
the kind face with its mock seriousness that was
in a perpetual struggle with the shrewd twinkle
in eyes which
saw ever the
good in man
and sought the
way of helping
it, the soul of
the Old Town
seems mirrored
^ to me. If any
one was in
NEIGHBoR QUEDENs.
trouble or
need, his path led straight to the Quedens'
back door. Mr. Quedens himself would have
barred the front door, that was in full sight of
the town, with a severity which somehow without
words managed to convey the message that at
the other, in the narrow street around the cor-
ner where no one was looking, there was a pitying
soul that had balm for all wounds. And so there
was; for there Mrs. Quedens was in charge. Dear

THE OLD TOWN 53
old friends ! Sweet dreams be yours in your long
sleep. The world seems poorer, the Old Town
empty, without your gentle presence. It must
be that even the Sunday service in the Dom-
kirke is unreal without those good gray heads.
His voice rose long and quavering from his seat
on the men's side, always a bar behind the con-
gregation; but he sang on undisturbed, finishing
the hymn in his own good time and in his own
way, which was not the way of earthly harmony;
but in the angels' choir it rises clear and sweet,
I know. It was ever heavy upon my conscience
that once, and only once, Mrs. Quedens expressed
a desire to box my ears soundly. That was
when my love-making had disconcerted the Old
Town and fatally broken its peace. But even
then she refrained; and in his office Herr Quedens
looked up a little later and pinched my arm with
his quizzical look. “We must be patient, patient,”
he said, and somehow I felt that there was one
who understood.
It happened that Father and he had birthday
together, and the eighteenth of March was the
54 THE OLD TOWN
great feast-day of both our houses. I think
that the fact that Grover Cleveland was also
born on that day helped on the great liking I had
for the ex-President in his later years. On that
day we gathered, old and young, around the board
in the Quedens home and had a great time.
Father invariably had a song which he had writ-
ten for the occasion with special reference to the
events of the year; as invariably to the great
surprise of Mr. Quedens, who knew all about it,
but never ceased to wonder loudly at these poetic
achievements. No one was forgotten; there
was a verse for every member of the family —
theirs; not ours, it was too large, we should
never have gotten through the dinner. As it
was, the night-watchman's midnight verse usually
came in and finished it, and we heard the tramp
of his heavy boots at the gate as Mrs. Quedens
disappeared from the table to see that he was not
forgotten.
Sunday evenings always saw a friendly gather-
ing at their home, there being no vesper service
in the Domkirke, since it could not be lighted.
THE OLD TOWN 55
We youngsters danced and played games. Our
elders had a quiet rubber of whist, or gossiped
over their knitting and the fine embroidery they
did in those days. There was one article that
went with the knitting pins which very recently
I have seen come back, as a curiosity I suppose.
It was an implement of polite use then – the
scratching stick I mean. A slender rod with an
ivory hand on its end, the fingers set “a-scratch.”
I can think of no better way of describing it.
It was handy if a lady's back needed scratching,
to reach down with, and no doubt it was the
source of much solid comfort. When the watch-
man cried ten, Mr. Quedens would look up from
his whist and remark innocently:
“Well, Anna, what do you say? I say when
our company go home, we'll go to bed.” The
company took the hint.
On the Monday morning preceding Lent we
children had a game that reversed the usual order
of things and was fine fun. We went around then
and “whipped up” our friends with festive rods
trimmed with colored paper rosettes. For being
56 THE OLD TOWN
caught in bed they were mulcted in many “boller,”
a kind of sweetened bun, or else pennies. They
made a point, of course, of staying in bed late,
and cried piteously as we beat the feather beds
with all our might. Mr. Quedens always cried
loudest of all and begged for mercy in his droll
half-German speech, while we gleefully laid it on
all the harder.
Across the main street from the Quedens home
one of the two Jewish families in Ribe kept shop.
They were quiet good people, popular with their
neighbors, who took little account of the fact
that they were Jews. The Old Town was not
given to religious discussions, for good cause:
with this exception it was all one way. There
was not a Roman Catholic in the country, I
think. Baptists we had heard of as sad heretics
quite beyond the pale; Methodism was but a
name. We were all Lutherans, and that as such
we had a monopoly of the way of Salvation fol-
lowed, of course.
So perhaps it was not so strange after all that
Mrs. Tacchau should fall out with her life-long
THE OLD TOWN 57
friend, Mrs. Kerst, who was as stubbornly zeal-
ous in her churchmanship as she was good and
generous in her life. The Jewess had always
known how to steer clear of the dangerous reef,
but at last they struck it fair.
“Well, well, dear friend,” said she, trying
- desperately to back away, “don’t let us talk
about it. Some day when we meet in heaven
we shall know better.”
It was too much. Her friend absolutely
bristled.
“What Our heaven? Indeed, no Here we
can be friends, Mrs. Tacchau. But there—really,
excuse me!”
It has helped me over many a stile since to
remember that she really was a good woman.
She was that. I have seldom known a better.
Which brings me naturally to the good Dean
of the Domkirke. Pastor Koch was my teacher
in the Latin School when the blow fell that sepa-
rated Denmark from her children south of the
Ronge-aa. His father had been the parish
priest in Döstrup, one of the villages across the
58 THE OLD TOWN
line, and his father before him, and so on through
an unbroken chain back almost to the Reforma-
tion. When the separation came, old Gabriel
Koch moved
to Ribe, rather
- than swear al-
§ ſ legiance to the
\ º conquerors,
% and died of a
/ ... ‘S §§ ºº broken heart.
º * There messen-
| gers from the
sº old parish
THE GooD DEAN of THE DomkIRKE.
found his son,
then in orders, and bade him come to them.
His church, his people needed him, they said.
The parish was Danish despite the German oc-
cupation and would always remain so. The
change of allegiance would be a mere matter of
form. Would he come? They were waiting and
yearning for the son of the old house.
They pleaded long and earnestly, but he stood
firm. He could not take oath to serve the ene-


THE OLD TOWN 59
mies of his country. When the men from Döstrup
went back over the line, Pastor Koch stood at the
South-gate, shading his eyes with his hands, and
followed their retreating forms until they van-
ished in the sunset. He had brought the last
sacrifice, forever closing the door upon his life-
- dream, that of filling the pulpit of his fathers.
To the day of his death, I think, he never ceased
to look southward with a yearning that had no
words. And from below the line longing eyes
were directed, are yet, toward the Square tower
of the Domkirke with the white cross on red
waving from its top. Like him, they are men
who never forget.
It is the way, I guess, of the Old Town. Last
year, when I was within a day's journey of it,
travelling toward Denmark, news reached me
that an old friend had gone to her long home.
Mrs. Hansen was the wife of the “middle-miller,”
for there were three on the three branches of
the river. It was at her door I bade good-by
to my mother when I went into the great world,
and it was she who comforted her, Mother told
60 THE OLD TOWN
me in after years, with the assurance that “Jacob
will come back President of the new country,
see if he doesn't.” Nor did she ever forget the
wanderer, but
always hailed
his return with
gladness. Her
boy rode with
me in that post-
chaise. He was
going in to serve
the King as a
soldier. We had
sat on the
THE WIFE OF THE MIDDLE-MILLER. school bench to-
gether and
fought together, to the loss of much learning, I
fear, and to the loss of caste, too, with our teacher.
But it befell that, when we met again under his
mother's roof, when our hair that was brown had
grown grizzled and gray, she saw us both distin-
guished by old King Christian as the two of our
class who had made it proud. And she smiled a

THE OLD TOWN 61
calm “I told you so.” But that is another story,
and we shall come to it.
The people of the Old Town were like itself,
simple and honest and good. None of them ever
plumed them-
selves with stolen
feathers. There
was a bell-ringer
at the Domkirke
whom we boys
dubbed Venus be-
cause of her ex-
ceeding ugliness.
She was certainly
the most hideous
and withal the
most good-na-
tured girl I ever
VENUS.
me t. She a c-
cepted the name meekly as a part of her office,
Something pertaining to the job, and her smile
reached from ear to ear when we hailed her by it
in the street. Then there was a change. Her

62 THE OLD Town
employer died, and she lost her place. When
next we met her and called her Venus, she pro-
tested soberly:
“I ain't Venus no more now, for I ain’t by the
kirk.”
She ought logically to have descended from her
ecclesiastical position to civil employment as
the town bell-woman, but I am not sure she did.
All public advertising was done in the Old Town
through the medium of either the bell-woman or
the drummer-man, the two official town-criers.
There was a newspaper, to be sure, — indeed, it
had been there for a hundred years and more,
“privileged by the King,” — but I think it came
out only every other day. At all events, all
matters of real human interest were promulgated
through these two functionaries. They divided
their duties fairly. She did the crying of fish
and meat in the market, and such like, or if any
one had lost anything. He, having been once a
soldier, did the honors on ceremonial occasions,
as when a fat steer, or a horse, was to be killed
at the butcher's, good horse-meat being neither
“DID THE HONORs ON CEREMONIAL OCCASIONS.”
w

THE OLD TOWN 63
unwelcome on the poor man's table, nor unpala-
table either. Then he led the procession through
the town, proclaiming between rolls of his drum
the virtues of the victim that stalked after,
adorned with ribbons and flowers. The steer
never took any interest in the proceedings. Per-
haps a bovine tradition told it what was coming.
But the horse took it all as a compliment, and
walked in the procession with pride, as if he were
a person of consequence.
Of characters the Old Town had had a full
supply ever since the days when Anders Sörensen
Wedel, who was a cleric attached to the Dom-
kirke, translated Saxo Grammaticus with the
Hamlet Saga into Danish from the original
Latin. Being in straits for paper on which to
print it, he called upon the Danish women through
his friend, Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, to
send their linen to the paper-mill lest the great
work be lost to posterity. Wedel was a pious
as well as a famous man, and it was his custom,
in order to impress his children with the bitter-
ness of the Passion, to call them into his study
64 THE OLD TOWN
on Good Friday and scourge them soundly.
The scourge had no longer any pertinent relation
to Good Friday in our day, though it was busy
enough the year round. It helped us on our way
to knowledge, or was supposed to, in the school,
where “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was
still an article of unquestioned faith. There
was an evil tradition that a king in the early part
of the century had once, on a visit, expressed
wonder at the number of great and learned men
that had come from it, and that the Rector had
told him: “We have a little birch forest near,
your Majesty. It helps, it helps l’’ It certainly
labored faithfully. As to the results — but prob-
ably it is a subject without interest to my young
readers, and since their elders have lost faith in
it I shall let it alone, and be glad to.
Liar Hans, whom I spoke of, was one of the
institutions of the town, along with Maren Dra-
goon, the apple woman, the memory of whose
early flirtation with a dragoon — she was sixty
and had a beard when I knew her — was thus
perpetuated, and Hop-Carolina, so called because
THE OLD TOWN 65
one of her legs was shorter than the other. How
and why Hans got his nickname, I don’t know.
I know that he
hated us, probably.
for yelling it at
him, and that he
compelled me for
a long time to go
armed with a horse-
whip for fear of
him. The Liar
was a professional
skinner of cats.
Women wore
tanned catskins in
those days as we
wear chamois chest
protectors, with
the hairy side in,
and this demand LIAR HANS.
Liar Hans supplied.
So he went about with a sack with dead cats in it,
and from this brought up his ammunition when
F

66 THE OLD TOWN
a fight befell, as it did whenever one of the Latin
School boys hove in sight. Then the air was
filled with cats that went back and forth till we
ran; for Hans did not know the word surrender.
He cornered me once in our own street, and there
ensued a mighty combat between the Liar and his
cats on one side, and myself and Othello, my
dog, on the other, in which my horsewhip did
great execution until we fled in disorderly re-
treat and got wedged in the doorway, the dog and
I, where Hans laid it on both of us with a cat he
had by the tail. My mother's exclamation of
horror, as she came out to see what was the
matter, set us free at last.
I have forgotten the name of the man who
lived just out of town and kept bees. I can-
not even remember whether he occupied the old
manse at Lustrup or the Dam-house. It was one
of them, I know. The thing I do remember is
the shift he made to tend his bees without getting
up with the sun as did they. The honey they
gather on the heath when the broom is purple
has a wild flavor which nothing can match, but
THE OLD TOWN 67
it is essential that they shall be about it early,
while the morning sun is on the heather. For
Some reason they closed the hives at night, and
Some one had to open them at sunrise. The
keeper was fond of lying late in bed, and it was
laziness in this instance that was the mother of
invention. He kept hens also, and their coop
adjoined the hives. They were early risers too;
he heard them jump down from their roosts when
he ought to be out tending his bees. So he hit
upon a contrivance, a sort of lever under the
roost, which, when the hens jumped upon it,
opened the hives and let the bees out. After
that he could lie in bed and laugh while his hus-
bandry went on. He was the only inventor I
ever knew the Old Town to turn out, unless you
count in the telegrapher who came when the
wires had been strung to our coast. He was a
lonesome, morose man, fond of taking long walks
by himself. On one of his tramps a vagrant dog
attached itself to him, and the two became friends.
The telegrapher had the notion, however, that a
well-behaved dog must trot obediently at its
68 THE OLD TOWN
master's heels, and that he could not make his
dog do. So he kept him half-starved, and when
he went out, tied a piece of meat to the end of his
stick. After that they were always seen together
in the orthodox way, the dog sniffing industriously
in his tracks as he strode along, looking neither
to the right nor to the left. He was a very thin
and ungainly man, who could look over a six-
foot fence without standing on his toes, and the
procession through the town was most singular.
Of course we dubbed him “the Bone.”
The old bookseller was there, whose birthday
was a movable feast. The date had been lost,
and as it was somewhere in the spring and he
liked Whitsuntide, anyhow, he kept it on that
Sunday, whenever it came. It was something
to have even the sun get up and dance on your
birthday. Perhaps that persuaded him. It was
the tradition that you could see the sun skip for
joy on the holy morning very early, in that
latitude. Most people took the dance on trust
and stayed in bed. And we had the funny Ger-
man shoemaker whose bills were the gems of the
THE OLD TOWN 69
town. The one he sent to the factory owner's
wife, who was a very fine and aristocratic lady,
became its great classic. It ran thus:
“En Paar Stiefel -
“Die Madame — Verschnudelt und hinterge-
flickt.” "
There used to be a Postmaster in the Old Town
who had a very quick and violent temper. The
post-chaise was upset once when he was the only
passenger, and in such a way that he was im-
prisoned within it and unable to open the door.
He called in vain for help; the driver did not
come. At that his gorge rose, and he shrieked
angrily: “Niels' Niels' Where are you? Come
at once.”
“I cannot, Mr. Postmaster,” Niels' voice spoke
patiently from the ditch. “I am lying here with
a broken leg.”
“Hang your leg,” yelled the angry man, from
the chaise; “come at once, I tell you. I am
lying here with a broken neck.”
I was thinking less of the unreasonable Post-
The Madam–Patched before and behind.
70 THE OLD TOWN
master than of the just anger of the district
physician, who one day was called to deal with an
emergency in a near-by farm-house, where all
depended on letting in fresh air quickly. The
patient lay in one of the horrible closet beds that
always gave me a shiver, though they were often
not so bad, if only there were not mice in the
straw. Air there never was, could not be. The
doctor ran to the window and tried to open it.
It was nailed down; probably had not been
opened since the house was built. Dr. P. was a
hasty man, too, and here he had reason, for no
time was to be lost. Looking around for some-
thing to smash the window with, his eye fell
upon the farmer's silver-mounted meerschaum
pipe, with a bowl as big as a man's fist and long
elastic stem. The doctor seized it and, wielding
it as a war club, Smashed pane after pane and
saved his patient. But the farmer sued him.
The pipe was an heirloom and beyond price to
him. It was the one thing that by the country-
folk was valued higher than lands and cattle.
The doctor lost his case, but he took the occasion
THE OLD TOWN 71
to inveigh effectually against the evil abuse of
the cupboard beds that were closed tight with
doors as often as with a curtain. When this last
was so, it was rather to save the wood than the
sleeper. And he lived to see them put under the
ban, and to see windows made to open.
The pipe was, indeed, an indispensable part of
the peasant's equipment. The boy of twelve
had his sticking out of his side pocket, just like
his father. They never stopped smoking except
when they were haying, and I have seen a man
mowing grass with his long pipe hanging from his
mouth. They even counted distances by pipes in-
stead of miles. A peasant would tell you, if you
asked how far it was to the next town, that it
was two pipes, or three pipes, as the case might
be. How far that was, I have forgotten, but it
was a safe enough way of reckoning. For they
went always at the same jog-trot, and the pipe-
bowls were always of the same size. They were
of porcelain and gayly decorated. Among the
young men there was a kind of rivalry as to who
should have the handsomest pipe bowl; the
72 THE OLD TOWN
meerschaum was the holiday pipe, for home and
festive occasions. And it was not only the
country folk who smoked thus. Everybody did
— the men, that is to say. It is only lately the
women have taken to smoking cigars, and in
public. When last I crossed the “Great Belt”
on the steam-ferry, I was greatly annoyed at the
sight of two handsome and otherwise nice young
girls smoking cigarettes on the deck, and I took
occasion to say SO to a motherly woman who
occupied the chair next to mine. She listencil
with polite interest to my diatribe about how
things were when I was a boy, and when I had
finished took out a cigar, a regular man's cigar.
“Yes!” she said, “things do change. Now,
I like a smoke myself. These girls take after me,
I suppose. They are my daughters.” And she
struck a match and lit her weed.
We boys in the Old Town were strictly pro-
hibited from smoking under the school rules,
which prescribed the rod for every such offence.
In consequence, we did it on the sly, thinking it
manly and fine. At his desk, at home, Father
THE OLD TOWN 73
smoked all the time, and so did everybody else.
Many a pound of Kanaster have I carried home
from the tobacconist's shop, the one in Grön-
negade with the naked brown Indian smoking a
very long pipe. From the moment the “Last of
the Mohicans” fell into my hands I looked
upon him as friend and brother. There was
something between us which the grown-ups knew
nothing about. He must be acquainted with
Uncas and Chingachgook and Deerslayer, of -
course, for clearly he was of the good Delawares
and not of the wicked Hurons. He swings from
his hook yet, and I confess to a nodding ac-
quaintance when I pass him in the street. His
pipe is still the biggest part of him.
It was a part of everything. I mind many a
time seeing our family doctor on the way to a
country case, wrapped in his great fur coat and
with the pipe between his teeth as he sat in his
wagon chair. That was a still bigger part of the
doctor's outfit; the great easy-chair that stood in
the hall and was lifted into the farmer's wagon
where it hung suspended from the sideboards.
74 THE OLD TOWN
Farm wagons in those days were not made with
Springs. With his collar up about his ears, his
cap pulled down and “fire up,” the doctor could
sleep comfortably on the longest and coldest ride,
and he had need. For there were few nights
when he was not called out for one. It was hard
work for very poor pay. Father, with a family
of fifteen and errand for the doctor every day,
and sometimes all day, paid our family physi-
cian, I think, not over fifty daler a year, which
is half that in American dollars. But it was not
a matter of dollars. Money could not pay what
our doctor gave us. He was the family friend
before he was the physician. He smoothed the
pillow of suffering, and the last agony was made
easier because he sat by. Grown old and slow of
gait, he goes his rounds yet in the Old Town that
will be my Old Town no longer when I look for
him in vain on his morning route. And where he
goes, to the rich man's house or the poor man's
hut, sunshine and hope come with him.
I have said that in Ribe one seemed to be
always bordering upon the way past because of
-
THE OLD FAMILY DOCTOR,
-









THE OLD TOWN 75
the track it had made everywhere, the many
landmarks it had set. There was another reason;
namely, that so many old people lived there who
in themselves made a link connecting the town
with days long gone. Their lives seemed to
reach straight back and lay hold of it visibly.
People grew older in the Old Town than anywhere
I know of, as if they were loath to let go of it.
There seemed to be no good reason why they
should die, and so they lived and lived, and some
of them are living yet. The old Bishop, whom
we all loved and revered, was 92 when I saw him
vault with the agility of a young man over a
beam some carpenters had left in his way. He
was the father-in-law of Dr. Niels Finsen, whom
all the world knows. Dr. Finsen's father was
Amtmand in Ribe in his day, and his picture in
uniform hangs in the Town Hall. Bishop Balslev
and King Christian had grown old together, and
were friends. When the Bishop thought his
charge required a younger man, he asked the
King to appoint his successor. “Not while I
live,” said the King, and he kept his word. He
76 THE OLD TOWN
outlived his friend, who was in sight of the
century post when his relief came.
There was scarce a street in the Old Town where
Some kindly old face did not look out upon you
with patient eyes that spoke of things unseen by
the crowd, of friends long waiting in the beyond.
In the Cloister' there were always one or two old
women that were nearing the hundred. The
keeper himself was in the nineties. They crept
about, the old men with their staffs in the sun-
shiny garden patches; the women sat at their
curtained windows, busy with sewing or knitting.
For there were ever small trousers to be patched
and small feet to be shod with warm socks for
the winter, if not in their own home then in many
a one about them. And the Old Town loved
them. Some day we heard that they slept, and
we bound wreaths for our friends and strewed the
* The old building was a hospital for centuries after the
Reformation drove out the monks, and for a season served as
an insane asylum. We children used to steal up to the tarred
board fence that enclosed its grounds and, gluing our eyes to
a knot hole, shudder deliciously at the sight of the poor
wretches. It was eventually turned into an Old Ladies Home,
and the name of the “Cloister” was restored to it.
THE OLD TOWN 77
street with wintergreen and spruce, and walked,
singing, their last journey with them, while all the
“THEY CREPT ABOUT, THE OLD MEN WITH THEIR STAFFs.”
“Ashes to ashes — dust to dust.”
But there was no pain in the parting, for in the
living there had been no discord. The welcome
of the grave was peace.

CHAPTER IV
I Do not know
how the forty
years Ihave been
away have dealt
with “Jule-nis-
sen,” the Christ-
mas elf of my
childhood. He
was pretty old
then, gray and
bent, and there
were signs that
his time was
nearly over. So
it may be that
they have laid
him away. I
shall find out
when I go over there next time. When I
was a boy we never sat down to our Christmas
Eve dinner until a bowl of rice and milk had
78
THE CHRISTMAs SHEAf.

