Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

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THE OLD TOWN

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

“Post Office.”

THE OLD TOWN

BY
JACOB A. RIIS

AUTHOR OF “THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN,” “HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES,” “THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM,” ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY W. T. BENDA

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1909,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1909.

Norwood Press
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 another! 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, meaning “The Brindle Cow,” bound for New Amsterdam with eighty-nine passengers aboard. Among them was one Juriaen Tomasson, a citizen of Ribe, who, four years after reaching these shores, married 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 Reebė. 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,[1] 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 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 without 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 children are found.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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. Something 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 mistaken. They were starlings, beloved friends of my boyhood, come across the seas at last after all these years, looking for me, perhaps. It 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 waiting 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 bedroom 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 shadows 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 presently Jack Frost would be banished for good, and all would be right. Was he not there to prove it? 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 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 everywhere, I suppose. I made the cage with infinite toil, caught my starling, and put him in it. But when I saw him darting from side to side struggling 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.

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 marvellous sight, while the youngest crowded up close, half afraid.

Ah, well! they were the old days of sweet memories, 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 message of cheer and good-will at my window, let me 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 toward 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 its mediæval 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 accepted as a judgment any one could have foretold. But even that bold intruder had never been guilty of the impropriety of whistling. The drowsy clatter of mill-wheels where blossoming lilacs dipped over garden walls into the loitering stream was the only sound of industry that broke the profound peace. The flour-mills were among the privileged traditions of the town. They had been handed down from father to son in unbroken succession 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 clearer title to possession be imagined than that the thing had been there before any one could remember?

“Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls.”

Red-legged storks built their nests on the tiled roofs of the quaint old houses, and swallows reared 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 welcome out. The turnkey patiently put up an extra shelf, for, old as was he, were not the swallows tenants before him?

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 tinderboxes 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 to-day would know how to cut. But the word “penknife” had meaning in those days. Envelopes 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 interest there was in the collection. I mind the excitement when the first bottle of “Pennsylvania oil” came into our house. I fetched it myself 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 centuries 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 telegraph, people shook their heads at it as a more than dubious American notion, though the undoubted success of the first sewing-machine that had come to town had disposed them to lend a lenient ear to its claims.

Above this little world of men the old Domkirke reared its gray head, a splendid vision of the great things that were. Travellers approaching 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 masters 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 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.

“The old Domkirke reared its gray head.”

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 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 vikings, 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 protect the coast, but beyond the shallows lay a 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 massed in the inlet, then it was we heard the big bell sing in the tower.

The Causeway in a Storm.

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 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. Sometimes 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 disaster. 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, 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 summons came and we sallied forth to bring the exhausted 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 pelting 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 toward the lights of the town scarce a hundred yards away. How that driver had lived through it, I shall never understand. The relief when we reached shelter was great, but greater my pride when the stern old Amtmand, the chief government 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 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 portico 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; watch over the widows and the fatherless,” read 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 warning 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, waterlogged Brazil-nuts, and other wreck of the tropics.

Fanö Women.

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[2] skipper to-day walks the bridge of many a ship that ties up at its pier in New York or Philadelphia. 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 the sanding in of the mouth of the river, nevertheless 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, 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 homelike 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 Domkirke now stood, something of the nature worship and of the fatalism of pagan times. Was it Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that we are omnibuses in which all our ancestors ride? Sometimes 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 experience, a clergyman in that country. A woman with a child born out of wedlock sought poor relief because of her handicap. When he remonstrated 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 custom. 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 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 pavements the rain stood in pools that tempted unwary 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 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 children were hurriedly sent away, and the Old Town prepared to give battle to the invaders. Barricades were built and manned; the council requisitioned two hundred pounds of powder from the next town, to be carried in as he could by the village 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 experts that it would cost two hundred daler[3] 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 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 swarming 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 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 faithful hands that packed our school arsenal—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. Indeed, 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 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 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.

An Old House.

Doughty scrappers were they ever, those old Jutes. Doubtless there was reason for the Ribe 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 Varde gallows.” Varde was 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, else what 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 decency’s sake,” was buried alive in the gallows hill. For murder, counterfeiting and adulteration 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 belongings. But even the iron hand did not stop 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 damages 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!

The Iron Hand.

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 instance, when Jep Bennedsen, appearing to prosecute 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 defects. 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 sufficient to preserve the public peace, for brawling 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-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 accoutrements, and was duly entered in the budget of the town to be raised by taxation.

A Watchman.

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 possibility 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 of its mediæval past, which after all is the real setting of the Old Town. It was not a mere cry, or senseless shout. In its mournful melody, 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, listening to the buffeting of the winds, and followed 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 watchman raised his voice at eight o’clock. From that hour until four in the morning he sang his song, every hour a new verse, supposed to have special reference to the time of night. The curious commingling of pious exhortation with homely advice 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:

[[audio/mpeg]] [Music XML (.mxl)]

Ho, watchman! heard ye the clock strike ten?

