CHAPTER VIII

Jackdaws in Council.

The big pear tree that hung over our way to school is gone, but the hawthorn hedge remains. When our young feet trod those toppy pavements, the tree smoothed the thorny path to learning in a way all its own. The late summer season when the sun shone so temptingly on the round red pears, and the old woman over whose garden wall they grew counted her profits at a skilling for two, fell in with our time for practising marksmanship, just as the spring brought its marbles and September its nutting tramps.Then if it befell that a good shot and the law of gravitation operated simultaneously to dislodge the biggest and juiciest pear, and it dropped in our path—surely destiny was to blame, not we. Findings is keepings, and there is no law against picking up a pear in the street. The stork on the Rector’s house looked on unmoved. Being in a way responsible for us, perhaps he was resigned to the ways of boys. Not so the old woman who counted upon our skillings. She stormed in the doorway, much exercised in spirit, and threatened to report us. I think she did once or twice, for we were warned not to go under the tree when pears were falling. But there was no other way out. And we detected, or thought we did, a twinkle in the old Rector’s eye while he took us to task. He had been a boy himself; was yet, despite the infirmities of years, beneath his mask of official sternness. And we evened it up with the pear woman by loyally investing our pennies with her when we had them.

The Latin School had always been just acrossfrom the Domkirke with which it had come into existence, and in the old house I was born, the teachers having lodgings under its roof at that time. But it was moved as the tie between church and school was loosened, and it was thus that the feud was bred with the pear woman, who had until then dwelt in seclusion and peace. That we came honestly by our proficiency in marksmanship I gather from the fact that, when the ecclesiastical bond was stronger a good deal than in our day, it made its mark in the pages of the Old Town’s history by picking the very Domkirke itself for a target. It is on record that the churchwarden complained of the boys snow-balling its windows. Of several hundred window-panes in the west front only seven were then whole; but, he added, “it is no use sending for the glazier to put them in while the snow is on the ground, for they will as surely be smashed again.” Evidently union of pedagogue and priest had not bred reverence in their pupils. They were the vandals who, when the Reformation had consigned to the lumber room the fine old crucifix that hangs once more inits rightful place since the late restoration, amused themselves by trimming the nails of the image. But that time they got their deserving, if the rod had been spared by man too long. According to tradition they lost their own finger nails, and it served them right, too. They were sad old days, when to put reverence and common sense, with common decency, in the rag-bag was held to be a mark of piety. Clear down into our day we heard the echo of it. When, in the ’40’s, the Domkirke was undergoing repairs, the stone coffin of one of the old kings was carried off, and after a long search was discovered serving as a horse-trough in front of a public house. “To what base uses—!” It would not have been recovered at that, but for peremptory notice from the government that it had better turn up without delay. There is nothing in their past record to forbid the suspicion that the Latin schoolboys had had a hand in raping the royal tomb.

So, if it does not fall to the lot of every man to have an alma mater dating back to the time ofthe crusades (the school was founded in 1137, or very soon after), the fact of having it is not necessarily a warrant of saintliness. It was not with us. I have recounted some of our pranks. For them, if they went beyond the limit, there was still the rod. That and the big book with red letters and the iron chain riveted to it that lay in the school library were the visible survivals of a past day. Concerning the latter there was a belief current among the untaught that it was in fact Cyprianus, the book with which the priest could cast a spell and bid the devil come and go as he saw fit, but which the hand of no unlearned man might touch without instant peril to life and soul. It was, as a matter of fact, the Bible that was held in such regard. The chain that gave it its grewsome aspect was testimony merely to its rarity and the cost of paper and printer’s ink in the day that made so sure it would not get lost. All of which made little or no impact upon the belief that the devil was firmly chained between its pages, and that it was a good plan to give it a wide berth.