THE OLD TOWN 79
been taken up to the attic, where he lived with
the marten and its young, and kept an eye upon
the house — saw that everything ran smoothly. I
never met him myself, but I know the house-cat
must have done so. No doubt they were well
acquainted; for when in the morning I went in
for the bowl, there it was, quite dry and licked
clean, and the cat purring in the corner. So,
being there all night, he must have seen and
likely talked with him. -
I suspect, as I said, that they have not treated
my Nisse fairly in these matter-of-fact days that
have come upon us, not altogether for our own
good, I fear. I am not even certain that they
were quite serious about him then, though to
my mind that was very unreasonable. But then
there is nothing so unreasonable to a child as the
cold reason of the grown-ups. However, if they
have gone back on him, I know where to find
him yet. Only last Christmas when I talked of
him to the tenement-house mothers in my Henry
Street Neighborhood House,"—all of them from
* The Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, New York.
80 THE OLD TOWN
the ever faithful isle, – I saw their eyes light up
with the glad smile of recognition, and half a
dozen called out excitedly, “The Little People !
the Leprecawn ye mean, we know him well,” and
they were not more pleased than I to find that
we had an old friend in common. For the Nisse,
or the Leprecawn, call him whichever you like,
was a friend indeed to those who loved kindness
and peace. If there was a house in which con-
tention ruled, either he would have nothing to
do with it, like the stork that built its nest on
the roof, or else he paid the tenants back in their
own coin, playing all kinds of tricks upon them
and making it very uncomfortable. I suppose
it was this trait that gave people, when they
began to reason so much about things, the notion
that he was really the wraith, as it were, of their
own disposition, which was not so at all. I re-
member the story told of one man who quarrelled
with everybody, and in consequence had a very
troublesome Nisse in the house that provoked
him to the point of moving away; which he did.
But as the load of furniture was going down the
THE NISSE. - -

THE OLD TOWN 81
street, with its owner hugging himself in glee at
the thought that he had stolen a march on the
Nisse, the little fellow poked his head out of
the load and nodded to him, “We are moving
to-day.” At which naturally he flew into a great
rage. But then, that was just a story.
The Nisse was of the family, as you see, very
much of it, and certainly not to be classed with
the cattle. Yet they were his special concern;
he kept them quiet, and saw to it, when the stable-
man forgot, that they were properly bedded and
cleaned and fed. He was very well known to
the hands about the farm, and they said that he
looked just like a little old man, all in gray and
with a pointed red nightcap and long gray beard.
He was always civilly treated, as he surely de-
served to be, but Christmas was his great holiday,
when he became part of it, indeed, and was made
much of. So, for that matter, was everything
that lived under the husbandman's roof, or within
reach of it. The farmer always set a lighted
candle in his window on Christmas Eve, to guide
the lonesome wanderer to a hospitable hearth.
G.
82 THE OLD TOWN
The very sparrows that burrowed in the straw
thatch, and did it no good, were not forgotten.
A sheaf of rye was set out in the snow for them,
so that on that night at least they should have
shelter and warmth unchallenged, and plenty to
eat. At all other times we were permitted to raid
their nests and help ourselves to a sparrow roast,
which was by long odds the greatest treat we had.
Thirty or forty of them, dug out of any old thatch
roof by the light of the stable lantern and stuffed
into Ane's long stocking, which we had borrowed
for a game-bag, made a meal for the whole family,
each sparrow a fat mouthful. Ane was the cook,
and I am very certain that her pot-roast of spar-
row would pass muster at any Fifth Avenue
restaurant as the finest dish of reed-birds that
ever was. However, at Christmas their sheaf
was their sanctuary, and no one as much as
squinted at them. Only last winter when Christ-
mas found me stranded in a little Michigan town,
wandering disconsolate about the streets, I came
across such a sheaf raised on a pole in a door-
yard, and I knew at once that one of my people
THE OLD TOWN 83
lived in that house and kept Yule in the old
way. So I felt as if I were not quite a stranger.
All the animals knew perfectly well that the
holiday had come, and kept it in their way. The
watch-dog was unchained. In the midnight hour
on the Holy Eve the cattle stood up in their stalls
and bowed out of respect and reverence for Him
who was laid in a manger when there was no room
in the inn, and in that hour speech was given them,
and they talked together. Claus, our neighbor's
man, had seen and heard it, and every Christmas
Eve I meant fully to go and be there when it
happened; but always long before that I had been
led away to bed, a very sleepy boy, with all my
toys hugged tight, and when I woke up the day-
light shone through the frosted window-panes,
and they were blowing good morning from the
church tower; it would be a whole year before
another Christmas. So I vowed, with a sigh at
having neglected a really sacred observance, that
I would be there sure on the next Christmas Eve.
But it was always so, every year, and perhaps it
was just as well, for Claus said that it might go
84 THE OLD TOWN
ill with the one who listened, if the cows found
him out.
Blowing in the Yule from the grim old tower
that had stood eight hundred years against the
blasts of the North Sea was one of the customs
of the Old Town that abide, however it fares with
the Nisse; that I know. At sun-up, while yet
the people were at breakfast, the town band
climbed the many steep ladders to the top of
the tower, and up there, in fair weather or foul, -
and sometimes it blew great guns from the wintry
Sea, - they played four old hymns, one to each
corner of the compass, so that no one was for-
gotten. They always began with Luther's sturdy
challenge, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” while
down below we listened devoutly. There was
something both weird and beautiful about those
far-away strains in the early morning light of the
northern winter, something that was not of carth
and that suggested to my child's imagination the
angels' song on far Judean hills. Even now,
after all these years, the memory of it does that.
It could not have been because the music was so
· · · · · -
|-
------
|-~
• • • • • •
----
“BLOWING IN YULE FROM THE GRIM OLD TOWER.”

THE OLD TOWN 85
rare, for the band was made up of small store-
keepers and artisans who thus turned an honest
penny on festive occasions. Incongruously
enough, I think, the official town mourner who
bade people to funerals was one of them. It
was like the burghers' guard, the colonel of
which — we thought him at least a general,
because of the huge brass sword he trailed when
he marched at the head of his men — was the
town tailor, a very small but very martial man.
But whether or no, it was beautiful. I have
never heard music since that so moved me. When
the last strain died away came the big bells with
their deep voices that sang far out over field and
heath, and our Yule was fairly under way.
A whole fortnight we kept it. Real Christmas
was from Little Christmas Eve, which was the
night before the Holy Eve proper, till New
Year. Then there was a week of supplemen-
tary festivities before things slipped back into
their wonted groove. That was the time of
parties and balls. The great ball of the year
was on the day after Christmas. Second Christ-
86 THE OLD TOWN
mas Day we called it, when all the quality
attended at the club-house, where the Amtmand
and the Burgomaster, the Bishop and the Rec-
tor of the Latin School, did the honors and
received the people. That was the grandest of
the town functions. The school ball, late in
autumn, was the jolliest, for then the boys in-
vited each the girl he liked best, and the
older people were guests and outsiders, so to
speak. The Latin School, still the “Cathedral
School,” was as old as the Domkirke itself, and
when it took the stage it was easily first while it
lasted. The Yule ball, though it was a rather
more formal affair, for all that was neither stiff
nor tiresome; nothing was in the Old Town; there
was too much genuine kindness for that. And
then it was the recognized occasion when matches
were made by enterprising mammas, or by the
young themselves, and when engagements were
declared and discussed as the great news of the
day. We heard of all those things afterward
and thought a great fuss was being made over
nothing much. For when a young couple were
THE OLD TOWN 87
declared engaged, that meant that there was no
more fun to be got out of them. They were
given, after that, to go mooning about by them-
selves and to chasing us children away when we
ran across them; until they happily returned to
their senses, got married, and became reasonable
human beings once more.
When we had been sent to bed on the great
night, Father and Mother went away in their
Sunday very best, and we knew they would not
return until two o'clock in the morning, a fact
which alone invested the occasion with unwonted
gravity, for the Old Town kept early hours. At
ten o’clock, when the watchman droned his sleepy
lay, absurdly warning the people to
Be quick and bright,
Watch fire and light,
Our clock it has struck ten,
it was ordinarily tucked in and asleep. But
that night we lay awake a long time listening to
the muffled sound of heavy wheels in the snow
rolling unceasingly past, and trying to picture
to ourselves the grandeur they conveyed. Every
88 THE OLD TOWN
carriage in the town was then in use and
doing overtime. I think there were as many
as four.
When we were not dancing or playing games,
we literally ate our way through the two holiday
weeks. Pastry by the mile did we eat, and gen-
eral indigestion brooded over the town when it
emerged into the white light of the new year.
At any rate it ought to have done so. It is a
prime article of faith with the Danes to this day
that for any one to go out of a friend's house, or
of anybody's house, in the Christmas season with-
out partaking of its cheer, is to “bear away their
Yule,” which no one must do on any account.
Every house was a bakery from the middle of
December until Christmas Eve, and oh! the
Quantities of cakes we ate, and such cakes | We
were sixteen normally, in our home, and Mother
mixed the dough for her cakes in a veritable
horse-trough kept for that exclusive purpose.
As much as a sack of flour went in, I guess, and
gallons of molasses and whatever else went to
the mixing. For weeks there had been long
THE OLD TOWN 89
and anxious speculations as to “what Father
would do,” and gloomy conferences between him
and Mother over the state of the family pocket-
book, which was never plethoric; but at last the
joyful message ran through the house from attic
to kitchen that the appropriation had been made,
“even for citron,” which meant throwing all care
to the winds. The thrill of it, when we children
stood by and saw the generous avalanche going
into the trough ! What would not come out of
it ! The whole family turned to and helped make
the cakes and cut the “pepper-nuts,” which were
little squares of spiced cake-dough we played
cards for and stuffed our pockets with, gnawing
them incessantly. Talk about eating between
meals: ours was a continuous performance for
two solid weeks. The pepper-nuts were the real
staple of Christmas to us children. We paid
forfeits with them in the game of scratch-nose
(jackstraws), when the fellow fishing for his straw
stirred the others and had his nose scratched with
the little file in the bunch as extra penalty; in
“Under which tree lies my pig’” in which the pig
90 THE OLD TOWN
was a pepper-nut, the fingers of the closed hands
the trees ; and in Black Peter. In this last the
loser had his nose blackened with the snuff from
the candle until advancing civilization substi-
tuted a burnt cork. Christmas without pepper-
nuts would have been a hollow mockery indeed.
We rolled the dough in long strings like slender
eels and then cut it, a little on the bias. They
were good, those nuts, when baked brown. I
wish I had some now.
It all stood for the universal desire that in the
joyous season everybody be made glad. I know
that in the Old Town no one went hungry or cold
during the holidays, if indeed any one ever did.
Every one gave of what he had, and no one was
afraid of pauperizing anybody by his gifts, for
they were given gladly and in love, and that
makes all the difference — did then and does
now. At Christmas it is perfectly safe to let
our scientific principles go and just remember
the Lord's command that we love one another.
I subscribe to them all with perfect loyalty, and
try to practise them till Christmas week comes
THE OLD TOWN 91
in with its holly and the smell of balsam and fir,
and the memories of childhood in the Old Town;
then — well, anyway, it is only a little while.
New Year and the long cold winter come soon
enough.
Christmas Eve was, of course, the great and
blessed time. That was the one night in the year
when in the gray old Domkirke services were held
by candle-light. A myriad wax candles twinkled
in the gloom, but did not dispel it. It lingered
under the great arches where the voice of the
venerable minister, the responses of the con-
gregation, and above it all the boyish treble of
the choir billowed and strove, now dreamily
with the memories of ages past, now sharply,
tossed from angle to corner in the stone walls,
and again in long thunderous echoes, Sweeping
all before it on the triumphant strains of the
organ, like a victorious army with banners crowd-
ing through the halls of time. So it sounded to
me, as sleep gently tugged at my eyelids. The
air grew heavy with the smell of evergreens and
of burning wax, and as the thunder of war drew
92 THE OLD TOWN
farther and farther away, in the shadow of the
great pillars stirred the phantoms of mailed
knights whose names were hewn in the grave-
stones there. We youngsters clung to the skirts
of Mother as we went out and the great doors
fell to behind us. And yet those Christmas
Eves, with Mother's gentle eyes forever in-
separable from them, and with the glad cries
of Merry Christmas ringing all about, have left
a touch of sweet peace in my heart which all
the years have not effaced, nor ever will.
At home the great dinner of the year was wait-
ing for us: roast goose stuffed with apples and
prunes, rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar on
it, and a great staring butter eye in the middle.
The pudding was to lay the ground-work with, and
it was served in deep soup-plates. It was the
dish the Nisse came in on, and the cat. On New
Year's Eve both these were left out; but to make
up for it an almond was slipped into the “gród,”
and whoever found it in his plate got a present.
It was no device to make people “fletch,” but it
served the purpose admirably. At Christmas we
ºpe,
T
la
(ſº,
*
º
º
f



THE OLD TOWN 93
had doughnuts after the goose, big and stout and
good. However I managed it, I don’t know,
but it is a tradition in the family, and I remember
it well, that I once ate thirteen on top of the big
dinner. Evidently I was having a good time.
Dinner was, if not the chief end of man, at least
an item in his make-up, and a big one."
When it had had time to settle and all the
kitchen work was done, Father took his seat
at the end of the long table, with all the house-
hold gathered about, the servants included and
the baby without fail, and read the story of The
Child: “And it came to pass in those days,”
while Mother hushed the baby. Then we sang
together “A Child is Born in Bethlehem,” which
was the simplest of our hymns, and also the one
we children loved best, for it told of how in heaven
we were to walk to church
On sky-blue carpets, star-bedeckt,
* The reader who is not afraid of dyspepsia by suggestion
may consider the following Christmas bill of fare which ob-
tained among the peasants east of the Old Town: On a large
trencher a layer of pork and ribs, on top of that a nest of fat
sausages, in which sat a roast duck.
94 THE OLD TOWN
which was a great comfort. Children love beauti-
ful things, and we had few of them. The great
and precious treasure in our house was the rag
carpet in the spare room which we were allowed
to enter only on festive occasions such as Christ-
mas. It had an orange streak in it which I can
see to this day. Whenever I come across one
that even Nemotely suggests it, it gives me yet
a kind of solemn feeling. We had no piano, -
that was a luxury in those days, – and Father
was not a singer, but he led on bravely with his
tremulous bass and we all joined in, Ane the
cook and Maria the housemaid furtively wiping
their eyes with their aprons, for they were good
and pious folk and this was their Christmas ser-
vice. So we sang the ten verses to end, with
their refrain “Hallelujah! hallelujah,” that al-
ways seemed to me to open the very gates of
Yule.
And it did, literally; for when the last hal-
lelujah died away the door of the spare room was
flung wide and there stood the Christmas tree,
all shining lights, and the baby was borne in,
“WE join ED HAND's AND DANCED ARound THE TREE.”

THE OLD TOWN 95
wide-eyed, to be the first, as was proper; for was
not this The Child's holiday? Unconsciously we
all gave way to those who were nearest Him, who
had most recently come from His presence and
were therefore in closest touch with the spirit of
the holiday. So, when we joined hands and
danced around the tree, Father held the baby, and
we laughed and were happy as the little one
crowed his joy and stretched the tiny arms tow-
ard the light.
Light and shadow, joy and sorrow, go hand in
hand in the world. While we danced and made
merry, there was one near for whom Christmas
was but grief and loss. Out in the white fields
he went from farm to farm, a solitary wanderer,
the folklore had it, looking for plough or harrow on
which to rest his weary limbs. It was the Wan-
dering Jew, to whom this hope was given, that,
if on that night of all in the year he could find
some tool used in honest toil over which the sign
of the cross had not been made, his wanderings
would be at an end and the curse depart from
him, to cleave thenceforward to the luckless
96 THE OLD TOWN
farmer." He never found what he sought in my
time. The thrifty husbandman had been over
his field on the eve of the holiday with a watch-
ful eye to his coming. When the bell in the dis-
tant church tower struck the midnight hour,
belated travellers heard his sorrowful wail as he
fled over the heath and vanished.
When Ansgarius preached the White Christ
to the vikings of the North, so runs the legend
of the Christmas tree, the Lord sent His three
messengers, Faith, Hope, and Love, to help light
the first tree. Seeking one that should be high
as hope, wide as love, and that bore the sign of
the cross on every bough, they chose the balsam
fir, which best of all the trees in the forest met the
requirements. Perhaps that is a good reason why
there clings about the Christmas tree in my old
home that which has preserved it from being
swept along in the flood of senseless luxury that
has swamped so many things in our money-mad
* An unromantic variation of this was the belief that the
farmer who left his plough out on Christmas would get a
drubbing from his wife within a twelvemonth. I hope who-
ever held to that got what he richly deserved.
THE OLD TOWN 97
day. At least so it was then. Every time I see
a tree studded with electric lights, garlands of
tinsel-gold festooning every branch, and hung
with the hundred costly knicknacks the store-
keepers invent year by year “to make trade,”
until the tree itself disappears entirely under its
burden, I have a feeling what a fraud has been
practised on the kindly spirit of Yule. Wax
candles are the only real thing for a Christmas
tree, candles of waac that mingle their perfume
with that of the burning fir, not the by-product
of some coal-oil or other abomination. What if
the boughs do catch fire; they can be watched,
and too many candles are tawdry, anyhow. Also,
red apples, Oranges, and old-fashioned cornu-
copias made of colored paper, and made at home,
look a hundred times better and fitter in the
green; and So do drums and toy trumpets and
wald-horns, and a rocking-horse reined up in
front that need not have cost forty dollars, or
anything like it.
I am thinking of one, or rather two, a little
piebald team with a wooden seat between, for
H
98 THE OLD TOWN
which Mother certainly did not give over seventy-
five cents at the store, that as “Belcher and
Mamie ’” — the names were bestowed on the
beasts at sight by Kate, aged three, who bossed
the play-room — gave a generation of romping
children more happiness than all the expensive
railroads and trolley-cars and steam-engines that
are considered indispensable to keeping Christ-
mas nowadays. And the Noah's Ark with
Noah and his wife and all the animals that went
two by two — ah, well ! I haven’t set out to
preach a sermon on extravagance that makes
no one happier, but I wish – The legend makes
me think of the holly that grew in our Danish
woods. We called it Christ-thorn, for to us it
was of that the crown of thorns was made with
which the cruel soldiers mocked our Saviour, and
the red berries were the drops of blood that fell
from His anguished brow. Therefore the holly was
a sacred tree, and to this day the woods in which I
find it seem to me like the forest where the Christ-
mas roses bloomed in the night when the Lord was
born, different from all other woods, and better.
THE OLD TOWN 99
Mistletoe was rare in Denmark. There was
known to be but one oak in all the land on which
it grew. But that did not discourage the young.
We had our kissing games which gave the boys
and girls their chance to choose sides, and in the
Christmas season they went on right merrily.
There was rarely a night that did not bring the
children together under some roof or other. They
say that kissing goes by favor, but we had not
arrived at that point yet, though we had our
preferences. In the game of Post Office, for
instance, he was a bold boy who would dare call
out the girl he really liked, to get the letter that
was supposed to be awaiting her. You could tell
for a dead certainty who was his choice by watch-
ing whom he studiously avoided asking for. I
have a very vivid recollection of having once
really dared with sudden desperation, and of the
defiant flushed face, framed in angry curls, that
confronted me in the hall, the painful silence
while we each stood looking the other way and
heard our playmates tittering behind the closed
door, – for well they knew, - and her indignant
100 THE OLD TOWN
stride as she went back to her seat unkissed, with
me trailing behind, feeling like a very sheepish
boy, and no doubt looking the part.
The Old Year went out with much such a
racket as we make nowadays, but of quite a
different kind. We did not blow the New Year
in, we “smashed” it in. When it was dark on
New Year's Eve, we stole out with all the cracked
and damaged crockery of the year that had been
hoarded for the purpose and, hieing ourselves
to some favorite neighbor's door, broke our pots
against it. Then we ran, but not very far or
very fast, for it was part of the game that if one
was caught at it, he was to be taken in and treated
to hot doughnuts. The smashing was a mark of
favor, and the citizen who had most pots broken
against his door was the most popular man in
town. When I was in the Latin School, a cranky
burgomaster, whose door had been freshly painted,
gave orders to the watchmen to stop it and gave
them an unhappy night, for they were hard put
to it to find a way it was safe to look, with the
streets full of the best citizens in town, and their
SMASHED THE NEW YEAR IN.”
º
ſº


THE OLD TOWN 101
wives and daughters, sneaking singly by with
bulging coats on their way to Salute a friend.
That was when our mothers — those who were not
out smashing in New Year—came out strong, after
the fashion of mothers. They baked more dough-
nuts than ever that night, and beckoned the
watchman in to the treat; and there he sat,
blissfully deaf while the street rang with the
thunderous salvos of our raids; until it was dis-
covered that the burgomaster himself was on
patrol, when there was a sudden rush from kitchen
doors and a great Scurrying through streets that
grew strangely silent.
The town had its revenge, however. The
burgomaster, returning home in the midnight
hour, stumbled in his gate over a discarded Christ-
mas tree hung full of old boots and many black
and sooty pots that went down around him with
great smash in the upset, so that his family
came running out in alarm to find him sprawling
in the midst of the biggest celebration of all.
His dignity suffered a shock which he never got
over quite. But it killed the New Year's fun, too.
102 THE OLD TOWN
For he was really a good fellow, and then he was
the burgomaster, and chief of police to boot. I
suspect the fact was that the pot smashing had
run its course. Perhaps the supply of pots was
giving out; we began to use tinware more about
that time. That was the end of it, anyhow.
We boys got square, too, with the watchmen.
We knew their habit of stowing themselves away
in the stage-coach that stood in the market-place
when they had cried the hour at ten o'clock, and
we caught them napping there one dark night
when we were coming home from a party. The
stage had doors that locked on the outside. We
slammed them shut and ran the conveyance,
with them in it wildly gesticulating from the
windows, through the main street of the town,
amid the cheers of the citizens whom the racket
aroused from their slumbers. We were safe
enough. The watchmen were not anxious to
catch us, maddened as they were by our prank,
and they were careful not to report us either. I
chuckled at that exploit more than once when,
in years long after, I went the rounds of the mid-
------
！ 4
JL.H™)：
N YIH YCI GINO GIHOIHI, ĐNTā āVN INGIHL LHĐnvO GIAA. ,,

THE OLD TOWN 103
night streets with Haroun-al-Roosevelt, as they
called New York's Police Commissioner, to find his
patrolmen sleeping Soundly on their posts when
they should have been catching thieves. Human
nature, police human nature, anyhow, is not so dif-
ferent, after all, in the old world and in the new.
With Twelfth Night our Yule came to an end.
In that night, if a girl would know her fate, she
must go to bed walking backward and throw a
shoe over her left shoulder, or hide it under her
pillow, I forget which, perhaps both, and say
aloud a verse that prayed the Three Holy Kings
to show her the man
Whose table I must set,
Whose bed I must spread,
Whose name I must bear,
Whose bride I must be.
The man who appeared to her in her sleep was to
be her husband. There was no escape from it,
and consequently she did not try. He was her
Christmas gift, and she took him for better or for
worse. Let us hope that the Nisse played her no
Scurvy trick, and that it was for better always.
CHAPTER V
--> THE stork came
in April, with de-
livery from the vile
º tyranny of March.
* Talk of March vio-
º º lets 1 to us the
º month meant cod-
º º - -
*º-ſº º liver oil. It was our
º Sº, N.
tº } º º-º-º-
º
: ſº steady dessert all
GETTING READY FoR THE REVIEw. through it. Good
for the system, they said. Perhaps it was. I
think it encouraged duplicity. The rule was that
when we had grown to like it so that we licked
the spoon after it, we might quit. You wouldn't
believe how quickly we came to adore it. How-
ever, when our need was greatest, the stork came,
and with it balmy spring and our freedom. Not
necessarily all at once: three times the stork had
to have snow in its nest to make things right;
but we knew the sunshine was not far away.
One day we heard it on its nest, jabbering out
104



THE STORK CAME IN APRIL.