This hour is worth the knowing

Ye house-holds high and low,

The time is here and going

When ye to bed should go;

Ask God to guard, and say Amen!

Be quick and bright,

Watch fire and light,

Our clock just now struck ten.

At one o’clock he sang:

Ho, watchman! Our clock is striking one.

Oh, Jesus, wise and holy,

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 simultaneously for town. Both had good teams, and 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 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 scandalized 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 furbelows, 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 pitifully, and the feather drooped sadly as he gave her his arm and, with face sternly set but with 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 tearful 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 happened 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 secure, go any length to oblige a neighbor. It is a characteristic of the Danish people, who are essentially honest, intolerant of pretence, stubbornly 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. Business 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”—au 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 Hvillingebäk.”

“Yes, I am that,” patiently.

“So—I thought there was only one Christian Sörensen in Hvillingebäk, and him I know,” with strong emphasis on the “I.”

“Yes! Well, my name is Jens Christian Sörensen.”

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 between 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 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 congratulations 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 hymnbook, 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 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 countryfolk 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 Rosenvinge, 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 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 compelling 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 prisoner 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.

“He found his prisoner faithfully guarding the gun when he came back.”

CHAPTER III

“Eyes that spoke of things unseen by the crowd.”

Our house was in Black Friars’ Street, right around the corner from Peer Down’s Slip in the picture. The Slip was a short cut to school for us boys, and we skipped through it 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. 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.

Peer Down’s Slip.

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 clashed often, taking instinctively opposite sides in public discussion, until it had come to be understood, 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 standing 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.

Neighbor Quedens.

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 tenants. Herr Quedens was one of the solid merchants of the town. He was an old man as far 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 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 corner 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 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 Domkirke 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 congregation; 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 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 written 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 gathering at their home, there being no vesper service in the Domkirke, since it could not be lighted. 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 watchman 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 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 followed, of course.

So perhaps it was not so strange after all that Mrs. Tacchau should fall out with her life-long friend, Mrs. Kerst, who was as stubbornly zealous 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.

The Good Dean of the Domkirke.

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 separated Denmark from her children south of the Konge-aa. His father had been the parish priest in Döstrup, one of the villages across the line, and his father before him, and so on through an unbroken chain back almost to the Reformation. When the separation came, old Gabriel Koch moved to Ribe, rather than swear allegiance to the conquerors, and died of a broken heart. There messengers from the old parish 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 occupation 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 enemies 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 vanished 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.

The Wife of the Middle-miller.

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 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 school bench together 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 distinguished by old King Christian as the two of our class who had made it proud. And she smiled a calm “I told you so.” But that is another story, and we shall come to it.

Venus.

The people of the Old Town were like itself, simple and honest and good. None of them ever plumed themselves with stolen feathers. There was a bell-ringer at the Domkirke whom we boys dubbed Venus because of her exceeding ugliness. She was certainly the most hideous and withal the most good-natured girl I ever met. She accepted 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 employer died, and she lost her place. When next we met her and called her Venus, she protested 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 unwelcome on the poor man’s table, nor unpalatable 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. Perhaps 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.

“Did the honors on ceremonial occasions.”

Of characters the Old Town had had a full supply ever since the days when Anders Sörensen Vedel, who was a cleric attached to the Domkirke, 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. Vedel was a pious as well as a famous man, and it was his custom, in order to impress his children with the bitterness of the Passion, to call them into his study 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!” It certainly labored faithfully. As to the results—but probably 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.

Liar Hans, whom I spoke of, was one of the institutions of the town, along with Maren Dragoon, 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 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 horsewhip 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 supplied. So he went about with a sack with dead cats in it, and from this brought up his ammunition when 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 retreat 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 cannot 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 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 husbandry 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 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 German shoemaker whose bills were the gems of the 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 hintergeflickt.”[4]

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 imprisoned 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 Postmaster 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 something 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 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 instead 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 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 listened 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 prohibited 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 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 Grönnegade 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 acquaintance 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. 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 physician, 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.

The Old Family Doctor.

I have said that in Ribe one seemed to be always bordering upon the way past because of 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 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[5] 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 sunshiny 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 street with wintergreen and spruce, and walked, singing, their last journey with them, while all the church bells rang and friends carried the tired body.

“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

The Christmas Sheaf.

I do not know how the forty years I have been away have dealt with “Jule-nissen,” the Christmas 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 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,[6]—all of them from 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 contention 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 remember 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 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.