No mediæval superstition was needed to convince us of the wisdom of that plan when it came to the rod. Its ceremonial use, so to speak, had fallen into disuse. I mean by that the great capital occasions when, for hopeless breach of discipline or for disgracing the school before the world, a pupil was flogged by the janitor in the presence of the assembled school, after a lecture by the Rector, and publicly expelled. No such emergency arose in my day. But in a more private and sufficiently intimate way it was still part of the curriculum. The daily cudgelling of dull heads was supposed to have a stimulating effect upon the intellect. It was the custom of the day, but its sun was setting even then. Is it merely harking back to personal experience that I sometimes think a boy is just pining for a whipping and won’t be happy till he gets it; and that, having got it, he feels justified, squared as it were, and ready for a new and better start? Or, is it faith in the boy’s fundamental love of fair play that sizes up the offence and its deserving? I will let the teacher decide. Somewhere I havetold of my first introduction to the “kids’ school,” kept by an old “she-wolf,” and its educational equipment. I was dragged all the way to it by an exasperated housemaid, hammering the pavement with my heels and yelling at the top of my voice. Forbearance at home had, it seems, ceased to be a virtue. There was none in the ogre who received me at the door and forthwith thrust me into a barrel down in the cellar, where it was dark, and putting on the lid, snarled through the bung-hole that that was the way bad boys were dealt with in school. Good boys were given kringler to eat. When from sheer fright I ceased howling, I was set free and conducted to the yard, where there was a sow with a litter of pigs. The sow had a slit in the ear to which my attention was invited. It was for being lazy, and when boys were lazy—the ogre brandished the long shears that hung at her belt—zip! I earned a kringle that very afternoon.

The ways of the Latin School were still stamped with the old severity, but there was some approach to present-day methods of constitutionalgovernment. The faculty took hardened cases under advisement. Execution of judgment was vested in the Rector, as gentle an old man as ever unwillingly caned a boy, whose guileless soul was no match for our practised wiles. A remorseful howl put him instantly out of action, and he was always ready to be led sympathetically along the slippery paths of boyish excuses; for, however much the boy’s soul may pine for just punishment, his body will always struggle to escape it. We had a singing-teacher, the organist of the Domkirke, whom, seeing that he was a helpless old bachelor without proper home or boys of his own, we accounted our lawful prey. Accordingly the candle snuffer sputtered with powder to his mild amazement, mice haunted the piano and struck unexpected chords at singing-school, and the blackboard sponge performed unheard-of antics as an impromptu foot-ball while the organist was writing our lesson on the board. It was when he happened to turn suddenly once and caught me in the very act of aiming it at his wig, that the worm turned. I was conductedstraight upstairs to the Rector, withcorpus delictiin my grasp, and left to his mercy.

Rector rose mechanically from his papers when the door closed and opened a cupboard to afford me a private view of the stick standing there. Then he came over to me and said sternly, pointing to the sponge, “What is this?”

“The sponge, Herr Rektor,” I said. “It was on the floor and I kicked it, like this—” it bounded across to the table—“and Niels, he—”

“Ah,” Rector was all interest; “Niels, he—?”

“He kicked it—so, and it landed where Hans stood.”

“Eh!” he was rubbing his hands; “and Hans?”

“Hans, he sent it—this way—to Peter; and Peter trod on it, and it shied to Anders. And he—”

We were skipping across the room together, mapping out the journeys of the vagrant sponge as fast as Rector’s gout allowed, when we arrived at the turn.

“It came back to me,” I explained, “and I was just going to fire it—”

“Ha! you were just going to fire it—”

“When the organist turned and caught me.”

The Rector stopped rubbing his hands abruptly. We gazed at one another soberly for a full minute. I don’t know, I think I saw the suspicion of a wink; then:

“I think you said this was a sponge. Go then and tell the organist that you have discovered it is not a ball. Now go.”

I went quickly. Unless my ears deceived me, I heard a chuckle behind the door as it fell to.