THE OLD TOWN 105
a noisy “How d'do” through its long red bill,
and then we children gathered below and sang
our song of welcome:
Allegro.
Stork, Stork - ie long leg
Where were you this long while 2
Saw you King Pha - ra - oh's lof - ty stone
—eº-
Stalk'd you in Nile Riv - er mead - ows 2

106 THE OLD TOWN
The swallow and the starling were not far be-
hind it. They were all our tenants and lived
under our roof, or on it, but the stork was the
only one who paid rent formally. Payment was
made in kind. Every other year he threw an egg
out of the nest, and the next year a fledgling stork.
For the rest he held aloof, disdaining haughtily
to hold communication of any kind with us.
Even when a disabled stork became, by force of
circumstances, a member of the household,
residing in the hen-house through the winter, he
never grew familiar, but accepted what was given
to him with quiet reserve as from a subject people;
which, of course, was his right, seeing that he was a
public functionary of the first importance. We
had no stork on our house, but both our neigh-
bors did, and as if to make up for the apparent
slight, he was a regular visitor in our family.
They seemed to always know when he was coming,
and when I was told of it, I never failed to leave
a Tvebak for him in the window which the nurse
had left open so that he should not wake up the
whole house by rapping on the pane with his bill.
THE OLD TOWN 107
And when it was gone in the morning, I knew
that a little brother had come to join our com-
pany; and sure enough it was so.
The Swallow sang for us, and we saw to it that
his way out and in of the hallway where he built
his nest was free, by leaving a pane out of the
transom. If by any chance that was obstructed,
we knew it by his flying up and down before the
doorway, waiting anxiously for some one to open
it, that he might slip in where a string of little
round heads, always set in a straight row, were
clamoring with wide-open bills for flies and gnats.
When the starling sang his evening Song in the
big poplar, the Old Town was white with the
bloom of the elder. He left it dyed a deep purple,
for he was as fond of elderberries as we were of
the soup our mothers made of them, and the
stain of them abides. In between the blossom-
ing and the berrying when his youngsters were
grown, he took himself off with his wife for sev-
eral weeks, leaving only the children behind. To
France, it was said, he went, and to Mediterranean
olive groves, where they hunted him as a nuisance.
108 THE OLD TOWN
We loved him and gave him sanctuary. And he
helped the farmer in turn by ridding his field of
pests. Where a flock of starlings settled down
for luncheon, no wriggling thing remained to tell
the tale.
By the time the stork was settled on the Rec-
tor's house and busy repairing his nest, our boy-
ish eyes turned speculatively toward the swelling
buds of the pear tree that hung temptingly over
the narrow way to the Latin School, and we
tried to estimate how many of them had pears
in them, and what were the chances of their
happening to hit us as they fell, later on. Our
daily walk took the direction of the Castle IIill,
and turned off at the big buckthorn hedge to
the river where we swam in summer. The cow-
slips were in the meadows then, and forget-me-
nots grew on the bank where the rushes nodded to
the waters going out to the sea, as if they would
like to go too, but, being unable, gave them a mes-
sage of cheer and good luck on the way. And the
spring birds called to each other in the meadows.
Then the bright nights were at hand. They
THE OLD TOWN 109
came, as night does in the hot countries, sud-
denly. You saw in the almanac – the 6th of
May, I think it was — that they were due, and
that night, or the next if it was clear, you noticed
a something in the atmosphere that was different.
You walked with a lighter step, and your glance
strayed constantly to the west, where the light
never quite went out, but kept moving round
north, to hail the coming day in the east. And
every morning it came earlier and left later, till
St. John's Day was passed, when the days
again began to grow shorter. Then one night in
early August, when we walked abroad on the
causeway, we knew that the summer was soon
over. The light had gone out of the sky, as sud-
denly as it came, and the world was changed.
There lives in my memory such an evening in
after years. I had been home — for ever the
Old Town remained home to one whose cradle
was rocked there — and was going my farewell
rounds among the old people and the old places
before packing off with the stork and his family.
My way took me past the Castle Hill in the early
110 THE OLD TOWN
twilight. A man stood up there, a lonely figure
sharply outlined against the light that was fading
out of the western sky. He stood watching it as
if he would hold it fast if he could, never stirring
once while the warm pink changed to a steely
gray, cold as the moonlight on Arctic ice. Be-
hind him the town lay buried in its shadows. I
almost fancied I saw him shiver as they crept up
the hill to close him in their long night. I knew
him, a Schoolmate of mine, a man in good posi-
tion who had remained unmarried and was now
past middle age, always a lonesome sort of fel-
low. He stood there yet when the houses shut
him out of my sight, and I did not see him again.
Three days later, on the day we sailed from
Copenhagen, I heard that he was dead. He had
killed himself, no one knew why. He was com-
fortable as the world goes, and there was no
explanation of his act, they said. To me none
was needed. The picture of him standing there
alone, the twilight of summer and of life closing
in upon him, rose up before me, and I thought I
understood.
THE OLD TOWN 111
With the coming of the bright nights the Old
Town grew young again. Its staid habits were
laid aside; the watchmen cried the bedtime hour
in vain. At all hours of the night, till the mid-
night bell sounded and Sometimes later, young and
old were abroad, on the causeway, in the Plant-
age, or driving to the shore and taking their
supper there. The young rowed and sang on the
river in the long glowing twilight and had a good
time. School and university were closed, and
the students came back to visit old friends and
to make love. With midsummer came “Holme
week,” of which more hereafter, when they all
went out and sported in the hay together. An
endless procession of young couples have driven
home on the hay wagons, watching the midnight
glow in the northern heavens from the top of the
load, hand in hand, and thinking earth a new-
found paradise for Two, while Cupid laughed at
the ferry-landing to see them go. In Holme week
he was always a regular boarder with the ferry-
master. But the young never suspected it, or if
they did, showed no fear; and their elders, who
112 THE OLD TOWN
knew, having met him there in their time, held
their peace. I am not sure that they did not
even surreptitiously pay his board. For they
were sly, the good people of the Old Town.
Early in August the young storks began to
gather on the high roof of the Cloister church, and
every day we saw them manoeuvring there in
agitated rows, between practice flights into the
fields that grew longer and longer toward the
time for their departure. At the final review,
we knew, any of them that could not fly well
enough and far enough would be killed by the
rest, for no laggards were wanted on their long
trip to King Pharaoh's land. We watched them
Soaring high, high up, and hoped fervently that
our own stork, or the neighbor's we knew so well,
might pass muster and not be stabbed to death
with those long bills which we had seen carrying
home snakes and frogs and lizards to the nest so
often, and always raised in loud thanksgiving as
the feast was spread before the brood. Then they
seemed the gentlest of birds; but all at once the
red beaks became swords to our imagination, to
----∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
∞∞∞
*****-
§），|-
§：|-|-
*******）
！
：：::：：:：…：）|-：…- .-…--|-：：：********）
≡----××××××××××××××----













THE OLD TOWN 113
pierce the helpless youngster who got a bad re-
port at his “exam.” Every day we looked to see
if they were all there and were glad when none
was missing. Then one morning we looked out,
and the Cloister roof was bare. The storks were
gone. Every nest in the town was empty. We
searched awhile, incredulous; then, with a little
shiver, went to look up our skates and our
mittens.
Before we had use for them, however, came the
annual fair in September. The Ribe Fair was fa-
mous throughout the middle ages, when the town
was the chief seaport of the country. Then mer-
chants came from far and near, and the court
bought its purple and fine linen of them. In our
day it had dwindled, as had the Old Town itself,
until barely a baker's dozen of traders from abroad
brought their wares. But the Ribe merchants
built their booths in the Square, and there came
embroideries from Schleswig, pottery from the
country to the north – the black “Jute pots,”
that alone were deemed fit to cook in by a careful
housewife. The woman who served fried eels,
I
114 THE OLD TOWN
and coffee out of a copper kettle with rock sugar
in lumps, -lovely lumps, strung on a thread, can
I ever forget ! — sat at the Cat-head Door of the
Domkirke. To us she was as much of an institu-
tion as the Domkirke itself and twice as impor-
tant, for she came only once a year, while the
church was there all the time. In the narrow
lane between the booths multitudes of farm-folk
Swarmed, togged out in their best, admiring it all
and meeting friends at every step. The blue of
the border gendarmes and the red and green of
the Fanó girls made a pretty picture. The Fair
was in fact the great opportunity of the country
folk for social intercourse in the days when news-
papers were rare, railroad and telegraph as yet
to come, and a letter an event news of which
spread through a country neighborhood and was
discussed at its firesides in all its probable bear-
ings. The peasants came to the Fair, the men
to dicker and trade, if nothing else their pipes,
it being understood that a treat went with the
trade, so that they became speedily mellow and
sometimes loud over the tavern board. The
* - - * * -
WERE BOOTHS WITH TOYS AND BOOTHIS WITH TRUMET -
- - - -
-
-a -
-
29


THE OLD TOWN 115
women laid in their supply of ribbons, calico, and
such like for the year, heard and discussed the
news of weddings, christenings, and funerals; and
the foundation of many a match was laid with a
parting invitation to the prospective suitor to
“come and see the farm” as the next step in the
negotiations.
To us children it was all an enchanted land.
There were booths with toys and booths with
trumpets and booths with great “honey-cakes”
with an almond heart right in the middle. No
such cakes are made nowadays, and the trumpets
in the toy-shops send forth no such blasts of rap-
ture as did those we bought at the Fair in the Old
Town and blew till our cheeks bulged and our
eyes stared with the strain. Up and down we
trooped, through lane after lane, dragging weary
but happy mothers in our wake, trumpeting — I
can hear those peals across all the toilsome years.
Tin horns—bah Those were trumpets, I tell you,
red and green and silver-shine. And at last we
brought up in front of the Great Panorama and
stopped, breathless, to look and listen.
116 THE OLD TOWN
The panorama man kept no booth. He was
above it. His entire outfit consisted of a sheet of
canvas hung upon a pole and painted all over with
the Scenes he sang about. For he was a singer,
the nineteenth-century descendant of the Skjald
of our forefathers; far descended, alas ! his song
was ever about murder and horror on sea and
land. He was the real precursor of the yellow
press—pictures, songs, and all. Whether he made
the latter up himself, or merely sang the ballad
of the day, I do not know. If it was not about a
man who took his girl to a dance and, getting her
aside,
Andante.
r–0&n I , —d | –4 I
"jº)) I | | I | _j 1 l *:
Öº:#EEE . L } | –––. 1
—I º JTL ( / C I L II |
Jº Tº- *T -g- º
He took his knife from his pock - et
F#–1 + | E–H
HéHRH ||
# = + + = *
And o – pen - e - ed it up,


preparatory to stabbing her with great detail
and deliberation, then it dealt with the latest
world horror, the full circumstances of which
THE OLD TOWN 117
were set forth in lurid words, and even more
lurid paint, on the canvas. Thus, for instance,
the burning of the emigrant steamer Austria in
mid-Ocean. I can see him now, slapping the
canvas with his rattan, and hear every inflection
of his strident voice as he drew attention to the
picture of it steaming peacefully along, and sang:
A malante
() º
[TVººD ſº | T
DZTT CO2 | || | M. > ||
Liſſy All Jill -] |N （NIL _l
[…VSU E E =-|-- s s 2––– T
U º #3; w º
Proudly o'er the O - C62. In WaW 6S
^ 4
| Wºº | |
HºRº N N– | | NA N=== |
TVSU —l Tº T -] –H =-H
e Jº CJ ey -e- -G- -G- U.7 Cº.
Sped the Steann - er Aus - tri - a.
A 4
E24-# E- | E |
[T Iſſy --|-- T N–N–H– ſ:
|-SP. N–INCI & s s g——
Tø- # º †
Pas - Sen - gers it had in num - bers
!
L-ſ): | ſ
Lºſ IV * — —l |
[...] If Y } INTL TI —l Jº. I
UVSU i H– | l—l- T
* * * * * * + +
-—-
º -g-
Go - ing to A - mer - i - ca.
n!}
| Wºº | | ºl
Lºzaſ. Tº | T] | |
[...] If N R. - || | ſ ºr ºl |-sess | |
TVSU IN Nº Lº — ––––4– } i AT]
° is is a # ºr #5- " ºr





To the cap - tain who com - mand - ed
118 THE OLD TOWN

a 4
ſ LZº. I A |
Hº!——-A---N–2 H-N-----
H(GB) s ~ L7 – [ _ _ P. º I
J Uy - U-7 ( )
Nev - er dream Carºle of the blow
n!
| LZºº | | |
IZCTI | | \ h | | I |
[...] [[TY Iºlº N. N | | | N RA | T
DVSU | __ ] T ~ T | Tw. T]
U (J CJ (J w ( / -º-, -º- (J

#
Which fate for him up - on this voy - age
!
#

|
:
:
| —N N– == |
* * : * + i + #
Un - luck - i - ly pre - pared has.
#
|-
Then the fire and the horror, the women throwing
the children overboard and being swallowed up
by yellow and crimson flames that sent grewsome
thrills up and down our backbones — and then
the hat passed around for the troubadour. His
was the pièce de résistance of the Fair, and we
went home, when we had heard him through,
impressed that we had heard t .e heart of the
great world throb.
Besides the Fair which in olden times was known
as Our Lady's Fair, perhaps because of the Dom-
kirke," in the shadow of which it was held, more
likely because it came on the Virgin's feast-day,
there were two other kinds, the cattle fairs and
* The Church of Our Lady was its official title.
THE GIRL MARKET. - -


THE OLD TOWN 119
the “girl-market.” The last was in the spring
and fall, when farmers hired their help. Those
who were for hire then came to the Old Town on
a set date, and stood in two long rows in front of
the old tavern in the Square, which remained
unchanged, as did the custom no doubt, from the
Sixteenth Century. The women bared their arms
to the shoulder, and the farmers felt them,
approvingly or not as they thought them strong
to do their work. There are tricks in all trades.
An old country parson from one of the neighboring
villages tells that a mistress at whose house hard
scrabble ruled would sometimes be found to smear
her mouth with bacon to give the impression that
there was fat living where she was at home.
When a pair were suited, the dickering began,
and the bargain made had the sanction of law.
Indeed, the applicant’s “book” was the first thing
asked for if the physical inspection had been sat-
isfactory. In it his or her character was recorded
by successive employers, and attested by the
police, to whom it had to be presented each time
the owner of it made a change of base.
120 THE OLD TOWN
All through the spring great droves of steers
came through the town on their way to the
Holstein marshlands, where they were to be
fattened for the Hamburg and London trade.
Ribe was on one of the ancient cattle tracks
from the north to the great southern pastures.
Then we heard the tread of many hurrying hoofs
at early dawn and the loud hop-how ! of the herd-
ers trying to keep their droves together. While
they passed through the town, the people kept
discreetly indoors. Indeed, there was no room
for them outside ; but they bore it patiently,
being used to it. Often enough the cows that
lived in the town went in by the same door their
owners used, and naturally there came to be a
neighborly feeling between them, which was
extended to these wayfarers. Sometimes, in-
stead of cattle, flocks of Jutland horses came
through with braided manes and tails, headed
south for the armies of Prussia or France or
Austria. Twice a year, I think, they halted at
the Old Town, and the market Square became
the scene of a great cattle fair. It was on one of
THE OLD TOWN 121
these occasions that I made my first bid for a
horse. I must have been seven or eight years old,
and had with much argument brought my mother
over to my notion that a little horse was a good
thing to have about the house. It could be
stabled in the peat shed, where we kept our winter
WHERE THE Cows Go IN THROUGH THE STREET DOOR.
fuel, and in Summer grass enough to more than
keep it grew between the cobble-stones in our
street, and on the narrow sidewalk. So it was
decided that I might buy a horse at the next fair,
if I could get it for eight skilling, — about five
cents, I should say. That was the appropriation,
and with it I sped, my heart beating fast, to the

122 THE OLD TOWN
Square and interviewed a dealer, telling him that
I only wanted a little horse, being but a little
boy; and besides, the peat shed was small. I had
seen some that were just the kind I wanted, run-
ning along with a farmer's team sometimes.
The dealer heard me through very gravely, and
as gravely inspected the eight skilling which I
unwrapped and showed him as a guarantee of
good faith. He ran his eye over his sleek mares
and regretted that those little horses were scarce
that year, and just then he had none in stock.
But he was going South, where they were plenti-
ful, he said, and if I would save my money till
he came back, he would be sure to bring me one.
And I went home joyfully to report my success
and get the shed ready, and also to drive off the
weeding women, who came most inappropriately
that very spring to dig out the dandelions in
our gutter. They were to be kept as a choice
morsel for my horse. I waited anxiously all
through that summer and kept a lookout for
every drove of horses that came through, but my
trader I never saw again, and in none of the herds
THE OLD TOWN 123
was my little horse. After a while I forgot about
it in the great overwhelming sensation of the
time. The King came to the town.
In its old age that was an honor it had rarely
enjoyed. No one there had, I think, seen the
King, unless in the field as a soldier seven years
before, in '49–50. King Frederik, furthermore,
was a great favorite of the people. He had given
them constitutional government, and he was the
popular hero whose army had driven the in-
vaders back after two years of hard fighting.
So we turned out to receive him, to the last in-
habitant. He came, impressive, kingly, yet with
a bonhomie about him that made the common
people accept him as their own wherever he went.
They told of how he had fared with a steady
Jutland farmer who entertained him and his
suite on the journey across country. Those yeo-
men still said “thou” to the King, as their fore-
fathers did in the long ago, and knew little of the
ways of courts – cared less, I fancy. Also, they
are as close-fisted as they are square in a trade
with “known man.” A neighbor is safe in their
124 THE OLD TOWN
hands; others may look out for themselves. So
when the King went to his host and thanked him
for his trouble, calling him by his first name as
was his wont, for he understood his men, Hans
scratched his head.
“It's all right with the trouble, King,” he
answered; “but about the expense. That's
worse.”
The King laughed long and loud and squared
up, and they parted friends.
This was the man we turned out in a body to
honor. The men who had horses and could ride
received him as an escort, miles up the road.
All the countryside was there to see and to cheer;
most of the men had carried muskets in the war,
and to the tune of “Den tappre Landsoldat ''
they brought him in. The streets were hung
with garlands of green, and little girls in white
strewed flowers before the royal procession. I
remember it all as if it were yesterday. In the
evening there was a great time in the Domkirke.
The King sat inside the altar-rail in his blue
soldier's uniform and with a big silver helmet on.
THE OLD TOWN 125
Years and years after, going through the National
Museum at Copenhagen, I saw it hanging there in
a glass case, and clear across the room I knew it
at sight. That was the way a king ought to
look, and it was the way King Christian, his
successor, did look when I saw him in the same
seat nearly fifty years later. Only he was slen-
der and youthful of figure despite his eighty
odd years. King Frederik was stout. Stout
or slender, he was our boyish ideal of a
king.
There was the gala dinner to which our father
and mother went and came home in the small
hours of the morning with their pockets full of
bonbons, and with wondrous tales of the show
that made our ears tingle all that winter. And
then there was the discovery on the Castle Hill,
made for the occasion expressly. That was the
very peak and pinnacle of it all. -
Ever since anybody could remember there had
been stories about a secret passage leading from
the Castle Hill under the moat into town—now,
it was said, to the Bishop's Manse, and then again
126 THE OLD TOWN
to the Cloister, or to the Domkirke itself. It
was supposed to be a way they had in the old
fighting days of getting out and taking the enemy
in the rear, when the castle was besieged and they
were hard put to it. No one ever knew the
truth of it, and so we all believed it; but now
by some fortunate chance the secret passage
was actually found. The mouth of it had been
uncovered, and the King was to see it. It was a
tunnel built of the big brick the monks made,
and which we still knew as monk-brick. Half
the Old Town is built of it, that is to say, castle,
cloisters, and churches long since gone live again
in the walls of the houses built since the Reforma-
tion. What is quite evidently a part of the
mantelpiece from the castle adorns the entrance
to the silversmith's on the corner of the street
through which King Valdemar rode to his dying
Queen, and the searcher of to-day, seeking vainly
a trace of his famous castle where it stood, walks
over it, unthinking, when he goes in to buy a
souvenir of his visit. This secret way stirred
the town mightily. It was confirmation of the
THE OLD TOWN 127
old rumors, and it was in itself a mystery. Where
was the other end of the hole 2 J
The King saw, but declined the honor of being
the explorer. He suggested first one then another
of his suite with less avoirdupois. But they all
had excuses. In fact, a small boy might barely
have done it; further, the hole led downward
and was black and ill-smelling. So it remained
unexplored. It stood open for some time, an
object of awe and many speculative creeps to us
boys; then it was covered up. I regret to have
to add, as destroying a long-cherished illusion
that had a glamour about it which it is hateful
to dispel, that when diggings were made in the
Castle Hill last summer, under competent leader-
ship, our Secret passage was discovered to be an
old sewer that led no farther than the dry moat.
It was just as well none of the King's courtiers
went down.
Those close-fisted farmer neighbors of ours
were sometimes very well-to-do; but a hard fight
with a lean soil had taught them the value of
money earned, perhaps overmuch. In the Old
128 THE OLD TOWN
Town, as I have said, there were no very rich peo-
ple, but the poor were not poor either in the sense
in which one thinks of poverty in a great city.
They had always enough to eat and were com-
fortably housed. There were no beggars, unless
you would countas such the travelling “Burschen,”
mechanics making the rounds of Denmark and
Germany under their guild plan, working where
they could and, asking alms when they had noth-
ing, the which we freely gave. It was an under-
stood thing that that was not charity in any
sense, but a kind of lift to a traveller on his way.
So he was getting experience in his work, what-
ever it might be, by seeing the ways of other
communities, and by and by would return to his
own, better regarded as man and mechanic for
having “travelled” in his years. It was, of
course, the old mediaeval system of which we saw
the last. There is very little left of it to-day, I
imagine.
I said that there were no beggars in the Old
Town. There are indeed few in Denmark, where
prosperity is very evenly distributed. It was,
THE OLD TOWN 129
nevertheless, there I encountered the slyest little
beggar it was ever my fortune to come across.
It was in one of the cemeteries of Copenhagen,
where we had been to look up a friend's grave,
that we came upon a little girl, a child of ten, who
was fashioning a little mound in the dust and
putting a monument over it, a piece of a broken
Slate. She looked up as we stopped beside her,
noticing our serious faces and no doubt check-
ing us off at once as being there on business, not
mere chance visitors.
“Here lies my cat,” she said. “It was red.”
“Oh l’” We were interested at once. “And
what did it die of ?”
“The weasel killed it — sucked its blood.”
We walked right into the trap – “And is there
to be a writing?”
“Yes,” sadly; “Good-by, little Svip; ' but I
have no money to buy a slate pencil with.”
She accepted our penny with the gravity of an
undertaker as she cast a swift glance down the
Walk where two women in deep mourning were
coming. Then she went on making her grave.
EC
130 THE OLD TOWN
There came a season in the autumn when the
Old Town resounded with the squealing of count-
-
+
*
--
-
*
-
-
ſº
flºº.
-
“TRENCHERs of stEAMING SAUSAGE.”
less pigs. It
was killing-
time when the
fat friend so
fondly cher-
ished through-
out the year
was to make
return by fur-
nishing forth
the tables of
his hosts. We
boys heard it
with joy, for
we knew what
was to come
after all the
woe. Toward
evening of the
great day
trenchers of
-







