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 outa 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 legWhere were you this long while?Saw you King Pharaoh’s lofty stone?Stalk’d you in Nile River meadows?

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. Theycame, 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 earlytwilight. 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, whoknew, 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, topierce 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. Thewomen 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 weretrumpets, 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 pocketAnd opened it up,

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 whichwere set forth in lurid words, and even more lurid paint, on the canvas. Thus, for instance, the burning of the emigrant steamerAustriain 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 wavesSped the steamer Austria.Passengers it had in numbersGoing to America.To the captain who commandedNever dream came of the blowWhich fate for him upon this voyageUnluckily prepared has.

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 thepièce de résistanceof 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,9in 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 andthe “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 ofthese 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 theSquare 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 herdswas 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 theirhands; 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 againto 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 theold 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 OldTown, 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?”

“The weasel killed it—sucked its blood.”

We walked right into the trap—“And is there to be a writing?”

“Yes,” sadly; “‘Good-by, little Svip;’ but I have no money to buy a slate pencil with.”

She accepted our penny with the gravity of an undertaker as she cast a swift glance down the walk where two women in deep mourning were coming. Then she went on making her grave.

“Trenchers of steaming sausage.”

There came a season in the autumn when the Old Town resounded with the squealing of countless pigs. It was killing-time when the fat friend so fondly cherished throughout the year was to make return by furnishing forth the tables of his hosts. We boys heard it with joy, for we knew what was to come after all the woe. Toward evening of the great day trenchers ofsteaming sausage were carried around among the neighbors who had no pigs, that they also might taste of the good things of the earth. Blood sausage was there, big and round and red, and good to eat, fried with syrup; and liver sausage, pale but appealing; and sausage with rice in and sausage with spices in; and roll sausage, which sometimes I buy in delicatessen shops nowadays; but they must have lost the art of making them, for they don’t taste as they did then. The trencher must have been welcome in Mother’s larder, for with so many mouths to fill we were taught to look upon meat as a relish rather than the mainstay of the meal. Not that we did not have enough. We always had that, but dishes made of flour, of potatoes, of peas and other vegetables, played a greater rôle in the economic cookery of the day and country than nowadays. And we liked it. I defy any one to find a summer dish that compares with “Rödgröd med Flöde,” which was just currant juice and corn-starch with cream. Even the Saturday menu in our house was a favorite: fried herring and Öllebröd.For special occasions the herring were fried “in dressing-gowns,” each in a cornucopia of white paper that gave the dish quite a festive touch. Öllebröd is a dish I despair of making the American mind grasp. It was made of black bread boiled in beer till it made a thick broth, to which each one added cream and sugar to suit his taste. Boiled beer sounds funny, but it was the household beer, non-alcoholic, which was both cheap and good. The other kind we knew as Bavarian beer. Its use was not so common as it has become since.

Still, the Old Town had ever been partial to its beer. When it was in its prime, eight “beer-tasters” were among the town functionaries. They were to see that the supply was up to the standard, with the proper allowance of good hops. In the account of the hanging of the big bell in the church tower—the “storm bell” I spoke of—in 1599, two barrels of beer to the men who hoisted it up and hung it are set down among the expenses. One wonders whether all who took a hand were included. According to one report of that day’sproceedings, there was some doubt about their ability to transport the bell from the foundry to the Domkirke, until the Rector of the Latin School put it up to his boys, who at once took hold and dragged it all the way alone. Whether they came in under the subsequent largesse of beer is not stated, but probably not. Two barrels would not have gone very far then. All this seems queer to us nowadays. It is strange to find that in that century the privileged Town Hall dramshop—the Rathhaus-keller, in fact—achieved a competitor in the Domkirke itself. The chapter of clerics opened one of their own in their cellar under the north end of the chancel, on the plea that they must have wine for churchly functions, of a proper quality, and kept it going for I don’t know how long. Much later than that, in 1683, clergymen were forbidden by law to distil whiskey, but in 1768 “priest and deacon” were expressly confirmed in their right to distil it for their own use. So there was ecclesiastical sanction, and to spare, for all the beer and spirits that were consumed. Clear down to my time, when theJutland peasant brewed,10it was the custom to throw the first three handfuls of malt into the mash “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” And the same man who did that, as the next step shut all the doors of the brewing room, placed a glowing coal on each doorstep, put three coals in the vat with a wisp of straw bound in form of a cross, and finally stirred it all with the iron tongs from the fireplace, to keep evil eyes from spoiling the brew!11No wonder there were spooks in the Old Town, the werwolf that haunted the graveyard by night, and the hell-horse on its three legs.

Whenever I think of that last and the horror we held it in, it comes to me that our dread of crawling things must be largely a matter of legs, due to our prejudice in favor of the standard two or four. The hell-horse was ever so much more horrible because of its limping about by night on three. We hate a spider, which has six or eight, and loathe the thousand-leg worm with cause. And at the other end, when it comes to the snake, that has no legs at all, we are prompted by an instant impulse to kill it. It is not a religious prejudice at all, no Garden of Eden notion, but an instinctive recoil from the thing that does not conform to the established standard in legs.But whether that be so or not, the hell-horse that so terrorized us, was a decadent beast. He was literally on his last legs in my childhood, and even the Old Town knows him no more, I guess.