Little as he relished the job of thrashing a boy, the Rector hated meanness in him worse. It was the discovery of such a streak in me that brought me the most thorough caning of my school life at his hands. Hans and I, who perennially disputed the seat next to the head of the class—when it stood in a circle—had been engaged in a combat that was undecided when the bell summoned us to our lessons. Flushed with the hope of victory, Hans hit upon the idea of setting the clock ahead, that we might the sooner have it out. The clock was in our class room, and it was easily enough done, but in his eagerness Hans forgot prudence and set it three-quarters of an hour ahead, so that recitations were no sooner begun than they were at an end. Whereupon there was an investigation, and the culprit was found. This was a matter that called for the big stick, as being at once dishonest and foolish, and Hans was commanded to wait after school had gone home.

Now it befell that I was getting a book out of the library in the next room when Hans’ shrieksrose high between the dull thuds of “Master Erik.” I will not attempt to excuse my conduct; I despise it. Probably the defeat I had so narrowly escaped rankled. I crept up to the door and listened. Meanly rejoicing at his plight, I pressed my ear to the key-hole to hear more, and leaned with my whole weight. I hadn’t noticed that the door was not shut tight, and suddenly it swung open, and I fell into the other room with my arm full of books,—fell right at Rector’s feet and lay sprawling there.

He gave me an amazed glance, paused an instant with uplifted stick, and comprehended. A look of stern disgust swept over his face; he let go of Hans and, seizing me, administered to me the worse half of the interrupted thrashing. Hans got square. I can see him yet as he stood in his corner wiping his eyes to keep from grinning. The utterly exasperating thing about it was the look of shocked innocence at the disclosure of such baseness that sat upon his face. As if he—ugh!

The Latin School Teachers.

The good old Rector stands flanked by hisstaff in the picture, in full dress, as beseems his dignity. My father is on his right, the only one who wears a cap. Herr Kinch, behind the Rector, was an antiquarian of no mean repute, andwrote the history of the Old Town,18making a notable contribution to Danish annals thereby. The venerable face that peers out beside him is that of Dr. Helms, whose interest in and writings about the Domkirke, through a long lifetime, finally bore fruit in the thorough restoration that has been just completed. We boys held the candle for him sometimes when he was poking in the dark corners for signs of the long past. Once he found what he was not looking for. It was while he was delving in the foundations of the Maria tower, which had been torn down a century or two before, being unsafe. They had covered up the foundations and shut them out of sight. But there must have been a crack somewhere, for when the good doctor broke into the dark space, thousands of bats broke out. The air was literally filled with the creepy things. The Old Town was at all times full of bats, and this was evidently one of their secret hiding-places. There were dead bats, too, by the cart load.

The other face in the doorway, that of Adjunct Koch, the same who in after years became Dean of the Domkirke, I can never see without thinking of the hour of my great triumph. He and Herr Trugaard were my history teachers. History as taught in the schools of those days was largely made up of interminable files of kings, with the years of their reign, nothing else, to be memorized that way. This I could not do, or would not; the result was the same,—a bad examination. But these two had discovered something. When the Great Examen came round again, instead of bringing up the tedious kings, they asked me to tell about the Hundred Days of Napoleon after Elba. Napoleon had not been dead forty years then, and there were people everywhere who had fought in his wars. We had one in our school, an old sergeant who drilled us in gymnastics. He had been through the campaign that ended at Waterloo, and was never tired of telling how it froze so hard in the winter of 1814 that they cut the wine for the army rations with axes, and of thefighting he had seen, of course. Poor fellow! He looked too long upon the wine when it was red, and marched to his death in the river one winter’s night singing a war-song, thinking perhaps he was at Borodino. They found him standing dead in the mud, upright, as a man and a soldier should, with his face to the foe who he imagined held the other shore.

I had sat at his feet when they strayed unsteadily toward the great past, many a time. And I needed no second invitation to enter upon the campaign of the Hundred Days. A sudden transformation came over that dusty class-room; for veterans sat in the Board of Censors. In five minutes I had them sitting up, eagerly scanning the camps of the French and the Allied Armies as I drew them. In ten they were on their feet, striding from Ligny to Quatre Bras, to the Wavre turnpike, objecting, applauding, disputing with me and with one another as I led them from field to field of slaughter and finally rounded them up at Waterloo, brought Blucher to the relief of Wellington in the nick of time,and charged the Old Guard with a yell of “Surrender!” only to be met with the immortal reply: “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders.”