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 stableman 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 deserved 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. 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 sparrow 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 Christmas 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 dooryard, and I knew at once that one of my people 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 daylight 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 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 forgotten. 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 earth 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 rare, for the band was made up of small storekeepers 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.

“Blowing in Yule from the grim old tower.”

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 supplementary 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 Christmas Day we called it, when all the quality attended at the club-house, where the Amtmand and the Burgomaster, the Bishop and the Rector 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 invited 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 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 themselves 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 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 general 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 without 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 and anxious speculations as to “what Father would do,” and gloomy conferences between him and Mother over the state of the family pocketbook, 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 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 substituted 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 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 congregation, 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 crowding 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 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 inseparable 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.

“The whole family turned to and helped.”

At home the great dinner of the year was waiting 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 “gröd,” 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 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.[7]

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 household 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,

which was a great comfort. Children love beautiful 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 Christmas. It had an orange streak in it which I can see to this day. Whenever I come across one that even remotely 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 service. So we sang the ten verses to end, with their refrain “Hallelujah! hallelujah,” that always seemed to me to open the very gates of Yule.

And it did, literally; for when the last hallelujah 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, 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 toward the light.

“We joined hands and danced around the tree.”

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 Wandering 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 farmer.[8] 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 watchful eye to his coming. When the bell in the distant 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 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 storekeepers 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 wax 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 cornucopias 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 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 Christmas 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 Christmas roses bloomed in the night when the Lord was born, different from all other woods, and better.

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 watching 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 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.

“We ‘smashed’ the New Year in.”

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 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 doughnuts 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 discovered 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 Christmas 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. 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 caught them napping there one dark night.”

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 midnight 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 different, 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

Getting Ready for the Review.

The stork came in April, with delivery from the vile tyranny of March. Talk of March violets! to us the month meant cod-liver oil. It was our steady dessert all 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. However, 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.

The stork came in April.

One day we heard it on its nest, jabbering out a noisy “How d’do” through its long red bill, and then we children gathered below and sang our song of welcome:

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Stork, Storkie long leg

Where were you this long while?

Saw you King Pharaoh’s lofty stone?

Stalk’d you in Nile River meadows?

The swallow and the starling were not far behind 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 neighbors 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. And when it was gone in the morning, I knew that a little brother had come to join our company; 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 blossoming and the berrying when his youngsters were grown, he took himself off with his wife for several 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. 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 Rector’s house and busy repairing his nest, our boyish 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 Hill, and turned off at the big buckthorn hedge to the river where we swam in summer. The cowslips 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 message 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 came, as night does in the hot countries, suddenly. 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 suddenly 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 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. Behind 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 position who had remained unmarried and was now past middle age, always a lonesome sort of fellow. 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 comfortable 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.

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 midnight bell sounded and sometimes later, young and old were abroad, on the causeway, in the Plantage, 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 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 manœuvring 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 pierce the helpless youngster who got a bad report 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.

A Girl from the North Sea Islands.

Before we had use for them, however, came the annual fair in September. The Ribe Fair was famous throughout the middle ages, when the town was the chief seaport of the country. Then merchants 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, 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 institution as the Domkirke itself and twice as important, 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 Fanö girls made a pretty picture. The Fair was in fact the great opportunity of the country folk for social intercourse in the days when newspapers 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 bearings. 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 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.

“There were booths with toys and booths with trumpets.”

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 rapture 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.

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,

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He took his knife from his pocket

And opened it up,

preparatory to stabbing her with great detail and deliberation, then it dealt with the latest world horror, the full circumstances of which 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:

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Proudly o’er the ocean waves

Sped the steamer Austria.

Passengers it had in numbers

Going to America.

To the captain who commanded

Never dream came of the blow

Which fate for him upon this voyage

Unluckily prepared 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 the heart of the great world throb.

The Girl Market.

Besides the Fair which in olden times was known as Our Lady’s Fair, perhaps because of the Domkirke,[9] 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 “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 satisfactory. 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.

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 herders 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, instead 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 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 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 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, running along with a farmer’s team sometimes.

Where the Cows go in through the Street Door.

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 plentiful, 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 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 invaders back after two years of hard fighting. So we turned out to receive him, to the last inhabitant. 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 yeomen still said “thou” to the King, as their forefathers 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 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. 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 slender 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 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 Reformation. 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 old rumors, and it was in itself a mystery. Where was the other end of the hole?

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 leadership, 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 Town, as I have said, there were no very rich people, 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 comfortably housed. There were no beggars, unless you would count as 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 nothing, the which we freely gave. It was an understood 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, whatever 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 mediæval 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, 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 checking us off at once as being there on business, not mere chance visitors.

“Here lies my cat,” she said. “It was red.”

“Oh!” We were interested at once. “And what did it die of?”