THE OLD TOWN 131
steaming Sausage were carried around among the
neighbors who had no pigs, that they also might
taste of the good things of the earth. Blood
Sausage was there, big and round and red, and
good to eat, fried with syrup; and liver sausage,
pale but appealing; and sausage with rice in and
Sausage with spices in; and roll Sausage, which
sometimes I buy in delicatessen shops nowadays;
but they must have lost the art of making them,
for they don’t taste as they did then. The
trencher must have been welcome in Mother's
larder, for with so many mouths to fill we were
taught to look upon meat as a relish rather than
the mainstay of the meal. Not that we did not
have enough. We always had that, but dishes
made of flour, of potatoes, of peas and other
vegetables, played a greater rôle in the economic
cookery of the day and country than nowadays.
And we liked it. I defy any one to find a summer
dish that compares with “Rödgród med Flöde,”
which was just currant juice and corn-starch
with cream. Even the Saturday menu in our
house was a favorite: fried herring and Öllebröd.
132 THE OLD TOWN
For special occasions the herring were fried “in
dressing-gowns,” each in a cornucopia of white
paper that gave the dish quite a festive touch.
Öllebröd is a dish I despair of making the Ameri-
can mind grasp. It was made of black bread
boiled in beer till it made a thick broth, to which
each one added cream and sugar to suit his taste.
Boiled beer sounds funny, but it was the house-
hold beer, non-alcoholic, which was both cheap
and good. The other kind we knew as Bavarian
beer. Its use was not so common as it has be-
come since.
Still, the Old Town had ever been partial to its
beer. When it was in its prime, eight “beer-
tasters” were among the town functionaries.
They were to see that the supply was up to the
standard, with the proper allowance of good hops.
In the account of the hanging of the big bell in
the church tower—the “storm bell” I spoke of —
in 1599, two barrels of beer to the men who hoisted
it up and hung it are set down among the expenses.
One wonders whether all who took a hand were
included. According to one report of that day's
THE OLD TOWN 133
proceedings, there was some doubt about their
ability to transport the bell from the foundry to
the Domkirke, until the Rector of the Latin School
put it up to his boys, who at once took hold and
dragged it all the way alone. Whether they came
in under the subsequent largesse of beer is not
stated, but probably not. Two barrels would
not have gone very far then. All this seems queer
to us nowadays. It is strange to find that in
that century the privileged Town Hall dramshop
— the Rathhaus-keller, in fact – achieved a
competitor in the Domkirke itself. The chapter
of clerics opened one of their own in their cellar
under the north end of the chancel, on the plea
that they must have wine for churchly functions,
of a proper quality, and kept it going for I don’t
know how long. Much later than that, in 1683,
clergymen were forbidden by law to distil whiskey,
but in 1768 “priest and deacon” were expressly
confirmed in their right to distil it for their own
use. So there was ecclesiastical Sanction, and
to spare, for all the beer and spirits that were
consumed. Clear down to my time, when the
134 THE OLD TOWN
Jutland peasant brewed," it was the custom to
throw the first three handfuls of malt into the
mash “in the name of the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost.” And the same man who did
that, as the next step shut all the doors of the
brewing room, placed a glowing coal on each
doorstep, put three coals in the vat with a wisp
of straw bound in form of a cross, and finally
stirred it all with the iron tongs from the fire-
place, to keep evil eyes from spoiling the brew l’
* My father's friend, Pastor Fejlberg, who, as a village par-
son just outside the Old Town, lived the life of the country folk
and recorded it with sympathetic understanding, is my author-
ity. I remember him telling a story which only last winter
one of his old “boys’ recalled to me in California. It was of
the village tailor, who, coming home in the small hours of the
morning, the worse for many deep potations of the strong mead
at the inn, was beset by a ghost that would not let him go.
In vain did he try to shake it off at cross-road after cross-road.
They all ran like this ><, and had no power over the children
of darkness. The spectre still pursued him, shrieking in
ghoulish glee over his failure. Not until he came to two roads
that crossed at right angles, forming a true F, did he beat it
off. There it could not pass, and he got home safe; let us
hope, sobered also.
* Which reminds me of a lesson in manners I once received
from the gudewife of a neighboring farm. It was in the days
THE OLD TOWN 135
No wonder there were spooks in the Old Town,
the werwolf that haunted the graveyard by night,
and the hell-horse on its three legs.
Whenever I think of that last and the horror
we held it in, it comes to me that our dread of
crawling things must be largely a matter of legs,
due to our prejudice in favor of the standard two
or four. The hell-horse was ever so much more
horrible because of its limping about by night
on three. We hate a spider, which has six or
eight, and loathe the thousand-leg worm with
cause. And at the other end, when it comes to the
Snake, that has no legs at all, we are prompted by
an instant impulse to kill it. It is not a religious
prejudice at all, no Garden of Eden notion, but an
instinctive recoil from the thing that does not
conform to the established standard in legs.
when the farmer and his hands all ate out of the same dish,
each with his own horn spoon, which he afterward licked clean
and stuck up under the beam until the next meal. I had
never been away from home and had “notions '' that made
me decline a mellemmad (sandwich) when she brought it to
me in her honest hand. She took in the situation, and after
serving the other children, handed me my mellemmad with
the fire-tongs, all sooty from the chimney.
136 THE OLD TOWN
But whether that be so or not, the hell-horse that
so terrorized us, was a decadent beast. He was
literally on his last legs in my childhood, and even
the Old Town knows him no more, I guess.
The man with his head under his arm was, if
anything, worse than the hell-horse, and had an
unpleasant habit of making himself at home under
your roof. The three-legged beast at least stayed
outside. There was a headless man in the old
mansion at Sönderskov, where I sometimes spent
my summer vacation. You could hear him walk
in the midnight hour up and down, up and down
the hall, and we boys lay and shivered in bed for
fear he would come to our door and knock. I
have heard him more than once since I grew up
and identified his tread on the Oaken stairs with
the regular beat of the tower-clock above my
head, but still I confess to a creepy feeling
when I hear it.
But I have gone far afield from the household
economics of the Old Town. They were intended
to make both ends meet on a scale of small in-
comes with need, often enough, of the closest
THE OLD TOWN 137
figuring. Large families were the rule rather
than the exception. Not till my father was long
in his grave and I was looking over his old papers
and accounts, did I suspect how bitter was the
fight he waged those forty years and to what
straits he was put. To turn a coat when the
right side was worn threadbare was a common
expedient in those days of honest cloth, but
Father had his overcoat turned twice to tide him
over an evil time. As for us boys, we didn’t have
any half the time. I remember the winter when,
being in such case and making a virtue of bald
necessity, I tried to organize a Spartan Society
among my schoolmates, the corner-stone of which
was contempt of overcoats as plain mollycoddling.
As a means of attracting the boys there were
Secret passwords and an initiation that had to be
worked at dusk in the moat by the Castle Hill and
was supposed to be very grewSome. It took
for a while, until the mothers put a stop to it.
I believe one of them who had read AEsop's
fable about the fox that had lost its tail and tried
to persuade the other foxes that it was the latest
138 THE OLD TOWN
fashion, Saw through my dodge. At any rate
the long woollen muffler which the society al-
lowed, I being possessed of one, went out of vogue
and the overcoats came back. It must have
been at that time that my father bought at a
Salvage sale of the cargo of a wrecked ship a roll
of really fine cloth of a peculiar sea-green color.
It was a good investment, for it made not only
a suit for Father that had lots of wear in it, but
all the family were clad in green while it lasted,
which was a long while. I hate to think what
the boys of to-day would have nicknamed us.
They were not so bright then, and I doubt if we
would have cared. We boys were quite able to
defend the family honor, and quite ready too.
Father had a fancy for numbering his children
in Latin. The sixth was called Sextus, the
ninth Nonus. In grim jest, he proposed to name
the twelfth Duodecimus, but agreed with his
fellow-teachers that the luckless child would be
forever miscalled “dozen.” They had a good
laugh over it. Father was very far from being a
book-worm. Though he was very learned, he
THE OLD TOWN 139
had a keen sense of humor, and, for all the heavy
burdens he carried, he was the life of the com-
pany always.
The dead languages were his task in the Latin
School, the living his pleasure and recreation. I
doubt if there was any modern tongue in which
he was not more or less proficient. And so it
was natural that when a wrecked ship's crew
came to the Old Town he should be the interpre-
ter; or when, as happened every now and then,
a bottle was cast ashore on one of the islands with
a message from Some ship in peril on the deep,
that it should be brought to him to be deciphered.
There was a fixed fee for this, - a “specie,” which
was two daler in the case of a bottle, – and it
was most welcome. Yet there was always an
element of the deeply tragic in it. We children
stood with bated breath and looked on while
Father unfolded the piece of crumpled paper,
polished his spectacles, and read with husky voice
some such message as this:
“We are sinking. Jesus, Maria, save us!”
Then the name of the vessel, its home port,
140 THE OLD TOWN
and the latitude, if they knew it. I think I am
Quoting literally one which I have never forgot-
ten. It was a Portuguese vessel and it got some-
how mixed up in my childish imagination with
the Lisbon earthquake. That had happened a long
while before, but news lasted longer than nowa-
days. There was not a fresh horror every day,
and the illustrated papers kept the earthquake
in stock until the siege of Sebastopol came and
gave us all a change. That in its turn lasted, I
think, quite a dozen years, down to our own war
of '64.
I cannot stop without recording here the great
and awful tragedy of my childhood. It was
when I had become possessed, by some unheard-
of streak of luck, of a silver four-skilling that
was all my own, to spend as I pleased, with no
string to it. It was a grave responsibility, for
I perceived that with this immeasurable wealth I
might buy practically anything, and what it
was to be, with the shops of the Old Town simply
crammed with things that were all desirable,
was not to be decided lightly. So I betook
THE OLD TOWN 141
myself to the Long Bridge, where I could be
alone, to think it over, my pockets, in the depths
of which reposed the miraculous coin, filled with
“I THREW THE LAST PEBBLE.”
pebbles to punctuate my ideas withal. I stood
on one of the arches and threw them in, watching
the rings they made in the water, and as they
widened till they reached from shore to shore

142 THE OLD TOWN
and I dug deeper and deeper into my pocket, my
ambition and my hopes rose with them. Until,
all unknowing, I threw the last pebble and, as it
sped forth in the sunshine, saw that it was my
four-skilling. The waters closed over it with a
little splash I can hear yet, and I saw its silver
sheen as it turned and sank. I did not weep.
The disaster was too great. I stood awhile dumb,
then went home and told no one. Darkness had
settled upon my life with a sorrow so great that I
felt it invested even with a kind of dignity as a
vast and irreparable misfortune. I cannot even
now laugh at it. It was too terrible to ever quite
forget.
CHAPTER WI
THE Old Town
, , was set in a
33:
%. meadow, grass to
º
º º grass to the left
º of it, stretching
s . -nº *-***-- ~~~~ lºſ,
*…* – away toward the
KING HARALD'S STONE. horizon until in
the South and east it came up against the black
moor, and toward the sunset a little way met the
sands of the western sea. What sport was there
for boys in such a country? My own boys asked
me that question with something of impatience on
a walk through the fields, for they had been sizing
up the lads of their own age on baseball and found
them no good. They threw the ball “just like
girls.” Not many days after one of them came
home with a bruised nose and an increased respect







143
144 THE OLD TOWN
for Danish muscle. It was good for fighting,
anyhow. But, in truth, we did not run to
baseball when I was a boy; and as for fight-
ing, we had no more than was good for us;
when any Uitlander bragged, for instance. As
I look back now it seems to me we didn’t
have time for either, so busy were we with our
Sports.
There was the brook that led to the old manse,
hidden quite behind a wind-tossed thicket of
scrub-oak that had run over the sunken walls
since the days when bishops were fighting men
who went clad in iron to the wars. Then the
manse was one of the strongholds of the Ribe
prelates who led the armies of the King against
the German counts, notably the “Strong Master
Jacob,” whose fists and sword saved many a soul
where preaching failed. The brook was now
barely a step wide, and we boys could easily jump
over it in places; but the wild birds built their
nests in its banks in spring, and up where we had
our early bonfires it widened into a dark still pool,
hedged in with mint and forget-me-nots, where
THE OLD TOWN 145
wary trout were always darting from the deep
shadows. I go to seek that pool first thing when
I return to the Old Town now, and it is not
changed. But the boys of to-day seem to have
forgotten it.
And then the creek that meandered through the
meadows miles and miles from the great peat bog
where our winter fuel came from, making one turn
more tortuous than another, with hole after hole
in the deep pockets that were fairly alive with
yellow perch and their silver-scaled neighbors,
whatever you would call them. We called them
“skaller.” I could go to a dozen of them blind-
folded, I think, even now, and bait my hook and
throw it in the exact spot where a perch is waiting
to pull the cork under with one quick, determined
jerk. No nibbling about him; his mind is always
made up and ready. Sometimes in my dreams I
sit by the creek in one particular spot I have
never forgotten, with feet hanging over the edge,
the slanting sunlight on the dark waters, red-
finned perch and silver fish darting hither and
thither, and the soft west wind in the grass; and
L
146 THE OLD TOWN
then I am perfectly happy. Our ambition did
not rise to five-pound pickerel in those days.
Maybe there weren't any. My little boy and I
found plenty in after years, and little else. My
pretty fish seemed to be gone. Perhaps the
- it.
***.
“IN MY DREAMs I SIT BY THE CREEk.”
pickerel had eaten them up, like some mean trust
on dry land. If he had, we got square with him.
We ate him in turn. They had reduced the catch-
ing of him to an exact science. Drop your bait
there, right in the edge of the rushes, so — a
swirl and a sudden tightening of the line ! Let
him run, and take out your watch. Eight min-
utes to a dot, and he is off again. That is when
he turns the bait around in his mouth and swal-
lows it, having lain by waiting for signs of treach-
ery. Now, pull him in. Here he is Hi, what a
big fellow !

WHERE I SHOT MY

THE OLD TOWN 147
It was up here by this turn that I shot my first
duck. It was in the winter vacation, and I had
found out that here, where there was a stretch of
open water, a flock of black-headed ducks were at
home. I burrowed through six feet of snow to
the water's edge and shot one of them as they flew.
It fell and dived, and I threw my clothes in the
snow and jumped after. Ugh ! it was cold. I
dodged the floating ice as well as I could and kept
turning the cakes over and over, looking for my
duck, but it was not there. It was not till I
climbed ashore again and dressed myself with
chattering teeth that, happening to look under the
bank where the current had cut the earth away, I
saw it sitting composedly on the little shelving
beach below. I can feel now the throbbing of my
heart as I leaned over, and reaching down with
infinite stealth, caught it by the neck and yanked
it up. The pride of that homeward procession
with the head of the duck flapping from my game-
bag ' And then, after all, the cook had to wring
its neck. In my joy I had forgotten to kill it.
The shot had only stunned it. -
148 THE OLD TOWN
If fish ran low in our own river because of the
Swans taking more than their share, we could go
to Konge-aaen (the King's River), four or five
miles away, where there were jumping fish which
an Englishman came across the North Sea every
year to catch with flies. This to us was a very
amazing thing, and quite like an Englishman:
to angle with a bit of hen feather, or even a grass-
hopper, when there were fine fat worms to be had
for the digging. Really, if the truth be told, it
was a rank imposition on the fish. I confess that
it seems to me so even yet — not exactly a square
deal. The Englishman did not discourage this
attitude on our part. He went right on, and for
years had a monopoly of the salmon in the stream.
For we did them little damage. Once in a while
very large salmon were speared by those living
along the stream. More frequently a farmer
haying in his field spitted a sturgeon on his pitch-
fork. Then there was a fight, the accounts of
which we boys listened to with breathless interest
when the fish was brought to town. Always it
seemed to me to hark back to the days we so loved
THE OLD TOWN 149
to dream of; for the sturgeon was all clad in mail,
as it were, just like the knights of old, and it was
often a question whether the fish would come
ashore or the man go into the brook. At least
that was the way he told it. If the fish said
nothing, it looked grim enough to make you be-
lieve almost anything.
But if one did not run to fishing, -though what
healthy boy does not ? – there was the heath,
and then the forest. Forest sounds big. All there
was of it was a patch of woodland some twenty
or twenty-five acres in extent, but to us in the
mellow autumn days it was an enchanted forest
indeed. For under the gnarled oaks, only sur-
vivors of the sturdy giants that had once covered
the land, as the names of half the villages bore
witness, and had filled the seas with the bold
vikings' ships, was a wilderness of hazel bushes
that was the special preserve of the Latin School
boys on Saturday afternoons, or when we had
“month’s leave.” Month's leave was an after-
noon off, which the school might choose itself
once a month, if it had been good. Then a com-
150 . THE OLD TOWN
mittee of the oldest boys went to the Rector with
the observation that it was a fine day for play,
while the rest of us stood with beating hearts,
and if the gout did not pinch him just then, he
would say, “Yes! be off,” and with a mighty
shout we would run for our botany boxes and
crooked sticks, and for the woods, if it was in
autumn. The boxes were to hold the nuts; the
crooked sticks served a double purpose. They
were for walking-staffs on the homeward way,
for the forest was three miles away; once there,
they were indispensable to hook down the branches
with. The hazel bushes grew in the twilight of
the woods, much as dogwood grows with us, and
were mostly big enough to climb, but the nuts
were on the farthest twigs, that could only be
reached and stripped by pulling them down.
That was fine fun, with enough tumbles to make
it exciting, and a very substantial reward if
judgment were used in the picking. The supply
so laid in often lasted past Christmas, and we had
little else. Walnuts were too dear. Chestnuts
we did not know at all, not the eatable kind.
THE OLD TOWN 151
The other, the horse-chestnut, made fine ammu-
nition when, in autumn, we played “robber and
soldier.” The winter storms that drove in wreck-
age from the Gulf Stream strewed our coast,
indeed, with Brazil-nuts, sometimes whole ship
loads of them, but they were good only for
making bonfires. The sea or something else had
cracked them. There was not a kernel in one of
them.
It does not seem to me that life could be worth
much in the Latin School without those nutting
expeditions. And so, when I went there with
my own boys, and after wading through the
old bog where the stork stalked up and down
fishing for frogs, we came to the cool shade of the
forest and found it hedged in with cheeky Ameri-
can barbed wire and signs up warning intruders
off, my spirit rose in instant rebellion. This was
a double disgrace not to be borne. And once
back again in the land of freedom I planned to
defeat that wretched barbed-wire fence. Not only
must it go, but the forest itself must belong to
the Latin School, or else the undisputed right to
152 THE OLD TOWN
go nutting there forever; and while I had it in
mind I thought I saw a way to drive in the edge
of democracy by vesting the control of it in the
boys, with the proviso that at least once a year
they should invite the public school boys to be
their guests there. In my day they fought at
the drop of a hat; the recollection of the bitter
feud between them stirs my blood even now when
I think of it. But alas for the best-laid plans of
mice and men I was told, when I moved to the
attack, that times had changed; that School
was dismissed at two o'clock, not at five, nowa-
days, and that therefore month's leave as we
knew it had gone out of existence; that Latin
School and “plebs” were part of the same sys-
tem, hence the strife of the old times had ceased;
and that anyhow boys rode cycles and made
century runs and such things, where we went
nutting. Truly, the times do change. I am glad
I was a boy then, if I am a back number now.
Maybe they ride right through the heath on
their senseless runs, and don't stop to pick Rāv-
linger. If they do, I am done; I have nothing
THE OLD TOWN 153
more to say. Rävlinger are the little black ber-
ries that grow on the creeping heather in the sterile
moor, quite like our blueberries, only there are
PICKING RAvLINGER IN THE MooR.
many more of them. Very likely you would think
them sour; we thought them heavenly, and there
is enough of the boy left in me to back up
that opinion to-day against the riper judgment of
the years. We gathered them by the bucketful,
paying little heed to the heath farmer's warning
not to touch them after midsummer night, for
then the devil had greased his boots with them,
and came home with black faces and hands and
terrible tales of the “worms” – i.e. snakes —

154 THE OLD TOWN
we had encountered in the heath. And, indeed,
there are enough of these poisonous reptiles there
yet. But, now as then, a fellow can keep out of
their way. Some of the dearest recollections of my
boyhood are of the long tours I made through this
lonesome moor, where a rare shepherd knitting
his woollen stocking and a gypsy's cart are often
the only “humans” one meets in a day's journey.
Met, I should have said, perhaps, for in another
generation even the moor will be a thing of the
past. Already half of the six hundred thousand
acres of heath land in the Danish peninsula has
been planted with seedling pine, American pine,
that has grown up finely, and a great and salutary
change has been wrought, no doubt. But if there
is to be a day without moor, without heather,
without the sweet honey the bees gathered there
when the broom was purple, and without Rāv-
linger, I — well, I am glad I was a boy when I
W3. S.
Which brings to my mind an adventure of one
of my lonely trips in the heath. This one went
far, extending over a whole vacation week. I
THE OLD TOWN 155
had come at the end of a long summer day to an
inn, where they gave me a big box-bed to sleep in;
and I had barely got into it when a lot of scratch-
ing under me made me aware that a family of
rats shared my couch. But I was too sleepy to
care; we Snuggled up together and did one an-
other no harm in the night. I remember it be-
cause of the terror it caused my mother when she
heard of it. She had a great dread of rats. It
was on that same trip that, coming to the shore,
I Supped at a fisherman's hut on Smoked dog-
fish and thought it the finest I had ever tasted. I
was a boy and hungry. But I do not know why
it should not be good. The dogfish I am thinking
of are the small sharks that infest the North Sea
coast in great numbers. They ate the flesh
and sold the skin for sandpaper in those days.
It was scratchy and did very well for that
purpose. - -
The Seemwoods, where we went nutting, covered,
as I said, but a little patch, but a dozen miles to the
eastward there were real forests, in which a boy
might get lost; and there were deer in them, which
156 THE OLD TOWN
made a picnic there ever so exciting. That had
to be engineered by the grown-ups, for it meant
impressing practically the entire rolling stock
of the town for the day. Then its half-dozen
ancient Holsteiners, yellow-wheeled open wagons
with seats for eight or a dozen, pulled up early in
the Square, where all upper-tendom was waiting
with much provender to board them for Gram.
Many were the dubious headshakes of those who
were left behind as to the promises of the weather.
The wind was in the east, and the clouds prophe-
sied rain. They did that regularly, and they
kept their promise at least half the time. It
was sometimes a bedraggled crowd that made
cover at sunset. But if even half the day was
fair, it paid well for the trip. The change from
the barren, rather stern outlook from the Old
Town, where the sea-wind stunted tree and
thicket so that it always sloped down to nothing
in the west as if some giant scythe had trimmed it
so, to the beech woods with their shelter and
quiet and their luxury of color and vegetation,
was very alluring. While our elders took tea at
THE OLD TOWN 157
the forester's, where the tea-urn was always
simmering, expecting company, and duly ad-
mired the furniture in the Countess's drawing-
room at the Château, we boys organized a mighty
hunt for boar and bear, and sometimes were
lucky enough to start a roebuck. Then, indeed,
was the hunt a success, and our minds were
stocked for many a day to come with stuff for
day-dreams.
There was enough of that lying all about, for
field and heath were dotted with the cairns that
covered the ashes of the bold vikings. Off to
the northeast from Gram, buried in a thicket of
scrub-oak where once had been deep forest, lay a
large boulder, twice as high as a big man, that
always seemed to me to span the thousand years
between the old days and ours as no dry books
could. Stones are not common in that country;
this one had come down from Norwegian moun-
tains on an ice-floe in ages long past. But no
geological speculation chained our imagination to
it. It had a story of its own. Harald Blaatand,
grandfather of Knud (Canute) the Great, had
158 THE OLD TOWN
chosen it to put over the grave of his mother,
Queen Thyra, and was hauling it across the
country with an army of oxen and thralls, when
word came that his son had risen against him to
take the kingdom. He dropped it there to take
up arms, and there it had been since. The top
of it was split open. The priest in a neighboring
parish had tried, a hundred years before, to quarry
it for his parsonage, but like King Harald was
halted before he had gone far. What was the
matter with the parsons in those days, I cannot
imagine. When they opened the graves of King
Waldemar and Queen Dagmar, of whom I have
told elsewhere, they found her tomb a jumble of
broken brick and rubbish. A priest attached to
the church, to make a nice roomy burial-place
for himself, had calmly cut into the resting-place
of Denmark's best-beloved queen, throwing the
bones he found there to the scrap-heap. A hun-
dred years and over, the skull of the gentle Dag-
mar, which some one had picked up, lay about the
church and was then carried off by a thief. A
gold cross the queen had worn was saved, having
THE OLD TOWN 159
“value” in the eyes of the vandals, and in the
course of time found its way into the possession
DAGMAR’s DESPOILED TOMB.
of the government and into the museum of
antiquities, where it now is, its most precious
relic.
“Holme week” was the great time of the year
for us all. It came late in July, when the hay
Was all in and we got our fishing-tackle out; for
the hay was the great crop thereabouts, and until
it had been cut it was not a good thing to be caught
by the farmer wading through his meadows.