The man with his head under his arm was, if anything, worse than the hell-horse, and had an unpleasant habit of making himself at home under your roof. The three-legged beast at least stayed outside. There was a headless man in the old mansion at Sönderskov, where I sometimes spent my summer vacation. You could hear him walk in the midnight hour up and down, up and down the hall, and we boys lay and shivered in bed for fear he would come to our door and knock. I have heard him more than once since I grew up and identified his tread on the oaken stairs with the regular beat of the tower-clock above my head, but still I confess to a creepy feeling when I hear it.

But I have gone far afield from the household economics of the Old Town. They were intended to make both ends meet on a scale of small incomes with need, often enough, of the closestfiguring. Large families were the rule rather than the exception. Not till my father was long in his grave and I was looking over his old papers and accounts, did I suspect how bitter was the fight he waged those forty years and to what straits he was put. To turn a coat when the right side was worn threadbare was a common expedient in those days of honest cloth, but Father had his overcoat turned twice to tide him over an evil time. As for us boys, we didn’t have any half the time. I remember the winter when, being in such case and making a virtue of bald necessity, I tried to organize a Spartan Society among my schoolmates, the corner-stone of which was contempt of overcoats as plain mollycoddling. As a means of attracting the boys there were secret passwords and an initiation that had to be worked at dusk in the moat by the Castle Hill and was supposed to be very grewsome. It took for a while, until the mothers put a stop to it. I believe one of them who had read Æsop’s fable about the fox that had lost its tail and tried to persuade the other foxes that it was the latestfashion, saw through my dodge. At any rate the long woollen muffler which the society allowed, I being possessed of one, went out of vogue and the overcoats came back. It must have been at that time that my father bought at a salvage sale of the cargo of a wrecked ship a roll of really fine cloth of a peculiar sea-green color. It was a good investment, for it made not only a suit for Father that had lots of wear in it, but all the family were clad in green while it lasted, which was a long while. I hate to think what the boys of to-day would have nicknamed us. They were not so bright then, and I doubt if we would have cared. We boys were quite able to defend the family honor, and quite ready too.

Father had a fancy for numbering his children in Latin. The sixth was called Sextus, the ninth Nonus. In grim jest, he proposed to name the twelfth Duodecimus, but agreed with his fellow-teachers that the luckless child would be forever miscalled “dozen.” They had a good laugh over it. Father was very far from being a book-worm. Though he was very learned, hehad a keen sense of humor, and, for all the heavy burdens he carried, he was the life of the company always.

The dead languages were his task in the Latin School, the living his pleasure and recreation. I doubt if there was any modern tongue in which he was not more or less proficient. And so it was natural that when a wrecked ship’s crew came to the Old Town he should be the interpreter; or when, as happened every now and then, a bottle was cast ashore on one of the islands with a message from some ship in peril on the deep, that it should be brought to him to be deciphered. There was a fixed fee for this,—a “specie,” which was two daler in the case of a bottle,—and it was most welcome. Yet there was always an element of the deeply tragic in it. We children stood with bated breath and looked on while Father unfolded the piece of crumpled paper, polished his spectacles, and read with husky voice some such message as this:

“We are sinking. Jesus, Maria, save us!”

Then the name of the vessel, its home port,and the latitude, if they knew it. I think I am quoting literally one which I have never forgotten. It was a Portuguese vessel and it got somehow mixed up in my childish imagination with the Lisbon earthquake. That had happened a long while before, but news lasted longer than nowadays. There was not a fresh horror every day, and the illustrated papers kept the earthquake in stock until the siege of Sebastopol came and gave us all a change. That in its turn lasted, I think, quite a dozen years, down to our own war of ’64.

“I threw the last pebble.”

I cannot stop without recording here the great and awful tragedy of my childhood. It was when I had become possessed, by some unheard-of streak of luck, of a silver four-skilling that was all my own, to spend as I pleased, with no string to it. It was a grave responsibility, for I perceived that with this immeasurable wealth I might buy practically anything, and what it was to be, with the shops of the Old Town simply crammed with things that were all desirable, was not to be decided lightly. So I betookmyself to the Long Bridge, where I could be alone, to think it over, my pockets, in the depths of which reposed the miraculous coin, filled with pebbles to punctuate my ideas withal. I stood on one of the arches and threw them in, watching the rings they made in the water, and as they widened till they reached from shore to shoreand I dug deeper and deeper into my pocket, my ambition and my hopes rose with them. Until, all unknowing, I threw the last pebble and, as it sped forth in the sunshine, saw that it was my four-skilling. The waters closed over it with a little splash I can hear yet, and I saw its silver sheen as it turned and sank. I did not weep. The disaster was too great. I stood awhile dumb, then went home and told no one. Darkness had settled upon my life with a sorrow so great that I felt it invested even with a kind of dignity as a vast and irreparable misfortune. I cannot even now laugh at it. It was too terrible to ever quite forget.

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