160 THE OLD TOWN
Out toward the sea the river made a great bend,
and in it, near its mouth, lay a stretch of marsh-
land where the grass grew exceeding rich and
sweet. This was the “IIolme,” which in the
thirteenth century had been given to the town by
the King in return for its building a wall around
Ribe the better to defend it. The wall was never
built, though they got so far as digging a ditch,
but they kept the land, and after the Reformation
divided it up among themselves, to their great gain.
When now the last of the hay had been cut and
stacked, the Old Town went a-picnicing, bag
and baggage. Those who could afford it drove
out; those who couldn’t walked, or sailed, or
rowed out, depending on a lift from the tide to
help them back. And all of them had hampers
or baskets, filled to the brim. There is no occasion
that I know of in Denmark when these are left
behind. There, on the meadow that was like a
smooth, green-carpeted floor, they sported and
ran and tumbled, pelting one another with hay,
children and grown-ups together, all day. I never
* Meaning islands.
THE OLD TOWN 161
knew who paid for the hay, or if it was just a con-
tribution to the general good-will of the time, but
no one ever put a damper on our fun. The
climax of it for us boys was always the attack on
the Fold, a kind of fort on the meadow into which
the cattle were driven in case of flood. The Fold
had earth walls and a living hedge, and to roll off
that wall with a bloody nose, or better still, to climb
over it and give the other fellow one, was enough to
make any boy feel like a real hero, especially with
the girls looking on and showing great concern.
When the sun set over the meadows and we
came back from our campaign, tired and Sore,
Supper was spread on the grass beside a comfort-
able hay-stack, and it was good. There is nothing
anywhere half so good to eat when you are hun-
gry as the Danish Smörrebröd, particularly the
kind they make in Ribe. Only, I guess, you've
got to have a boy's stomach, for you will want to
eat it all, and the last time I did — well, never
mind I will lay that up against my American
training. It never happened when I was a boy
but once; that was when a ship had been wrecked
M
162 THE OLD TOWN
with a cargo of Messina raisins, and the man who
had bought it saw us Snooping around where he
had laid those raisins out to dry on great tarpau-
lins and told us we might eat as many as we liked.
We did, and ouch ! let me forget it. I sure
thought I was going to die.
In the gloaming they lit tallow candles set in
beer bottles in the dancing tent, and to the tune
of an old cracked fiddle everybody had a turn on
the sod with everybody else. If there were
classes and distinctions in the Old Town, there
were none out there. The Bishop's wife or the
Rector's daughter danced with the shoemaker's
lad and had a good time. The old ferry raft that
was pulled from shore to shore with a rope, plied
back and forth over the river, carrying great loads
of hay one way, and bigger and bigger loads of
merry-makers from the town, for those were the
midsummer nights when nobody kept account of
time. That was the Old Town's real holiday.
It came to an end with the third Sunday, I think
it was, in July, after which the cattle were turned
in to graze on the Holme and the herdsman was
THE OLD FERRY RAFT.
EEK —
HOLME W.
IN



THE OLD TOWN 163
left in sole possession; by no means a sinecure,
for soon the North Sea gave warning that at any
moment his life and the safety of his charges
might be at stake, if they were outstripped in the
race with the angry floods.
But while the sea yet slumbered in summer
sunshine we boys had our shore days, and they
were fine. Then we arose with the sun and
walked the four miles to the beach, which there-
abouts is very flat and wide. When the tide is
out, there is a stretch of quite half a mile of white
sand to deep water. Over this the flood-tide
comes stealing in so stealthily, yet so swiftly,
that it takes a pretty good runner to get to the
land without very wet feet or worse, if he is caught
far out by the turn of the tide. We would some-
times bring home quite a store of amber from
these trips, and then little files would be busy for
days making hearts, sabots, and other trinkets
for the girl each boy liked best. Hearts were the
most popular and also the easiest to fashion. We
made those things ourselves, and it was a sort of
manual training not to be despised.
164 THE OLD TOWN
“Treading” flounders was a unique kind of
fishing that took a whole day from earliest dawn,
but sometimes turned up a bigger yield of fish than
one could carry home. A perfectly calm day was
needed for that, when there was no “wash.”
The boys followed the outgoing tide, tramping
hard with bare feet in the soft sand and steering by
the church on the island out in the sea. When
they had gone as far as they wanted, they tramped
back by another route, and then put in the long
wait till the tide had come in and was ebbing
again, building fires, catching crabs, or whatever
they felt like. With the next ebb-tide came
their harvest. Following their tracks of the morn-
ing, they would find, wherever they had made
them deep enough, a little pool left by the reced-
ing waters, and in each pool one or two, and some-
times three, flounders about the size of my hand,
very much like the Catalina sand dabs of the
Pacific. These they would unceremoniously heave
into a sack they carried between them, and before
long it grew heavy with their catch. It seems that
the bottom of the North Sea is fairly covered with
THE OLD TOWN 165
multitudes of these fish, which served the island-
ers of that coast as both meat and bread. They
dried and toasted them, and served them with
their afternoon coffee, and you might look long
for a better dish. I think of it often as being quite
like Tvebak slightly salted, only better to my
youthful taste.
Out along the river mouth was famoushunting for
water-fowl. In the migrating season great flocks
of duck alighted there, and geese and every other
kind of game that flies. I can hear yet the cry of
the sickle-billed curlew in those meadows. It
prophesied rain, we said, and the promise was
usually kept. When I was a big boy, the first
telegraph line was built to the Old Town, and
that autumn an odd thing happened. Morning
after morning dozens of shore-birds were found
dead under the wires. We thought first that the
electric current had slain them as they roosted
on the wires; but as it was apparent that Some
of them couldn’t roost that way, a better explana-
tion was sought and found. They had been killed
* Tvebak is Danish for Zwieback.
166 THE OLD TOWN
flying against the wires. It seems that they were
strung just at the height at which they flew. It
is clear to me that birds have some power of
reasoning, for after a while we found no more
dead. Evidently they had learned to fly higher,
or lower perhaps.
Once or twice in autumn, on their way south,
great flights of kramsfowl, a bird highly es-
teemed by the cook, roosted in the Plantage, a
little grove just outside of town. Just when that
would be, no one could tell, but for weeks after
the leaves began to turn some of us set our Snares,
— a willow bough bent in a triangle, with horse-
hair loops in each of the uprights, and baited
with rowan-berries below. The bird would sit
and Swing in the triangle, and, bending to get at
the berries under its feet, would put its head
through one or both of the loops and be strangled.
Morning after morning we would sneak out be-
fore breakfast to look to our snares and come
home empty-handed. Then some brisk morning,
when the first touch of frost was in the air, we
would drag such loads of the big black birds into
THE OLD TOWN 167
town that there would be talk of it for days.
Every sick person we knew had a feast, and we
felt that we were mighty hunters indeed.
CRUISING UP TO THE SEEM CHURCH.
So there was no lack of sport in the Old Town,
and I haven’t begun to tell you of it all. In
the winter there was the river that was then
dammed back and became a great frozen lake
five or six miles long. Then we would strap on


168 THE OLD TOWN
our skates good and tight for a long trip, and go
cruising up from the Kannegrove,' the big ditch
down by the Cloister, to the Seem church, clear at
the further end, and, spreading our jackets out, let
the wind use them as sails on the run back. I
tell you we came down in a hurry. No time for
fancy skating then. But a mighty sharp lookout
had to be kept on that trip, for if a skate slid into a
crack there was a wrench and a fall, and it was
apt to be a bad one. When the snow lay deep,
there was such coasting as you do not often find.
For though the country was flat as a pancake,
the Castle Hill was there with its deep moat. Al-
most clear up on the other side the rush would
fetch you. I haven’t seen a better coasting hill
in New England. But, on the other hand, I
must own that American boys are “up” on steer-
ing to an extent we didn't dream of. The “leg
out” is a Yankee invention, and it is great. We
just slid.
* The “cleric's '' or “clerk's ditch” that skirted the monks'
garden in the old days. The garden is still there, and traces
of the ditch.
CHAPTER VII
RIBERHUS.
To the west
of the Old
Town, with
only the dry
moat and a
fringe of gar-
dens between,
stood the green
Castle Hill.
Green it was and had been in the memory
of the oldest. The road-makers of three gener-
ations before had taken what the house-builder
had left of the ruins that alone remained
of Denmark's once great historic stronghold.
There its fighting kings guarded the land
against the enemy to the South;
thence its ar-
mies had marched to victory or defeat in many a
fight with the turbulent German barons. Thither
came the merchant ships of Europe bringing stone
from the Rhine for the Domkirke, sweet wines and

169
170 THE OLD TOWN
silken raiment for the ladies of the court, and
cloth from Flanders; for to be well dressed in
those days a man's coat must have been cut in
Ribe. The river was long since sanded in, in my
day, and ships came that way no more. A few
lonesome sheep were picketed on the green hill,
and when at night the white mist crept in from
the Sea, blurring and blotting the landscape out,
their melancholy bleating alone betrayed the site
where once the clash of arms waked ready echoes.
Here dwelt IXing Valdemar and his gentle queen
who live in the Danish folk-song. Of her after
Seven centuries the ploughman Sang yet:
She came without burden, she came with peace,
She came the good peasant to cheer.
The ballad tells of the brief year of bliss the royal
lovers lived here, of his wild ride across the heath
to her death-bed, and of the daring May party that
won back the castle from a traitorous garrison for
“King Erik the young.” Last summer they dug
in the Castle IIill and found little enough there.
But here on my table stands a brick from the
stout wall, that long since crossed the ocean with
THE OLD TOWN 171
me. It may be that there is magic in the stone
to tell of the past, for it was fashioned by monks
who knew more than the pater-nosters they told
on their beads; or is it that I am of Queen Dag-
mar's kin, her god-son, christened as I was in the
font she gave to the Domkirke: last night as I
sat alone pondering the old Songs, the flickering
shadows from my study fire touched it, and I
dreamed again the story of King Waldemar and
Riberhus." -
I dreamed that I saw a great throng on land
and shore, men and women in holiday garments,
straining their eyes seaward, where a ship with
golden dragon's head was making its way slowly
between low islands. As it came into full view,
the people broke into jubilant cheers: “Wel-
come Dagmar, Denmark's Queen l’” It was the
King's ship bringing his bride from her far Bo-
hemian home. Answering cries came back from
the crew, and with music and the waving of
many banners the splendid vessel sailed up the
channel. At the rail stood a golden-haired
princess with the King's messenger and friend.
* The Ribe House, or Ribe Castle.
172 THE OLD TOWN
Her eyes were wet, but there was a happy smile
upon her lips. Her glance sought the lonely
figure of a horseman on the beach whose prancing
steed champed its bit impatiently. Where he
rode the crowd fell back and made room.
“What knight rides yonder on the white
charger?” she asked; “never saw I kinglier
man.”
“Hail thee, fair Queen' that first of Denmark's
sons thou Sawest is thy royal bridegroom,” was the
answer. “It is King Valdemar, whom his people
call ‘Victor,’ with cause.”
Then I heard a louder, more joyous cry than
before, and I saw the people thronging about,
striving to kiss the hem of her robe as she stood
upon the quay that was laid with crimson cloth
for her feet. I saw the King bend his knee and
kiss her hand and her brow; and the people went
wild at the sight. They took her horses out of
their harness, and themselves drew the chaise
toward the city with the many spires, singing
and shouting their joy; and I saw that she was
glad and that the young King who rode by her
THE OLD TOWN 173
side was proud and happy. I saw them walk up
the broad aisle of the Domkirke together, fol-
lowed by many brave knights and fair ladies, and
before the altar they knelt and were blest by the
venerable priest who had held the King in his
arms at his christening. The bells of the thirteen
churches and chapels in the town were rung, and
masses were said for the twain at their altars.
And I heard many a wassail drunk at the wedding-
feast in the great halls of the castle and in the
thronged streets of the town, where torches
burned from sundown to sunrise and the people
made merry through the long summer nights.
Strong ale and mead from the royal cellars ran
like a river, for such was the custom of the times
and of the people.
But before the sun had set twice I heard a new
song in the Ribe streets which the very children
learned with joy. It told of the Queen’s “morn-
ing-gift” from her lord. “Ask,” he said; “what-
ever thy wish, of land or gold, it shall be thine.”
But she prayed for neither greatness nor riches,
but that the plough-tax that bore heavily on the
174 THE OLD TOWN
husbandman be forgiven him, and that the peas-
ants who, for rising against it, were laid in irons
be set free. And the King granted her prayer.
Ever since, the Danish people have given Dag-
mar's name to their best-beloved queens. “Day-
break” was the meaning of it in the old tongue,
and she was their hope and heart's desire.
Then darkness fell; and I saw the King resting
after the chase in a far-distant place. In the
west there arose a cloud of dust, and at the sight
of it his heart misgave him, for his happiness had
been too great for man. Out of it came one rid-
ing fast with evil tidings: “The Queen is sick
unto death. She bids the King make haste.” And
there came to me the voices of women singing at
their spinning-wheels as I heard them when I was
a child; and this was the burden of their song:
Andante. I
When the King he rode out of Skan - der - borg
:.”-

THE OLD TOWN 175
Him fol - low’d
But when he o - ver Ri - be Bridge
Then rode
|
In Ring - sted sleepeth Queen Dag - mar!



176 THE OLD TOWN
Over the wildsome moor he had come, neither
resting nor sleeping, his face set ever toward the
sea, the one wild prayer in his heart that he might
not be too late. But ride man ever so fast, death
travels faster. As his horse's hoofs struck fire
from the stones in Grönnegade," with the castle
beyond the pillared gate at its end, the Ribe
THE KING's RIDE over THE MooR.
church bells rang out the tidings of Dagmar's
death.
Now help, O Lord, my Dagmar dear,
Me thinketh my heart must break.
On his knees at her bed the King begs her
weeping women to pray that she may speak to
him once more, and the Queen opens her eyes and
* Green Street, the street leading to the Green where the
castle stood.

THE OLD TOWN 177
smiles upon her lover. “Fear not for me,” she
says, “I did no worse sin than to lace my silken
sleeves on Sunday.” And her last thought as her
first is for her people. She prays him to pardon
every outlaw, and with her dying breath pleads
with him not to take Bengerd to his heart. “The
evil Bengerd,” the ballad calls her, and evil did she
bring to Denmark. For, when in after years the
King did marry the Portuguese princess, whose
beauty was so great that even her dust after ages
bore witness to it, she brought King and land but
sorrow and misery, aye! and of both a full
measure."
* Of her three sons, Abel slew his brother Erik for the
crown, and was himself slain by a peasant in the highway.
His body was buried in a swamp, with a stake driven through
the heart to lay his grievous ghost. Christopher, who took
the sceptre last, was poisoned by a monk in the Sacrament
as he knelt at the altar rail in the Domkirke; and in the
division of the kingdom between the brothers that gave
cause for their quarrels, began Denmark's woes, which in our
own day culminated in her dismemberment, when Germany
took Slesvig, Abel's dukedom. Queen Bengerd herself was
the worst-hated woman in Danish history, as Dagmar is yet
the best-beloved. In death the people's hatred would not let
her rest. When her grave was opened in my boyhood, it was
N
178 THE OLD TOWN
But these things were not yet. Still I dreamed
by my study lamp. I saw a mighty host of men
and ships; fifteen hundred sail did I count in line.
But the men wore no fine raiment; they were
clad in steel and carried battle-axes and swords.
Every knight wore on his left shoulder a cru-
sader's cross. And I saw the King, grown stern
and gray, lead them toward a foreign shore, where
there dwelt men who worshipped idols. And
there by night the pagan hosts fell upon them in
such multitudes that the King's men were swal-
lowed up as Sands by the sea. I saw them strug-
gling in darkness and dread in which no man knew
friend from foe, and the Christians were driven
back in despair, their standards taken; and a
great cry arose that all was lost.
Then I beheld a wondrous thing. I saw a
Strange banner descending as if from the clouds,
over against the hills upon which the priests were
found that the stone slab which covered it had been pried off
and a round boulder dropped in the place made for her head.
Yet her beautiful black braid was there, and the skull, so
delicate in its perfect oval, that those who saw it marvelled
greatly.
**
-
AND THE KING
D
“FOR G.

THE OLD TOWN 179
calling upon God for victory. It was crimson
red, and in it was a great white cross, even the one
upon which our Lord was crucified for the sins of
the whole world. And a loud voice cried, “Bear
this high, and victory shall be yours.” And the
heathen saw and heard and were stricken with
fear; for now they knew, indeed, that they were
fighting the Lord God of Hosts, and that their
strength was as a broken reed. And as the ensign
fell among the battling hordes I saw a tall knight
who rode before the King seize it and, holding it
high, spur his horse into the bravest of the fight,
with the cry “For God and the King.”
And I saw the King's men take heart and the
heathen turn and flee from the shore that was
strewn with their slain, while the sea ran red
with blood. And the King and his men rested
their swords and knelt upon the battlefield as the
moon rose over it, and sang a Te Deum to their
God for having delivered them and crushed the
power of the Evil One; for of the Fiend and of his
idols there was an end in the land, then and for-
evermore. And I knew that I had seen in my
180 THE OLD TOWN
dream the battle of Lyndanissa that won all
Esthland for the Christians' God by King Walde-
mar's sword, and gave to Denmark its Danne-
brog, oldest of flags among nations.
Once more did darkness fall, and I saw the old
King betrayed by night in his tent, in the midst
of peace, by his guest, the Black Count Henrik
of Schwerin, who hated him, and, with Dagmar's
son, brought, bound and gagged, “in great haste
and fear,” to the traitor's strong tower on the
Elbe. I saw them lying in chains, thirty moons
and more in the dark dungeons, while Denmark's
foes rose on every side and overwhelmed its
armies that had lost hope with their leader. I
saw the old marshal, the King's kinsman and
friend, brought wounded and chained to his cell
after the battle; and the aged King bowed his
head while his enemies mocked him. And I saw
the prince with Dagmar's blue eyes and fair locks
comfort him in his sorrow and defeat. And then
I saw the Danish women, matron and maid, in
the proud castle and in the peasant's hut, bring
their gold and their gems, their rings and their
“THE KING AND HIS MEN KNELT UPON THE BATTLEFIELD.”

ºº:
- **
DANIsh Wom EN RANsomed
THEIR KING.


THE OLD TOWN 181
jewels and their silver, for their King's ransom;
and once more the Old Town echoed with cries
of gladness and joy as when Dagmar came; but
this time he rode alone, and stricken and sore.
“COMFORTED THE KING IN SORROW AND DEFEAT.”
Once again in my dreams I saw the gates of
the tower swing wide and a mighty army march
forth to meet the German traitors in battle, to
avenge their King. And I saw the great barren
where the bones of the fairest knights in all the

182 THE OLD TOWN
North lay bleaching in many a summer's sun from
that day, while all the Danish land mourned.
I saw the day all but won when the base Hol-
steiners turned their arms against their Danish
allies, and I beheld the sun set in defeat and dis-
aster and the King borne, wounded and beaten,
from the field, his army destroyed, his wars ended.
But still were his people faithful, in evil days
as in good. I saw King Valdemar, now blinded
and white and bent, put away the Sword and
write laws for his land that in the evening of his
life earned him the name of the Wise Law-giver;
for the landmarks he set, the justice he did between
man and man, endure unto this day. I saw the
last crushing sorrow fall upon him when Dag-
mar's son was killed on the chase by a friend's
arrow. And I saw the mightiest of Danish
rulers breathe out his great soul in the fulness
of his days. And as I awoke I heard the voice
of the old chronicler, when Waldemar was gathered
to his fathers: “Truly then fell the crown from
the heads of Danish men.” For never since has
Denmark seen his like.
THE OLD TOWN 183
The embers in my fireplace glowed and the
stone from the old tower showed red. Once
more I saw, as in a dream, the castle on the hill.
It was night, and there were lights in the windows
and sounds of noisy revelry within. On the
green by the river men and women were dancing.
The girls had daisies and the young leaf of the
beech braided in their hair, for it was May-day.
The men wore long muffling cloaks that hid
their armor and their swords. They were danc-
ing “May into town” in the glad fashion of the
day, and into the castle too, where the captain
was making merry with his men. He had be-
trayed the King's cause into the hands of his
enemies and sold his soul, with his faith, for their
gold. Little did he dream who was dancing over
the drawbridge which the sentinels let down at
his bidding:
They danced them over the Ribe Bro, (bridge)
There danceth the knight with pointed shoe
For Erik, for young King Erik.
Over the bridge and into the castle they danced,
and into the great hall where the faithless Tage
184 THE OLD TOWN
Muus and his men sat drinking deep to the suc-
cess of their deviltry, hammering a mirthful
welcome on the table with their tankards as the
doors swung open for the May party. They
trod the dance lightly before them, the men
waving torches and the women weaving flowery
garlands about them, and the knaves hailed them
uproariously; but the shout died in their throats
as, at a signal from their leader, the women seized
the torches and the men dropped their cloaks
and fell upon the revellers with drawn swords.
For they were the King's men, and Ribe was loyal
if the captain of the castle was false. So it was
won by a May dance
For Erik, for young King Erik,
Waldemar's son, and his banner flew once more
from its walls, while the dungeon claimed the
traitors.
Thus I dreamed. And I thought that I slept
seven centuries and saw the green Castle Hill
once more with its lonesome sheep looking into
the sunset; with its billowing reeds in the deep
moats that whisper to the west wind of the great
THE OLD TOWN 185
days that were; with the sleepy little town by
the shallow river, its glory gone, its ships gone,
the world gone from it, forgotten even as — no,
not that. For the great name, the great past,
live for all time, and that which I have written
is not a dream. It is the story of the castle that
stood upon the green hill, and of its king. It is
the story of Riberhus.
CHAPTER VIII
JACKDAws IN Council.
learning in a way all its own.
season when the sun shone so
THE big pear
tree that hung
over our way to
school is gone,
but the hawthorn
hedge remains.
When our young
feet trod those
toppy pavements,
the tree smoothed
the thorny path to
The late summer
temptingly on the
round red pears, and the old woman over whose
garden wall they grew counted her profits at a
skilling for two, fell in with our time for prac-
tising markmanship, just as the spring brought
its marbles and September its nutting tramps.
186

THE OLD TOWN 187
Then if it befell that a good shot and the law
of gravitation operated simultaneously to dis-
lodge the biggest and juiciest pear, and it dropped
in our path — surely destiny was to blame, not
we. Findings is keepings, and there is no law
against picking up a pear in the street. The
stork on the Rector's house looked on unmoved.
Being in a way responsible for us, perhaps he
was resigned to the ways of boys. Not so the
old woman who counted upon our skillings.
She stormed in the doorway, much exercised
in spirit, and threatened to report us. I think
she did once or twice, for we were warned not
to go under the tree when pears were falling.
But there was no other way out. And we de-
tected, or thought we did, a twinkle in the old
Rector's eye while he took us to task. He had
been a boy himself; was yet, despite the infirmi-
ties of years, beneath his mask of official stern-
ness. And we evened it up with the pear Woman
by loyally investing our pennies with her when
we had them. -
The Latin School had always been just across
188 THE OLD TOWN
from the Domkirke with which it had come into
existence, and in the old house I was born, the
teachers having lodgings under its roof at that
time. But it was moved as the tie between church
and school was loosened, and it was thus that the
feud was bred with the pear woman, who had until
then dwelt in seclusion and peace. That we
came honestly by our proficiency in marksmanship
I gather from the fact that, when the ecclesiasti-
cal bond was stronger a good deal than in our day,
it made its mark in the pages of the Old Town's
history by picking the very Domkirke itself for a
target. It is on record that the churchwarden
complained of the boys snow-balling its windows.
Of several hundred window-panes in the west
front only seven were then whole; but, he added,
“it is no use sending for the glazier to put them
in while the snow is on the ground, for they will
as surely be smashed again.” Evidently union
of pedagogue and priest had not bred reverence
in their pupils. They were the vandals who,
when the Reformation had consigned to the lumber
room the fine old crucifix that hangs once more in
THE OLD TOWN 189
*
its rightful place since the late restoration, amused
themselves by trimming the nails of the image.
But that time they got their deserving, if the rod
had been spared by man too long. According
to tradition they lost their own finger nails, and it
served them right, too. They were sad old days,
when to put reverence and common sense, with
common decency, in the rag-bag was held to be a
mark of piety. Clear down into our day we heard
the echo of it. When, in the '40's, the Dom-
kirke was undergoing repairs, the stone coffin of
one of the old kings was carried off, and after a
long search was discovered serving as a horse-
trough in front of a public house. “To what
base uses — l’’ It would not have been recovered
at that, but for peremptory notice from the
government that it had better turn up without
delay. There is nothing in their past record
to forbid the suspicion that the Latin school-
boys had had a hand in raping the royal
tomb.
So, if it does not fall to the lot of every man to
have an alma mater dating back to the time of
190 THE OLD TOWN
the crusades (the school was founded in 1137,
or very soon after), the fact of having it is not
necessarily a warrant of saintliness. It was not
with us. I have recounted some of our pranks.
For them, if they went beyond the limit, there
was still the rod. That and the big book with
red letters and the iron chain riveted to it that
lay in the school library were the visible sur-
vivals of a past day. Concerning the latter there
was a belief current among the untaught that it
was in fact Cyprianus, the book with which the
priest could cast a spell and bid the devil come
and go as he saw fit, but which the hand of no
unlearned man might touch without instant peril
to life and soul. It was, as a matter of fact, the
Bible that was held in such regard. The chain
that gave it its grewSome aspect was testimony
merely to its rarity and the cost of paper and
printer's ink in the day that made so sure it would
not get lost. All of which made little or no
impact upon the belief that the devil was firmly
chained between its pages, and that it was a good
plan to give it a wide berth.
THE OLD TOWN 191
No mediaeval superstition was needed to con-
vince us of the wisdom of that plan when it came
to the rod. Its ceremonial use, so to speak, had
fallen into disuse. I mean by that the great
capital occasions when, for hopeless breach of
discipline or for disgracing the school before the
world, a pupil was flogged by the janitor in the
presence of the assembled school, after a lecture
by the Rector, and publicly expelled. No such
emergency arose in my day. But in a more
private and sufficiently intimate way it was still
part of the curriculum. The daily cudgelling of
dull heads was supposed to have a stimulating
effect upon the intellect. It was the custom of
the day, but its sun was setting even then. Is it
merely harking back to personal experience that
I sometimes think a boy is just pining for a whip-
ping and won’t be happy till he gets it; and that,
having got it, he feels justified, squared as it were,
and ready for a new and better start 2 Or, is it
faith in the boy's fundamental love of fair play
that sizes up the offence and its deserving? I
will let the teacher decide. Somewhere I have
192 THE OLD TOWN
told of my first introduction to the “kids' school,”
kept by an old “she-wolf,” and its educational
equipment. I was dragged all the way to it by
an exasperated house-maid, hammering the pave-
ment with my heels and yelling at the top of my
voice. Forbearance at home had, it seems,
ceased to be a virtue. There was none in the
ogre who received me at the door and forthwith
thrust me into a barrel down in the cellar, where it
was dark, and putting on the lid, snarled through
the bung-hole that that was the way bad boys
were dealt with in school. Good boys were given
kringler to eat. When from sheer fright I ceased
howling, I was set free and conducted to the yard,
where there was a sow with a litter of pigs. The
sow had a slit in the ear to which my attention
was invited. It was for being lazy, and when
boys were lazy – the ogre brandished the long
shears that hung at her belt – zip ! I earned a
kringle that very afternoon.
The ways of the Latin School were still stamped
with the old severity, but there was some ap-
proach to present-day methods of constitutional
THE OLD TOWN 193
government. The faculty took hardened cases
under advisement. Execution of judgment was
vested in the Rector, as gentle an old man as ever
unwillingly caned a boy, whose guileless soul was
no match for our practised wiles. A remorseful
howl put him instantly out of action, and he was
always ready to be led sympathetically along the
slippery paths of boyish excuses; for, however
much the boy's Soul may pine for just punish-
ment, his body will always struggle to escape it.
We had a singing-teacher, the organist of the
Domkirke, whom, seeing that he was a helpless
old bachelor without proper home or boys of his
own, we accounted our lawful prey. Accord-
ingly the candle snuffer sputtered with powder
to his mild amazement, mice haunted the piano
and struck unexpected chords at singing-school,
and the blackboard sponge performed unheard-
of antics as an impromptu foot-ball while the
organist was writing our lesson on the board. It
was when he happened to turn suddenly once
and caught me in the very act of aiming it at his
wig, that the worm turned. I was conducted
O
194 THE OLD TOWN
straight upstairs to the Rector, with corpus
delict in my grasp, and left to his mercy.
Rector rose mechanically from his papers
when the door closed and opened a cupboard to
afford me a private view of the stick standing
there. Then he came over to me and said sternly,
pointing to the sponge, “What is this?’’
“The sponge, Herr Rektor,” I said. “It
was on the floor and I kicked it, like this — ”
it bounded across to the table — “and Niels,
he - ''
“Ah,” Rector was all interest; “Niels, he – ?”
“He kicked it — so, and it landed where Hans
stood.”
“Eh!” he was rubbing his hands; “and
Hans ?”
“Hans, he sent it — this way — to Peter; and
Peter trod on it, and it shied to Anders. And
he - ?”
We were skipping across the room together,
mapping out the journeys of the vagrant Sponge
as fast as Rector's gout allowed, when we arrived
at the turn.
THE OLD TOWN 195
“It came back to me,” I explained, “and I was
just going to fire it — ”
“Ha! you were just going to fire it — ”
“When the organist turned and caught me.”
The Rector stopped rubbing his hands ab-
ruptly. We gazed at one another soberly for a
“HA! You WERE JUST GOING TO FIRE IT —”
full minute. I don’t know, I think I saw the
suspicion of a wink; then:
“I think you said this was a sponge. Go then
and tell the organist that you have discovered it
is not a ball. Now go.”
I went quickly. Unless my ears deceived me,
I heard a chuckle behind the door as it fell to.

196 THE OLD TOWN
Little as he relished the job of thrashing a boy,
the Rector hated meanness in him worse. It
was the discovery of such a streak in me that
brought me the most thorough caning of my
school life at his hands. Hans and I, who peren-
nially disputed the seat next to the head of the
class — when it stood in a circle — had been
engaged in a combat that was undecided when
the bell summoned us to our lessons. Flushed
with the hope of victory, Hans hit upon the idea
of setting the clock ahead, that we might the
sooner have it out. The clock was in our class
room, and it was easily enough done, but in his
eagerness Hans forgot prudence and set it three-
quarters of an hour ahead, so that recitations
were no sooner begun than they were at an end.
Whereupon there was an investigation, and the
culprit was found. This was a matter that called
for the big stick, as being at once dishonest and
foolish, and Hans was commanded to wait after
school had gone home.
Now it befell that I was getting a book out of
the library in the next room when Hans' shrieks
THE OLD TOWN 197
rose high between the dull thuds of “Master
Erik.” I will not attempt to excuse my conduct;
I despise it. Probably the defeat I had so nar-
rowly escaped rankled. I crept up to the door
and listened. Meanly rejoicing at his plight, I
pressed my ear to the key-hole to hear more, and
leaned with my whole weight. I hadn't noticed
that the door was not shut tight, and suddenly
it swung open, and I fell into the other room with
my arm full of books,— fell right at Rector's feet
and lay sprawling there.
He gave me an amazed glance, paused an in-
stant with uplifted stick, and comprehended. A
look of stern disgust swept over his face; he let
go of Hans and, seizing me, administered to me
the worse half of the interrupted thrashing.
Hans got square. I can see him yet as he stood
in his corner wiping his eyes to keep from grinning.
The utterly exasperating thing about it was the
look of shocked innocence at the disclosure of
such baseness that sat upon his face. As if
he - ugh
The good old Rector stands flanked by his
198 THE OLD TOWN
staff in the picture, in full dress, as beseems his
dignity. My father is on his right, the only one
º
THE LATIN SCHOOL TEACHERs.
who wears a cap. Herr Kinch, behind the Rec-
tor, was an antiquarian of no mean repute, and

THE OLD TOWN 199
wrote the history of the Old Town," making a
notable contribution to Danish annals thereby.
The venerable face that peers out beside him is
that of Dr. Helms, whose interest in and writings
about the Domkirke, through a long lifetime, fi-
nally bore fruit in the thorough restoration that
has been just completed. We boys held the
candle for him sometimes when he was poking in
the dark corners for signs of the long past. Once
he found what he was not looking for. It was
while he was delving in the foundations of the
Maria tower, which had been torn down a century
or two before, being unsafe. They had covered
up the foundations and shut them out of sight.
But there must have been a crack somewhere,
for when the good doctor broke into the dark
space, thousands of bats broke out. The air was
literally filled with the creepy things. The Old
Town was at all times full of bats, and this was
evidently one of their secret hiding-places. There
were dead bats, too, by the cart load.
* It is upon his “History of Ribe Town,” in two stout
volumes, that I have drawn in these sketches for the an-
cient records that enliven its pages.
200 THE OLD TOWN
The other face in the doorway, that of Adjunct
Roch, the same who in after years became Dean
of the Domkirke, I can never see without think-
ing of the hour of my great triumph. He and
Herr Trugaard were my history teachers. History
as taught in the schools of those days was largely
made up of interminable files of kings, with the
years of their reign, nothing else, to be memo-
rized that way. This I could not do, or would
not ; the result was the same, – a bad exami-
nation. But these two had discovered some-
thing. When the Great Examen came round
again, instead of bringing up the tedious kings,
they asked me to tell about the Hundred Days
of Napoleon after Elba. Napoleon had not been
dead forty years then, and there were people
everywhere who had fought in his wars. We
had one in our school, an old Sergeant who
drilled us in gymnastics. He had been through
the campaign that ended at Waterloo, and was
never tired of telling how it froze so hard in
the winter of 1814 that they cut the wine
for the army rations with axes, and of the
THE OLD TOWN 201
fighting he had seen, of course. Poor fellow !
He looked too long upon the wine when it was red,
and marched to his death in the river one winter's
night singing a war-song, thinking perhaps he
was at Borodino. They found him standing dead
in the mud, upright, as a man and a soldier should,
with his face to the foe who he imagined held the
other shore. -
I had sat at his feet when they strayed un-
steadily toward the great past, many a time.
And I needed no second invitation to enter upon
the campaign of the Hundred Days. A sudden
transformation came over that dusty class-room;
for veterans sat in the Board of Censors. In
five minutes I had them sitting up, eagerly scan-
ning the camps of the French and the Allied
Armies as I drew them. In ten they were on
their feet, striding from Ligny to Quatre Bras,
to the Wavre turnpike, objecting, applauding,
disputing with me and with one another as I led
them from field to field of slaughter and finally
rounded them up at Waterloo, brought Blucher
to the relief of Wellington in the nick of time,
202 THE OLD TOWN
and charged the Old Guard with a yell of “Sur-
render l’’ only to be met with the immortal reply:
“The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders.”
We sat down, a hot, excited band. There was
a quiet gleam in Herr Trugaard's eye as he pro-
nounced the unanimous judgment of the Board:
“ug-i-,” that is, A1 and to spare. It was the only
“ug” I earned in my school days. It ought to
have given the pedagogues food for thought, and
perhaps it did.
The bell that once called the monks to prayers
summoned us to school at a quarter to eight, and
in the long winter we sang our morning hymn
with the dawn struggling through the windows.
When we trooped home again with knapsacks
strapped on our backs, it was night once more.
From eight to five was our day, with two hours
for noon, the rule in all the Old Town's affairs.
The bell regulated our lives as it had done since
hour-glasses marked the time. It rings yet at
the old hours, though the school-day is entirely
changed, and Venus who rang it has long been
gathered to her fathers. But when the Great
THE OLD TOWN 203
Examen drew near, it was too slow for our guilty
consciences, and the night-watchman was bribed
to wake us up. So that he should not rouse the
whole house, a string was hung out of the window,
the other end of which was tied securely to the
sleeper's toe or ankle. The watchman's order
was to pull it till the boy responded, and he did.
Perhaps he took the chance to pay off old scores.
He pulled and pulled with might and main, until
a red and swollen foot shot up to the window and
behind it an angry face yelling to let go. The
boy was awake and up, and the watchman clat-
tered on his way, chanting his morning verse:
Ho! Watchman, our clock it has struck four !
Eternal God, all honor
In Heaven’s choir to Thee,
Thou who art watchman ever
For us on earth that be.
Now ended is our watch,
For a good night
Give God the thanks
And mind ye well the time.
Before his song died away among the old houses,
we were hard at work cramming for examination.
204 THE OLD TOWN
This service was set down to his credit when in
Christmas week the watchman came to the door
to “bid New Years.” It was one of the customs
of the Old Town that came down from the earliest
days, happily shorn of some of its mediaeval as-
pects. For then he came not alone, but the whole
body of watchmen together, a kind of recon-
noissance in force, to which the fact that the
public executioner came with them lent a sug-
gestion which no one could afford to let go un-
heeded. That it really was a kind of official
blackmail is made apparent by certain ordinances
passed in the Sixteenth Century which forbade the
practice and fixed a regular schedule of charges
for these public servants. The executioner was
to have one dollar for chopping off a head or
hanging a man, half a dollar for an ear, a dollar
and a half for burning a witch at the stake, and
so forth. It was not much. When one reads of
his using twenty-two loads of wood for burning a
single witch, it seems but poor pickings for a
hard-worked man; but then he made up for it
by having his hands full. He burned thirteen
THE OLD TOWN 205
witches between the years 1572 and 1652, and
beheaded one. Of ears and such small fry no
account seems to have been kept. Besides all this
he was street-cleaning commissioner" and offal
contractor, with the express proviso, however,
that he must not himself engage in the latter
business as beneath his dignity, but must farm it
out to the town chimney-sweep. It will be seen
that the executioner was by no means a dis-
reputable man, but a functionary of importance
who could not be allowed to go begging from door
to door. As for the watchmen, they were ordered
to desist not merely from that practice, but from
monopolizing the moving business and from boss-
ing weddings held in the Town Hall; likewise
they must do no harm to drunken men in the
street, but must help them home. One look at
‘The river was included, I suppose; at all events, it con-
tributed to his revenues. An old law provided that whoever
polluted the stream by throwing any uncleanness into it
should lose his life. The Thirteenth Century had a curious
way of anticipating the things upon which the Twentieth
prides itself with much vaunting. We cry out against water
pollution; they prohibited it. It is easy to understand that
there were no sewers in Ribe.
206 THE OLD TOWN
the mug they drank from at council meetings and
still keep at the Town Hall gives a clew to the
wherefore of this last ordinance: the councilmen
themselves might have some trouble navigating
after a protracted session.
The demand of these New Year pirates seems
in the olden time to have been for “candles,”
perhaps a convenient medium of exchange. In
our day it was frankly for cash. Not only the
watchman, but every one who had during the
year rendered the house any service, or might be
expected to in the year to come, knocked, said
“Happy New Year,” and received a silver mark or
an “eight-skilling,” which was half a mark, as the
case might be, with the thanks of the house-
holder. The chimney-sweep was there, washed
and cleaned for once, — on other days he made it
a point to look “like his trade,” — and the official
mourner, who alternately bade the town to wed-
dings and funerals, or gave notice that the stork
had been around with a baby. A regular “cinch”
had he, since sooner or later every well-regulated
family must employ his service. His was a
THE OLD TOWN 207
real profession, and he kept a special face for
each of his functions. When he was bidding
to a funeral his gait
was slow and meas-
ured, his face grave,
and his voice had a
mournful droop that
matched his rusty
black coat and an-
cient silk hat. If it
was a wedding, he was
cordial, his step was
light and his tile
was set at a rakish
angle. The man was
an artist. And so in
their limited sphere
were the funeral bear-
ers, who were among -
Our New Year's call- THE CHIMNEY-SWEEP.
ers, too. They were a remnant from the days of
the executioner, farther back even, to the time
of the Black Death that killed half the people in

208 THE OLD TOWN
the town. Their guild was organized then, a sort
of mutual insurance concern that made a man sure
of getting underground at all events; and, having
been established, stayed, as did everything else
till it fell to pieces of itself. The aforesaid ordi-
nances bear witness that it took much Dutch cour-
age to carry the dead in the days of pestilence.
There is one which forbids giving the “bearers”
a barrel of beer at each funeral as wasteful and
unseemly. The Old Town did some things after
all that are worth considering. We do with less
than a barrel in our day, but even when we do
without it altogether, there is still waste enough
about our funerals that is both unseemly and
unfit in a Christian land.
The head of the house sat in state with a plate
full of silver coins beside him on the day these
callers made their rounds, and responded to each
salutation in kind; said “Thank you, Same to you,”
and handed the caller his coin. He twirled his
cap, spat on the silver for good luck, put it in his
pocket, scraped out, and made room for the next
comer. If it was the night-watchman, he had
THE OLD TOWN 209
perhaps a word about the wind being in the north-
west, “blowing up to a storm,” or about the mar-
ten that ate the last batch of squabs. The marten
lived in the attic under the roof beams, where it
had its young in peace. It was not disturbed,
though it
made an oc-
casional raid
on the hen
roost or the
pigeon coop;
but that was
to be guarded
against. To
“WE SAW IT ON MOONLIGHT NIGHTS.”
make up for
it, it ate the rats that infested the old houses,
and for this service it was let alone. We saw it
sometimes on moonlight nights, a black shadow
up among the pointed gables, big as a cat, it
seemed to me, and with a cat's long tail. The
watchman knew all its haunts, being a night
prowler himself, and could tell when it was “get-
ting too many” for the peace of the hen roost.
P

210 THE OLD TOWN
Then shot-guns came out, and after some still-
hunting by moonlight things were evened up
again and put upon a peace basis.
As pater familias sat awaiting his New Year's
callers, he had the advantage always of knowing
who was in the offing making for his door, and
could arrange his contribution accordingly. That
was because of the universal use of window
reflectors, two mirrors set at an angle and fixed
on the outside of the window. Sitting in your
chair by it, you could tell who was coming from
either side, half a block away. I often wonder
why they are not more used on this side of the
ocean. I should think they would be a great con-
venience if one did not wish to be “at home” for
undesirable callers. Perhaps that was how the
Bishop's wife escaped meeting the Burgomaster's
lady they used to tell of in Copenhagen. They
were not exactly friends, but their position re-
quired them to be agreeable before the world.
So they exchanged visits, and upon one of these
occasions the Burgomasterinde found the Bishop's
Manse deserted, with evidences of hasty flight.
THE OLD TOWN 211
Now the good Bishop's wife was not noted nearly
as much for tidiness as for her sharp wit, and the
Burgomasterinde took a long chance when, seeing
the mahogany table covered with a thick layer
of dust, she wrote on it “P-i-g.” But she felt
better, no doubt, and went on her way rejoicing.
Some days later the two ladies met on the street.
“Oh 1” said the Burgomaster's wife, “I called
at your house last week, but you were not in.”
“Yes, I am so sorry,” from the other, sweetly,
“I found your card on the table.”
They played the Old Town a trick once, those
reflectors, that is hard to forgive. It was when
the burghers who dwelt in the Main Street in-
sisted upon the town removing the North Gate
that obstructed their view. They “could not
see past it.” No more they could, for it
fairly blocked the way. But it was the last rem-
nant of the old walls, which, imperfect as they
were, for they never reached around, had borne
the brunt of many an assault, and it was over
this the iron hand was fixed in the days of rigor-
ous Ribe justice. It was a wretched fate that
212 THE OLD TOWN
sacrificed it to the whim of a lot of curious women
who wanted to spy on their neighbors. How-
ever, they got their deserts. They had forgotten
that the street turned just beyond the gate, and
when it was down and out of the way, behold
THE North GATE.
they could see no farther than before. I do not
know what they did. I know what sensible
people said about it twenty years after. But I
suppose the gate would have gone anyway, so it's
no use grieving.
Speaking of women's ways, a fashion grew up

THE OLD TOWN 213
three hundred years ago of wearing their cloaks
or petticoats over their heads instead of on their
shoulders, in the street and to church, where, so
shrouded, they slumbered peacefully through the
Sermon and, say the contemporary accounts,
even slept at the altar-rail through the com-
munion service. Talk about women wearing
hats in church I Those cloaks became such a
nuisance to the clergy that the practice was
sternly forbidden in town council under penalty
of a fine. Widows and mourners were excepted,
but the latter only for six months. There is no
mention of a petticoat revenue, so probably the
practice ceased of itself.
A custom that made a deep impression on us
children was the semi-annual “offering” in the
Domkirke. Part of the revenues of priest and
deacon was derived from free gifts of the people
at Easter and Christmas – free, that is, to all
appearances; but custom prescribed the exact
amount of what was really a tax upon every
householder. On these Sundays, when the last
hymn had been sung and the Sexton's purse on its
214 THE OLD TOWN
long pole had been poked into the farthest pew,
the Dean put on his crimson robe with the big
white cross down the back that made him look
as if he were clad in the national flag, and took
his place at the altar. The organist pulled a stop
that set a little bell tinkling and started a silver
star spinning in the organ loft. That was the
signal for all the men to rise, and with the Amt-
mand, the Rector, and the Burgomaster leading
on, they marched up to the altar and laid their
gifts there in two piles, one for the priest, the other
for the clerk, always silver, which made quite a
heap before the last coin had clinked upon it.
The organist always played the hymn with the
longest and slowest metre while the procession
was passing, to give it time, I suppose, and the
order of procedure was rigidly maintained. For
a boss carpenter, for instance, to have gone be-
fore a teacher in the Latin School, even though
his offerings had been twice the size of the other's,
would not have done at all. They kept step very
well to the music, going and coming back, though
I fancied their march was a little brisker on the
-
*
THE EMPEROR
s BIRTHDAY


THE OLD TOWN 215
return, as if they were glad it was over. Odd
what impressions children get and keep. To
me, looking back, it seems the one really great
religious ceremony in the Domkirke I remember,
always excepting the time the King came and one
other. That was when the Austrian soldiers, dur-
ing the occupation in '63–64, celebrated the birth-
day of their Emperor with a high mass. There
had not been a Catholic service in the cathedral
since the Reformation, and there has not been
one since. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was
the whole setting of august ceremonial and
warmth and color that were foreign there; the
uniforms, the bugles, the incense, with the strange
tongue and the evident devotion of the soldiers
who knelt on the marble floor — it all left an
impression on my mind and heart that has never
faded. It is rank heresy, of course, and I would
never subscribe to it in cold blood, but it did
seem somehow as if the old House of God came
to its rights once more. Saints of old whose
knees, bent in worship, had hallowed those
ancient stones, walked again in the vaulted aisles,
216 THE OLD TOWN
and the image of the martyred Bishop Leofdag
in the wall outside seemed to nod as with under-
standing as we went by. I saw the lights go out
with regret. Perhaps, unknown to myself, it had
something to do with my desire in years long after
to put a couple of stained-glass windows in the
chancel that looks so white and cold. But they
did not want them. They were not in the style,
they said. Perhaps they were right. But oh
for a little warmth in our worship now and then,
even at the sacrifice of being right in the matter
of style.
It may be that the fact that the Emperor's
birthday came in summer, if my memory serves
me right, had something to do with it. The
most loyal friend of the Domkirke could not have
sat out the services there in winter without dis-
comfort. There was no way of heating it, had
not been since the beginning of our century, when
the “fire-pan” given to it by a pious burgher in
1473 was taken out and sold for old iron. A
legacy went with it that was forever to keep it
in coal, so that “the poor and the church-goers”
THE OLD TOWN 217
should not suffer from the cold. What became
of that, I don’t know. They did many queer
things in the days before reverence for the great
past, and its memories and landmarks, awoke
with the struggle for nationality and for freedom
in our own time. Among other things they
stripped some of the ancient grave-stones of their
beautiful engraved brass plates for the melting
pot, when a new bell had to be cast. And down
in Holstein, where the sacred banner that fell
from heaven to the Danish knights in the Esth-
land crusade and saved the battle that was all
but lost, had been left by the indifference of a
later day in hostile hands, they took it at house-
cleaning time and, esteeming it just a moth-
eaten and tattered rag, burned it with other
rubbish in the public road.
In Ribe, for a hundred years the people put on
their overcoats and mufflers and their rubbers
when they went to church and sat it out as they
could; or else they stayed at home. Even so
clothed we sat and shivered, our toes growing
numb on the stone floor. When it was over, we
218 THE OLD TOWN
limped out and took a quick walk around the
Castle Hill to “get up circulation.” The walls
of the Domkirke were thick, and it was past
Christmas before the winter had quite moved in;
but then it stayed well into the summer, refusing
to be dislodged by spring until the roses were in
bloom. In the great restoration, of which more
hereafter, it was at last the upstart factory across
the Linden Square, that had once so piqued the
conservatism of the Old Town, which, having
been by that time abandoned, gave its boiler
house to be a heating plant for the church. And
So the old and the new met once again, and atone-
ment was made for past misconduct.
I have spoken of the square red tower which,
though part of the Domkirke, and its great and
distinguishing feature seen from afar, did yet
belong under the civil government as the strong-
hold of the burghers in time of trouble, typifying
curiously the union of church and state, and
crumbling slowly like that in my day. It had
given fair warning to more than one generation.
There was a house in Priest Street, straight up
THE OLD TOWN 219
from the tower, with the old arms of the town
picked out in colors above its door, which I
never could pass without a shudder. As far as
that, tradition had it, the tower fell on Christ-
mas morning in the year 1283, when it collapsed
during early mass while the church was full of
people. Very many were killed. It was in the
time after the death of the great Waldemar when
the country was torn by dissension within and
onslaught from without. An earthquake had
shaken the land eleven years before, probably
contributing its share to the insecurity of the
tower, and one can imagine the “great fear that
prevailed” among the people. Again in 1594
the upper part of the tower fell, and in the re-
building it received the shape and height which
it has kept.
The tower falcon, a fierce-eyed, solitary bird of
prey, was its rightful tenant in my day; had
been, I fancy, from the beginning. He seemed
to fit in with its warlike traditions. The boys
caught him in traps, sometimes, and kept him
chained about the house, but never for long,
220 THE OLD TOWN
for he was utterly untamable and his shriek was
not melodious. Furthermore, his diet of meat,
preferably live mice, kept us scurrying in a way
we quickly tired of. The falcon has moved.
A score of years ago they overhauled the village
church at Seem, three miles up the river, and
dislodged a family of rooks that lived there. In
search of new quarters they struck the Domkirke,
liked it, and stayed. The newcomers were great
chatterers, while the falcon is a silent bird, and
moreover they brought all their relations. In
disgust, I suppose, at the racket they made, the
falcon betook himself to the Plantage and be-
came a dweller in trees. My boy reports that he
is there yet. He has been up to see. The rooks
stayed and multiplied exceedingly. At least I
supposed them to be rooks, till, last summer,
I stood on the top of the tower in Windsor Castle
and was told by the caretaker that the black
birds hopping about were jackdaws. They were
the very same.
Jackdaws or rooks, they took possession of the
big tower and of the little one, and they have
THE OLD TOWN 221
kept it since. By day they go afield for their
food; but sundown always finds them in loud
and general debate on the stone railing of the red
tower. They sit in military files discussing the
subject in hand in very human fashion: now one
at a time, and again all together, Squawking at
the top of their voices. Year by year their num-
ber grows, since no marten can reach them on
their roost. There came a time when it seemed
as if something ought to be done, if they were not
to practically own the town. The matter came
up in council, and the debate that ensued was
worthy of the best days of the Old Town. The
consensus of opinion was that they were getting
to be a nuisance; but how to stop it was another
matter.
’ said one of the city fathers,
“They are here,’
“and what are you going to do about it?” There
was no answer. Upon the question what was
their diet no one could shed any definite light;
but it suggested a ray of hope to one.
“They might,” he ventured, “be good to eat.”
The city fathers considered one another thought-
222 THE OLD TOWN
fully. They were certainly fat. If they were to
turn out a new kind of game, now ! It ended,
after long debate, in a committee being appointed
to take the matter under practical advisement,
with directions to report at a future meeting
whether the rooks were good eating, or, if not,
how they disagreed with a councilman's stomach.
Six months had passed when last I fished with a
member of the committee. He screwed up his
mouth and shook his head dubiously as he made
a cast for a pickerel hiding in the rushes.
“They are fat, yes,” he said ruefully. “They
might be good, and then again — they might
make you sick.”
Caution, says an ancient Danish proverb, is
the virtue of a burgomaster. It ought at least
to be the privilege of a councilman.
A friend who, like myself, had long been in
foreign parts where they have other ways, once
told me that he believed the Danes had no busi-
ness capacity, at least the Danes who stayed
at home, because he found them charging the
big summer hotel a cent more for milk than
THE OLD TOWN 223
they exacted from the poor fishermen who lived
on the shore; and when he asked them why,
he was told that “the hotel took so much more
and it was more trouble.” But in the first
place that was true; and, further, I think it
was their inborn sense of fairness plus their
stubborn democracy that was breaking out
there. The small folk were to be protected
against the wealthier neighbor. A people with-
out business capacity would never have thought
of the expedient the Old Town hit upon in a
dispute with the local gas company, long after
I had gone away. The sidewalks are narrow,
with never room for more than one, and the
nights are sometimes very dark. So, as the
gas company refused to give in and the town
refused to burn gas till it did, and consequently,
all parties to the quarrel being Jutlanders, there
was no telling when the dispute would be set-
tled, if ever, the council ordered that the lamp-
posts be painted white to avoid collision and
suits for damages. If that is not business Sense,
what is it 2 -
224 THE OLD TOWN
No. The Old Town moves with delibera-
tion, it is true. But then, the rest of us are in
too much of a hurry. No one ever is, there.
What is there to run after? The clock that
has counted the hours since before Napoleon
stirred up the dry bones of Europe still stands
in its corner and ticks the seconds, the hours,
the years, twice a day pointing its slow finger
to the date graven on its face: 1600–1700–1800
— why should one hurry? If we but wait,
the years will come to us and carry us with them
to our long rest. And there will be others where
we are now. The world will move; men will
live and labor and love; and the old clock will
tick in the hall, counting the hours, the days,
the years. It is the Old Town's philosophy.
If it has not made it rich, or powerful, or great,
it has made it content. Who shall say then
that it is not as good as the best ?
There is one that ticks in a house I know of
where eyes I loved smiled to it and nodded to
it every day in passing. In 1792 it was made
in Ribe, where famous clock-makers lived then.
THE OLD TOWN 225
I tried to buy it; I offered two hundred kroner
for it, which was a small fortune to the Old
Town. But its owner shook his head. It had
been in the family since his great-great-great-
grandfather, and it would stay there as long
as there were any of them left. I shook his
hand. I should have been sorry had he been
willing to sell. It would have been like be-
traying an old friend. They were poor, but
they were loyal. It was the Old Town all over.
Years ago the last of the clock-makers lived in
Black Friars Street, in our block. One morn-
ing there was a great crash. It was their house
that had fallen down. The neighbors hastened
up to help, and when a way had been made
through the wreck, found the old man and his
wife lying calmly in bed. The beams had formed
a shelter over them, and they were safe till the
next cave-in. They urged them to hurry out,
but the old couple refused. It was their home.
They had always lived in it and, now they were
old, would die in it if need be rather than seek
another. They were like Heine's lovers:
Q
226 THE OLD TOWN
Wir Beide bekümmern uns um nichts
Und bleiben ruhig liegen.
They had to take them out by force.
No need of haste. The mail-coach waited
for you in the old days, once you were regis-
tered as a passenger, till you came. It would
have been base to desert you. The train waits
now till you climb aboard and station-master
and conductor have exchanged the last item of
news. The red-coated mail-carrier taps on your
window with the expected letter and a sympa-
thetic “It’s come.” The telegraph messenger
who meets you in the street with his message
goes home with you to hear the good news;
he knows it is good. The mill-wheels drone in
the stream their old drowsy lay that was old
when you were born. Down by the castle
garden a worn wheel whirs and hums in the rope-
walk where father and son go spinning their end-
less cord, side by side, as did their people before
them as far back as any one can remember.
Why should one hurry? The sun sinks low in
the west. Far upon the horizon there is a gleam
THE OLD TOWN
227


228 THE OLD TOWN
of silver: it is the sea, sleeping in a calm. The
bells of the Old Town peal forth their even
Song. The cows come home from the meadows.
In the Cloister shadows trembling hands are trim-
ming the evening lamp, tired old feet tottering
to their rest. A day is ended. Above blossom-
ing gardens the stork looks down from its nest,
wiser than the world of men: another will dawn.
So that its evening be peace, what matters the
rest? It is the message of the Old Town.
CHAPTER IX
OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER.
To us it will al-
ways be “our beau-
tiful summer,” I
expect, and, indeed,
I fancy it will be
so remembered
THE ACCURSED CANDLESTICK. throughout the Dan-
ish land." For the seasons there had suffered a sad
decline since my boyhood days. Then the sun
shone always in summer, the autumn days were
ever mellow as the ripened nuts we shook from
the hazel bushes, and in winter we skated from
Christmas until the March winds woke the slum-
bering spring. At least So it seems to me now,
They tell me that this generation of boys has
almost forgotten the art of skating; that they
do not know how to cut the figure 8, or the name
of the girl they like best, in the ice, because
* The summer of 1904, the year of our home-coming.
229

230 THE OLD TOWN
there is no ice more than half the time; that in
summer they have to hurry so between showers
that all the fun is gone out of the haying. And
as for the autumn, I am not likely to forget one
that found me stranded there, sick and desolate
just as the century was closing; the long, wake-
ful nights I lay listening to the storm shaking
my window and whistling through the cracks
as if it were mocking my helplessness, with four
thousand miles of tempestuous sea between me
and home. I sailed them all in those night-
watches, with never a rift in the pitiless gray
skies, till I saw at last a coast lying golden in the
sunset, and knew it from the way my heart
leaped within me for the Blessed Isles where
home was. It was then I learned that I, too,
belonged here where my children were born.
But this summer was one long holiday with-
out a cloud. The sun set in yellow glory on
that June day when we landed, hours after chil-
dren should be in bed and asleep; but how could
one ask it in reason, with the day, as it seemed,
only half over? And it rose in undimmed splendor
THE OLD TOWN 231
on the September morn that saw us wave tear-
ful good-bys and sail away, past Hamlet's Castle
and Elsinore, and leave our fairyland behind.
We rode in on the hay wagons, we saw the
sheaves of golden grain stacked and housed.
We watched day by day the stalks of Indian
corn by the fountain in the King's Square grow
ears as big as any in Kansas fields. They were
flaunting great shocks of shining silk when we
went away, to the admiration of the good people
of Copenhagen, who were never tired of looking
at the strange plant; and I, with the memories
of Long Island strong upon me, was deep in a
plot to teach that gardener how to make “hot
' since ripen they would not, those ears,
corn,'
when my wife came along and wrecked that
dinner and my reputation with one swoop by
declaring that “they were not that kind, but
common chicken corn.” I never knew until then
that there was any difference. But, sweet
corn or chicken-feed, dinner or no dinner, it
was truly a beautiful summer. All Denmark
will bear me out in that.
232 THE OLD TOWN
We had gone, we old folk, to see once more
the fields where we played when we were chil-
dren, and to us there was in it the sadness of the
long ago. To the young it was a joyous picnic;
and many a time their laughter in the quiet
streets, where ghosts walked in broad daylight
to our sight at every turn, made us stop and
listen wistfully. For in the Old Town nothing
was changed. The stork stood one-legged upon
the peak of the red-tiled roof, holding majesti-
cally aloof from the ways of men; and in the
doorway the swallow hatched her young as of
old. There was the broken pane in the transom
I knew so well, to let her in, the right of way
for which she paid in coin of sweetest song.
I know they laughed at me for calling it song;
but then they had not been away a lifetime.
No mocking-bird or nightingale sings to my
heart as does the house-Swallow's cheery note.
In it are summer and sunshine, and the blossom-
ing lilacs, and the whisper of the breeze in the
trees, the children calling to each other at their
play. It is as the time I had sat through an
THE OLD TOWN 233
hour of Christina Nilsson, missing something —
I knew not what — in all the wealth of music,
when all at once came “’Way down upon the
Suwanee River,” and melted the icicles away.
It is many years since, but the mist comes into
my eyes at the thought of it. That is how the
Swallow sings to me in the streets of old Ribe.
Down in the river the white swans arched
their necks as in the days that were, and the
clatter of the mill-wheels by the dam came up
with drowsy hum, heavy with the burden of
the centuries. For Ribe was an old city when
Christian bishops first preached peace to the
savage North. In the wall of its great cathe-
dral there is a stone that once bore the image
of the earliest among them who fell before pagan
arrows in the very meadow where we had our
boyish games. The storms of many winters
have nearly worn it away; but what reverent
loyalty vainly sought to preserve, the bigotry
of a day that thought itself wise as well as pious
ignorantly achieved in commemoration of hu-
man hate. When they came to knock away
234 THE OLD TOWN
the whitewash of the Reformation, put on to
hide what sand and soap and acids could not
efface (there are clear marks of their having
been used to de-
stroy the pictures
of apostles and
Saints painted in
Catholic days on
the great granite
pillars), there came
to light, in one of
the arches pointing
toward the place
of Bishop Leof-
dag's martyrdom,
2.
;--
W
-
-
a strange figure in
kilts with fists up-
raised in threat and
;
A STRANGE FIGURE IN. KILTs.
curse, which presently was seen to be a heathen
raging against the new day that dared rear a tem-
ple to the Christians' God upon the very site of
the ancient sacrifices. The whitewash had kept it
from decay. The recollection of it came over me




THE OLD TOWN 235
with a rush of gratitude that the world is grow-
ing better and broader and all the time farther
into the light, when, the other day, I sat in the
beautiful chapel of the Leland Stanford Uni-
versity that was built “to the glory of God”
and to no sect or set of mortals. Some one
had told the organist that I was there, and upon
the waves of soft music that floated out into the
twilight hour there came snatches of a Danish
hymn I had not heard since childhood until
twenty-five hundred men and women sang it
in the old church the day we rededicated it, and
this time “to the glory of God,” with no wish
to make reservation. Ay! let the heathen rage,
within the sanctuary and without. It stands
there despite them, witness that the light drives
out darkness, love conquers hate.
Eight hundred years the old Dom of Ribe
had borne its testimony, when its crumbling
walls gave warning that nothing that is of earth
is imperishable, and now, after many years of
labor, it stood restored. It was to its birthday
we had come home. Morning, noon, and even-
236 THE OLD TOWN
ing our steps turned toward it; and when at
night the old town had settled down to its fire-
side chat, and only the organist was musing over
the old hymns in his loft, my feet found the
familiar paths. They needed no guide here, even
where the shadows lay deepest. There was the
pillar with the mark of the great flood that two
hundred years ago at the Christmastide made ten
thousand homes desolate upon the Danish coast.
Though the Dom stands upon the highest spot in
town, anciently called the mountain because it was
at least ten feet above the level of the river, the
water rose man-high within it. We boys used
to measure up against the mark, and wonder if
we would ever grow to be so tall. There was the
Oaken door with great bronze rings worn thin
and light that bore their own testimony to those
days and their ways. The powerful bishops who
built the Dom and gave it renown were fighting
men. It was the custom of their day. The
* October 11–12, 1634. The worst flood in Danish history.
Over twenty-two thousand persons perished in it, all along
the coast. In one village hard by Ribe — Melby — only one
young man was left alive.
-HEAD DOOR,
THE CAT



THE OLD TOWN 237
one who laid its foundation fell in battle before
the walls were fairly above ground. But at home
they wore the mitre, and knew how to make
even the King hold his hand at the door of the
Sanctuary. To all men it was that literally;
hence the worn rings. How many appealing
hands had grasped them with despairing grip,
no one may ever tell; but this much is certain,
that the appeal was not in vain. The iron
hand was over the town gate, indeed, symbol
of the rigor of human justice that demanded
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but at
the church door a mightier was raised to stay
it, at least until the case had been heard by the
tribunal that claimed power to loose and to
bind in the world to come as in the one that is.
The Cat-head Door, as we called it, because of
the lions' heads wrought upon it, long since
ceased to play other part than to frighten us
children. It was nearest the altar, and, with
that curious incongruity that in the popular
superstition assigned to Satan an abode in the
church when it was forsaken at night, we boys
238 THE OLD TOWN
had been told how we could bring him out by
walking thrice around the building and calling
each time through the key-hole of that door,
“Come out !” The third time he would ap-
pear. I do not think any of us believed it; but
many a dark night — it was only at such times
that speech was to be had with his Satanic Maj-
esty — I have made one of a party to test the
power of the spell. We made the circuit of the
Domkirke bravely enough twice, albeit we lagged
a little on the second lap; but invariably when
we approached the Cat-head Door on the third,
a wild panic would seize us, and we ran as if the
devil were after us in very truth.
Silly? Of course it was. But in Ribe it
was bred in the bone. Barely within the door
that held us in such terror, haven of refuge
though it had once been, was the accursed candle-
stick, with its blasphemous ban upon whoever
should presume to move what some purse-proud
burgher had hung there to celebrate his own
littleness, persuading himself and his time, per-
haps, that it was also to the glory of God. In
THE OLD TOWN 239
such fashion had he succeeded that stories of
how disaster had befallen when impious hands
THE OLD CLOISTER-CHURCH.
were stretched forth to touch it were whispered
yet in my school days. The Sexton had fallen
from the ladder, the architect had died sud-
denly, etc. Silly, certainly. But with every
spade-thrust in the earth disclosing forgotten
cemeteries, buried cloister walls, and secret bur-
rows; with the watchmen at night droning
forth their chants of five hundred years ago in
the dark shadows of the Domkirke; with the
deep voice of its bell counting the hours, the
bell that hung in the great tower when men

240 THE OLD TOWN
went to war clad in iron — and little else they
did in that country in those days; with the very
street names proclaiming the past on every
hand: Black Friar Street, Gray Friar Street,
Priest Street, Bishop Street, Monk Street, Cloister
Street, Castle Street, Grave Street — mere names
now, it is true, but eloquent of things long dead
— why, the wonder was, not that we were still
so little, but rather that we had grown so big
in our world ghosts.
To one they had put up a marble tablet since
I was a boy. There it was, set in the wall of the
old house:
Here lived the tailor Laurids Splid, whose poor wife,
Maren, on November the 9th, 1641, was burned for
witchcraft on the gallows hill.
A hundred years after the Reformation | Was
there a maniac epidemic that swept the world
and swept men's reason away, as the Black
Death did their lives in that fatal century?
Fifty years later still, they hanged the witches
at Salem, Massachusetts. They did not burn
them, so I was informed once, when I fell into
THE OLD TOWN 241
the error, by a scandalized citizen of that right-
eous commonwealth. They were not savages,
he would have me know. The Ribe Christians
had some bowels too. They tied a pound of
powder on the woman's back before they flung
her into the fire, and so cut her sufferings short.
Surely the devil came out of his hiding-place
that day and helped feed the fire. The house
in which Maren lived stands unchanged, except
for a coat of paint, across the way from the
jail. She confessed, is the record. Oh, yes!
the Seventeenth Century had not forgotten the
ways of the Inquisition, any more than the
Twentieth has the fire when its passions are
aroused, though the merciful pound of powder
is left out. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but
there was no swallow's nest in that hall, with
hungry mouths of little ones gaping to be fed,
and no peaceful stork upon the roof. Even
the rats shunned it: a weasel lived in the attic.
Poor Maren's travail was brief, let us hope.
Down the street there lived a man with whom
it went through a life rich in benediction to his
R
242 THE OLD TOWN
kind. A bishop was he, and a singer whose
songs will live as long as the Danish tongue.
He sang of human sorrow and travail and of
the land yonder where the tears are wiped away,
until one who did not know went to him once
with a sneer. Easy for him to speak of trouble
who had none — rich, well housed, all his lines
cast in pleasant places ! Bishop Brorson heard
him out with a sad little smile.
“Come with me,” he beckoned, when he
had done, and led the way to the top story of
the house. There, in a room made strong with
iron bars, sat his son, caged like a wild beast,
a raving maniac.
“There,” he said, with a sigh that must have
seared the man's soul to his dying day – “there
is my trouble.” The mark of the bars is there
yet, — there were no insane asylums in those
days, – but the good bishop's troubles are long
OVer.
So I wandered, and whithersoever I strayed,
back to the Dom I came and lingered there.
There was the seat in which She sat, in her fair
THE OLD TOWN 243
girlhood, during the long Sunday sermons, while
I was banished to the “men’s side” across the
aisle. Yonder the door through which we had
come in together on the day of our betrothal,
when the doing gave notice to all the world
forever after to hold its peace; and down this
aisle we had walked, hand in hand, with the
old parson's blessing in our ears and our hearts,
out into the world that had suddenly become
glorified. And now, across the Square, there
hung from a window She and I both well knew,
the flag of freedom and of hope under which we
were growing old together. I wanted it so
that when we came back we should be within
sight of the Domkirke and as near to it as might
be. For the church is as much part of my life
as is the memory of my father and mother. In-
deed, it is a big part of the life of the Old Town,
all of its past and more than half of the present.
With might and main did we wave our flag
when the King came. For days the silent street
had echoed with the tramp of troops come from
far-off garrison towns to receive him. The
244 THE OLD TOWN
children stared; they had never seen soldiers.
In us of the past generation it touched a wound
that ached still. Forty years had not made
us forget those winter nights of weary waiting
for our beaten army on its way to the north,
its face still to the foe that followed fast. That
spring we saw our country cut in twain and a
wall of bayonets drawn between us and our
brothers to the south. King Christian had not
forgotten, either, the great tragedy of his and
the nation's life. I saw it in his furrowed face
as he looked up at old Dannebrog flying from
the church tower. Perhaps he thought of the
thousands of hungry eyes riveted upon it across
the frontier. Up there at least the enemy could
not reach it, though he tore it from their homes.
But if the ghost sat at the banquet, no one
gave any sign. In fact, no one did anything
but run and shout for three whole days. It
was Ribe's one chance to cheer its King, and it
dropped all else and went at it with a rush. Fifty
times a day the alarm was given: “Here they
come !” and men, women, and children ran
THE OLD TOWN 245
and swung their hats and cheered until they
were red in the face. We too. My little boy
had announced with republican dignity that
“he guessed the President was more than any
Ring,” but when he saw the kind old face of
King Christian he swung his flag and yelled
louder than any of us.
“Gee! Mamma,” he said, when it was over
for the moment, “I didn’t know it was like that.
I just had to.” - r
The very guard at the fire-house that was
there to rush out and toot and present 8.TIOS
whenever one of the red-coated royal drivers
came into view on the box of a coach, lost its
bearings and turned out to salute a scarlet-clad
letter-carrier in the twilight. That the bugler
discovered his mistake, choked off his tune in
the middle, and so took the whole town into
the joke, was as it should be. We were in it,
all of us, and, as young America remarked,
“up to the neck!’’ All except the cows. They
had been warned off the streets during the King's
stay by police ordinance. Ordinarily they have
246 THE OLD TOWN
the right of way, being taken back and forth
twice a day, to and from the pasture. But
now they must keep away three whole days.
The police force of Ribe put the case to me
convincingly:
“”Tain't only for the sake of the streets,”
he said; “we don’t mind they're dirty; but
s’pposin' they came up against the Bishop and
the parsons paradin’ – them cows is lawless
beasts — they wouldn’t let them pass, no more
they wouldn't.”
Hence their banishment and the singular pag-
eant of numberless led cows, in charge of little
boys, that paraded through the streets on the
last day of their freedom. They wanted to see
as much of the show as they could while they
had the chance. And see it they did — greens,
flags, flowers, and all. Into the very yard of
our hotel I found one youngster leading his cow
to see the tent they were putting up there for
the overflow, and also the flag that Hans Peter-
sen, or Peter Hansen, or somebody, had hoisted
in his back-yard, where no one could see it but he
THE OLD TOWN 247
himself. But then, was he nobody? It was
his chance to show his loyal good-will, and he
took it, as did all the rest of us.
The rising sun found an orchestra of bare-
headed men on top of the church tower “blow-
ing in?’ the festival with old hymn tunes, that
all might hear and rejoice. That is one use
the big tower is put to. Of another the fat
stone balusters that hedge in its top give a hint
under close scrutiny. Three or four of them have
been replaced by wooden ones with copper skins.
The old were shot away in a duel with the Swedes
who had taken the castle in the seventeenth
century and were pelted with cannon-balls from
the tower. Truly, the Church militant but
the tower was built in the beginning for warfare.
The centuries and the Church — perhaps also
the modern artillery — tamed it slowly. As
the day wore on, one excitement followed an-
other. A big blow brewed in the west, and
by the middle of the afternoon the North Sea
itself came in to have a look at the King.
Where the cows had been pastured, suddenly
248 THE OLD TOWN
there was water, and the royalties turned out,
eager to see the famed “storm flood.” But
the wind died down, and the cows went back
to their own. Night found the Old Town in a
blaze of light. In every window of every house
stood lighted candles; the river was alive with
boats carrying colored lanterns and joyous sing-
ers. Above it all a black cloud of bewildered
rooks flew with loud squawks from the old Cloister
to the Dom and back again, frightened out of
their night's rest, and thinking, no doubt, that
the end of the world had come.
Old King Christian had tears in his eyes when
he arose at the banquet to thank his people,
and so had we all of us when he broke down
utterly and pleaded for patience “with an old
man eighty-six years and over.” And then
he gave me the surprise of my life; for in the
midst of it all he sent one of the gold-gallooned
lackeys to tell me that he desired to drink to
my health, and did. Now you may call me a
snob, or anything else you like; I own that I
was never so proud in all my days. For there
THE OLD TOWN 249
sat my old townsmen, with whom I had been,
shall we say, just a bit off-color in spite of all,
because I did
not do accord-
ing to the rules,
but broke over
the traces every
way, and went
off to America
to do mercy
knows what out-
landish stunts in
the way of earn-
ing a living.
There they sat
now, in their
own town, and
saw the King
himself toast me
before their very
KING CHRISTIAN COMES FROM CHURCH.
faces ! I did think my measure was full when I
beheld the President of the United States take
my wife in to dinner in the White House — I

250 THE OLD TOWN
know I nearly burst with pride in her and in him
—but now, indeed, it was running over. In self-
defence, lest I grow vain and foolish, I had to
pinch myself, and remember the Iowa farmer
who sized me up last winter. I met him going
to one of my lectures, and when he found out
that I was the man who was to speak, he looked
me up and down, and passed verdict thus:
“Well, now, you never kin tell from lookin'
at a toad how far he'll jump !”
Back to the soil, is the proper cure for the big
head any day.
Now that I am back home I can speak of
another surprise that befell, if the little people
can be left out the while. They might not under-
stand. It was when I looked my classmates
from the Latin School over. There were fifteen
of us, and the thirteen took the strait and nar-
row road. They were good and they prospered.
Hans and I were the black sheep who perennially
disputed the dunce's seat on the last bench,
and disputed pretty much everything else. It
seems that we never found time to learn for
THE OLD TOWN 251
fighting, and no doubt the class felt it as a relief
when we quit, out of season, Hans to go into
business where he belonged, I to learn a trade.
And now, after a lifetime, what was my sur-
prise to find that of the whole fifteen the two
whom the King had singled out for decoration
with his much-coveted cross were — Hans and
myself. The thing came to me with a stunning
sensation when I saw the ribbon pinned on
Hans's coat that day; and when we were together
in his home at tea, it worked out into my con-
sciousness.
“Hans,” I said, “did it occur to you — ”
A motion of his hand stayed me. “Fritz l’’
he called, sharply, “time you were at your les-
sons,” and not until the door had closed upon
the reluctant retreat of the son of the house did
he turn to me with a twinkle in the eye.
“Yes,” he said, “it did. We got through
somehow, but on your life don’t you let the boy
hear. He is in it now.”
All things come to an end, and this did too.
When the King was gone and Ribe had settled
252 THE OLD TOWN
down to talk it over, I had my chance of getting
even for sundry little digs at my home across
the seas that I had scored up. They will do
it; it is in the blood. To the old country, when
it is as old as Ribe, we shall remain, I suppose,
to the end of time a lot of ex-savages, barely
reclaimed from the woods and scalp-locks and
such, and in the nature of things not made to
last. It was at a social gathering where the
one all-absorbing topic was the Domkirke,
that the worm turned. The walls would stand
now a hundred years, some one said, and shot a
pitying glance at me, that said as plainly as
speech: “Your whole republic isn’t much older
than that, and where will it be in another hun-
dred?” But I had been up in the roof of the
church the day before with the boss carpenter
to look at the big beams, and something there
seemed familiar. To my question he nodded:
Yes! he had bought the lot on the sea, a ship
load of American timber, pitch-pine, and there
it was. So I was not slow to rise to my friend's
bait.
THE OLD TOWN 253
“And,” I added, when I had told them, “your
walls of old-world stone may stand a hundred
years on your own showing; or give them two.
But the carpenter told me that, barring ac-
cidents, there is no reason why the roof of Ameri-
can timber should not last a thousand and be
as good as new.” I think I scored.
But we bore no grudges. I owe them too
much for that. The sun shone so brightly upon
my mother's new-made grave, which hands of
loving friends had garlanded with flowers against
her boy's home-coming; the grass was so green
and the thrush sang So Sweetly in the hedge,
that the sting went out also of that sorrow and
only the promise remained. It is good to have
lived, and though its days be mostly gray under
northern skies, glad am I that mine were framed
in the memories of the Old Town. We sought
and found it together, She and I, the house in
which I dreamed as a boy, in the street of the
Black Friars. The window-pane was still there
upon which I wrote “From here I can see Elisa-
beth's garden” beyond the river, heaven knows
254 THE OLD TOWN
with what stylus to cut so deep. With a dozen
little mouths to feed in our home, diamonds
were not lying loose there. The trees have grown
and shut garden and stream out of sight. But
the river divides us no longer, and though the
shadows lengthen and the frost is upon our heads,
into our hearts it cannot come. Hand in hand,
we look trustfully across to that farther shore,
to the land of the rising sun where we shall find
what we vainly seek here: our youth in the
long ago.
So we came home. I shall not soon forget
the morning when, to the wondering sight of
our thousand immigrants, the panorama of the
great world city rose out of the deep. They
crowded the rail of the steamer as it came slowly
up through the Narrows. Clad in their holiday
clothes, they stood in quiet groups, gazing si-
lently toward the land, all the fun and the horse-
play of the voyage gone out of them. To the
jester of the steerage it was but a dull mood,
and, thinking to cheer them, he leaped upon a
chest and harangued the crowd, telling them
THE OLD TOWN 255
in their own language that they were coming
to a land where the golden rule read, “Do others
or they will do you.”
“Cheer up !” he shouted, “and let's have
a song. Who can give us a jolly one?’’
There was no answer. Till somewhere in
the crowd a lone, far-away voice began a verse
of an old Norwegian hymn and sang it to the
end in a clear alto. There was a little uneasy
laugh in the corner by the wheel-house, but as
the singer went on, never faltering, here and
there a voice fell in, and before he had come
to the end of the second verse it swelled in one
common strain: “On this our festal day.”
Everybody was singing. The jester had dis-
appeared. He was forgotten, as they looked
out, men and women, with folded hands toward
their Promised Land. I thought of my friend
who fears for our democracy, and wished he
were there to hear his answer. For it was the
answer. Such as these have its hope in keeping.
KING FREDERIK AT HOME
IKING FREDERIK AT HOME
I HAD never met
King Frederik — the
Crown Prince he was
then — until the sum-
mer of 1904, which we
spent at Copenhagen.
As a boy I had seen
him often and pulled
off my cap to him,
and always in return had received a bow and
a friendly Smile. But at home, and to speak
to, I had not met him till that summer. We
were at luncheon at our hotel one day, noth-
ing further from our thoughts than princes and
courts, when the portier came in hot haste to
announce a royal lackey who wished speech
with me. Right behind him up loomed the
messenger, in his gold lace and with his silver-
headed cane ever so much more imposing a
259

260 THE OLD TOWN
figure than the King himself. “Their Royal
Highnesses, the Crown Prince and the Crown
Princess,” so ran his message, “desired our
attendance at dinner at Charlottenlund the
next day but one.”
“The dickens they do,” I blurted out, for-
tunately in English, with a vision of silk hats
and regalia of which I had none. But my wife
pulled my sleeve and saved the day. “Would
he thank their royal highnesses very much; we
should be glad to come,” was the way it went
into Danish. Whereupon he bowed and went,
leaving us staring helplessly at one another. I
think we were both disposed to back out; but
the children decided it otherwise. Of course
we must go. Such an honor -
So we went. After all, it was simple enough.
I just borrowed a top hat (that did not fit; I
was glad to carry it in my hand in the presence
of royalty, for it simply would not come down
over my head; it was three sizes too small).
The rest was easy. We drove out with the
American Minister and his wife, who were in-
THE OLD TOWN 261
vited too. It was for a long time after a dis-
puted question in our family whether it was the
cross of Dannebrog I wore on my breast, and
therefore me, the sentinels saluted; or the Ameri-
can Minister. But he wore no cross. My wife
insisted mischievously that it must be his car-
riage. Could she have seen herself, charming
princes and princesses alike with her sweet and
gracious ways, there would have been no mys-
tery. Where she passed, everybody was made
glad. They saluted from sheer desire to do it.
And then, we were guests of royalty.
Charlottenlund lies in the forest just outside
Copenhagen, on the beautiful Shore Road. It
blew in from the water, and the ladies, on ac-
count of their hats, preferred to ride backwards.
And so, chatting and laughing, we wheeled into
the palace grounds before we knew we were
halfway, and found ourselves heading a pro-
cession of royal carriages bent for the palace.
They were easily known by their scarlet-coated
drivers. We had barely time to change around,
to get our wives properly seated, when the door
262 THE OLD TOWN
of the carriage was yanked open and lackeys
Swarmed to help the ladies. In we went. Al-
most before we could draw breath a door was
thrown wide, our names were announced, and
the Crown Princess came forward with out-
stretched hand.
“It was very good of you to come out to us,”
she said.
Our entrance had been so sudden, due to the
hustle to make way for the princes following close
upon us, and in thought and speech we had been
so far away during the trip, that the Danish
greeting left me for the moment dumb, groping
my way four thousand miles across the Sea.
Slowly and laboriously, as it seemed to me, I
found the tongue of my childhood again, but
awkward beyond belief. This is what it said:
“How very respectable of you to ask us.”
The Crown Princess looked at me a moment,
uncertain what to think, then caught the look
in my wife's face, and laughed outright. At
which the Prince came up and heard the ex-
planation, and we all laughed together. The
THE OLD TOWN 263
next moment the room was filled with their
children, and we were introduced right and
left. It was all quite as neighborly and as
informal as if we had been at home. Fine young
people, all of them; finest of them all Prince
Rarl, who is now King Haakon of Norway. Hand-
some, frank, and full of fun and friendliness,
he was both good to look at and to speak yith;
and in that he resembled his father. They all
have the slender, youthful shape of the old King.
But for his furrowed face and the tired look
that often came into it in the last few years,
no one would have thought him over fifty, though
he was nearly ninety. The Crown Prince at
sixty-one seemed barely forty.
My wife was taken in to dinner by a prince,
a shy, boyish young fellow, whose great ambi-
tion, he confided to her, was to live in a New
York sky-scraper and shoot up and down in the
elevator, which was entirely contrary to her
inclinations, and she told him so. I was not
so lucky, but I shall always remember that
evening with unalloyed pleasure for the hearty
264 THE OLD TOWN
and unaffected hospitality of our hosts and of
everybody. The Crown Prince talked of America
and its people with warm appreciation, and of
President Roosevelt as a chief prop of the
world's peace, at the very time when some
people at home were yet shouting that he was a
firebrand. He thought him a wonderful man,
and we did not disagree. The thing that es-
pecially challenged his admiration was his capac-
ity for work — for getting things done. That
any one could get access to him in a nation of
eighty millions, and get a hearing if he was en-
titled to one, seemed to him marvellous. He
was interested in everything done for the toiler
in our great cities, and heard with visible inter-
est of the progress we were making in the search
for the lost neighbor. The talk strayed to the
unhappy conditions in Russia, the Jewish massa-
cres, and the threatening unrest. My wife was
expressing her horror at the things we read,
and I began to feel that we were skating on very
thin ice, seeing that the Czar was the Crown
Prince's nephew, when I heard him say to her,
THE OLD TOWN 265
with great earnestness, “You may believe that
if my sister had the influence many think, many
a burden would be eased for that unhappy people.”
And my heart swelled with gratitude; for Crown
Prince Frederik's sister, the Czar's mother, was
the sweet Princess Dagmar whom every Danish
boy loved when I was one of them, unless he were
the sworn knight of Alexandra, her beautiful sister.
After dinner we strayed through the garden
that lies in the shelter of the deep beech forest,
and when it was bed-time the boys, including
my wife's cavalier, came to kiss their father
good-night. It was all as sweet a picture of
family happiness as if it were our own White
House at home, and it did us good to witness.
I think our host saw it, for when we shook hands
at the leave-taking he said: “You have seen
now how happily and simply we live here, and
I am glad you came. Now, take back with
you my warm greeting to your great President,
and tell him that we all of us admire him and
trust him, and are glad of the prosperity of his
people — your people.” -
266 THE OLD TOWN
He had expressed a wish to my wife to read
our story, and I sent to London for a copy of
“The Making of an American,” which he fell
to reading at once, according to his habit. They
say in Denmark that he reads everything and
never forgets anything, and has it all at his
fingers' end always. I had proof of that when
we next met. It was in the Old Town at the
reopening of the Domkirke. I was coming
out of our hotel at seven in the morning, and
in the Square ran plumb into a gentleman in a
military cloak, who had a young man for com-
pany and a girl of fifteen or sixteen.
“Good morning, Mr. Riis,” said he. “I hope
you are well, and your wife, since last we
met.”
It must surely be that I am getting old and
foolish. The voice I knew; there are few as
pleasing. But the man —- I stood and looked
at him, while a smile crept over his features and
broadened there. All at once I knew.
“But, good gracious, your Royal Highness,” I
said, “who would expect to find you here before
THE OLD TOWN 267
any one is up and stirring? You are really
yourself to blame.”
He laughed. “We are early risers, my chil-
dren and I. We have been up and out since
six o'clock.” And so they had, I learned after-
wards, to the despair of the cook at the Bishop's
house where they were staying. He introduced
his son and daughter. “And now,” said the
Prince with a smile that had a challenge in it,
“where do you suppose we have been 2 Down
at the river to look at the bridge where you first
met your wife. You see, I have read your book.
But we did not find it.”
I explained that the Long Bridge had been
but a memory these twenty years, but to me a
very dear one, and he nodded brightly, “Give
her my warm regards.” She was glad when
I told her, for her loyal heart had made room
for him beside his sweet sisters from our child-
hood. When the lilacs bloomed again, I was
alone, and he sent me a message of Sorrow and
sympathy. And because of that, for his liking
of her, he shall always have a place in my heart.
268 THE OLD TOWN
They told no end of stories of the delight he
had given by this gift, so invaluable in a public
man, of remembering and recognizing men after
the lapse of years. One peasant, come to town
to see the show, was halted by Prince Frederik
in the market square, as was I, and greeted
as an old comrade. They had been recruits
together in one regiment; for the royal princes
in Denmark have to serve in the ranks with their
fellow-citizens. They are not made generals
at birth. In Copenhagen I was told that the
Prince kept tab on all that went on in the Rigs-
dag, and the man without convictions dreaded
nothing so much as his long memory. With
reason it would seem; for not long before, when
a certain member of the Opposition made a
troublesome speech, the Crown Prince calmly
brought out his scrap-book and showed the
embarrassed minister where the same man had
taken the exactly opposite stand half a score
of years before. It is not hard to understand
how a memory like that might become potent
in the deliberations of a parliamentary body,
THE OLD TOWN 269
particularly among a people with a keen sense
of the ridiculous, like the Danes. However,
they have something better than that. They
are above all a loyal people. I have never
seen anything more touching or more creditable
to a nation than the way the Danes put aside
their claims when the dispute between them
and King Christian's ministers over constitutional
rights became bitter, and the King, loyal him-
self to the backbone, would not let the min-
isters go.
“He is of the past that does not compre-
hend,” they said, “but he is our good old King
and we love him.”
And the clouds blew over, and the people
and their ruler were united in an affection that
wiped out every trace of resentment. King
Frederik is of the present. He knows his people,
and they trust him with the love they gave
his father. Stronger buttress was never built
for a happy union of Prince and People.
By JACOB A. RIIS
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN
An Autobiography
“It is refreshing to find a book so unique and captivating . . . one
of the brightest, wholesomest, most fascinating books of the season.”
— A'ecord-A’erald, Chicago.
“It fairly bubbles over with happiness, energy, and inspiration. . . .
It is partly the pleasure of watching a desperate, thrilling contest
against big odds, with success at the end, that gives this book its
keen appeal.” — Boston Herald.
“As varied and delightful as any romance.” — Publishers’ Weekly.
Cloth, $1.50 met
THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
“Mr. Riis is a man who does not theorize, but who knows. His
book is full of pathetic pictures, painful in their truth but beautiful in
their meaning. No one who is interested in sociology can afford to
miss what he has to say.” — Current Literature.
“The book thrills you as much as the most exciting romance and
to far better purpose.” — The Boston Herald.
Cloth, $2.00 met
CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS
“Touches the heart and quickens the sympathies. Very human and
pitiful are some of the episodes, and humorous, too, and they are told
with simplicity and sincerity. . . . They bear the unmistakable stamp
of fidelity to life.”—Brooklyn Times.
“Mr. Riis has gone into the poor districts and made the acquaint-
ance of children in a manner that is not given to every one. . . . The
work will commend itself to the thinking public.” — The Globe
AXemocrat. Cloth, $1.5o net
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64–66 Fifth Avenue, New York
AMERICAN HIGHWAYS and BYWAYS SERIES
By CLIFTON JOHNSON
Highways and Byways of the Mississippi Valley
Crown 8vo, $2.oo met
“Mr. Clifton Johnson has a faculty all his own for entering easily
and pleasantly into the life of the common people wherever he may go.
The valley of the Mississippi as he followed it gave him many oppor-
tunities to study phases of American life which belong distinctly in
the category of ‘highways and byways.' The book is eminently read-
able, while from the pictorial side it has the advantage of scores of Mr.
Johnson's own photographs.” — The Outlook.
Highways and Byways of the South
$2.00 met
“Mr. Johnson gives more illuminative descriptions of homely details
in life than any other modern writer.” — Town and Country.
Highways and Byways of the Pacific Coast
$2.oo met
“A more readable book of travel . . . is not often published. . . .
As in other volumes of the series, he has described the rurally pictu-
resque and typical and has avoided the urbanly conventional and unin-
teresting.” — The Dial.
New England and Its Neighbors
$2.00 met
“A story of New England life, liberally sprinkled with tales and
legends of early days, each one accompanied by an illustration that
illustrates. They are homely folk about whom Mr. Johnson writes,
and he writes in a plain and simple style, giving pictures of them as
they move about pursuing their daily occupations.” — The Delineator.
The Picturesque Hudson
Ready September, 1909
PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64–66 Fifth Avenue, New York
Kºuſ - To KJoT fic NA- q.3 L)
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
9015 03058 6559