We sat down, a hot, excited band. There was a quiet gleam in Herr Trugaard’s eye as he pronounced the unanimous judgment of the Board: “ug+,” that is, A1 and to spare. It was the only “ug” I earned in my school days. It ought to have given the pedagogues food for thought, and perhaps it did.

The bell that once called the monks to prayers summoned us to school at a quarter to eight, and in the long winter we sang our morning hymn with the dawn struggling through the windows. When we trooped home again with knapsacks strapped on our backs, it was night once more. From eight to five was our day, with two hours for noon, the rule in all the Old Town’s affairs. The bell regulated our lives as it had done since hour-glasses marked the time. It rings yet at the old hours, though the school-day is entirely changed, and Venus who rang it has long been gathered to her fathers. But when the GreatExamen drew near, it was too slow for our guilty consciences, and the night-watchman was bribed to wake us up. So that he should not rouse the whole house, a string was hung out of the window, the other end of which was tied securely to the sleeper’s toe or ankle. The watchman’s order was to pull it till the boy responded, and he did. Perhaps he took the chance to pay off old scores. He pulled and pulled with might and main, until a red and swollen foot shot up to the window and behind it an angry face yelling to let go. The boy was awake and up, and the watchman clattered on his way, chanting his morning verse:

Ho! Watchman, our clock it has struck four!Eternal God, all honorIn Heaven’s choir to Thee,Thou who art watchman everFor us on earth that be.Now ended is our watch,For a good nightGive God the thanksAnd mind ye well the time.

Ho! Watchman, our clock it has struck four!

Eternal God, all honor

In Heaven’s choir to Thee,

Thou who art watchman ever

For us on earth that be.

Now ended is our watch,

For a good night

Give God the thanks

And mind ye well the time.

Before his song died away among the old houses, we were hard at work cramming for examination.

This service was set down to his credit when in Christmas week the watchman came to the door to “bid New Years.” It was one of the customs of the Old Town that came down from the earliest days, happily shorn of some of its mediæval aspects. For then he came not alone, but the whole body of watchmen together, a kind of reconnoissance in force, to which the fact that the public executioner came with them lent a suggestion which no one could afford to let go unheeded. That it really was a kind of official blackmail is made apparent by certain ordinances passed in the Sixteenth Century which forbade the practice and fixed a regular schedule of charges for these public servants. The executioner was to have one dollar for chopping off a head or hanging a man, half a dollar for an ear, a dollar and a half for burning a witch at the stake, and so forth. It was not much. When one reads of his using twenty-two loads of wood for burning a single witch, it seems but poor pickings for a hard-worked man; but then he made up for it by having his hands full. He burned thirteenwitches between the years 1572 and 1652, and beheaded one. Of ears and such small fry no account seems to have been kept. Besides all this he was street-cleaning commissioner19and offal contractor, with the express proviso, however, that he must not himself engage in the latter business as beneath his dignity, but must farm it out to the town chimney-sweep. It will be seen that the executioner was by no means a disreputable man, but a functionary of importance who could not be allowed to go begging from door to door. As for the watchmen, they were ordered to desist not merely from that practice, but from monopolizing the moving business and from bossing weddings held in the Town Hall; likewise they must do no harm to drunken men in the street, but must help them home. One look atthe mug they drank from at council meetings and still keep at the Town Hall gives a clew to the wherefore of this last ordinance: the councilmen themselves might have some trouble navigating after a protracted session.

The Chimney-sweep.

The demand of these New Year pirates seems in the olden time to have been for “candles,” perhaps a convenient medium of exchange. In our day it was frankly for cash. Not only the watchman, but every one who had during the year rendered the house any service, or might be expected to in the year to come, knocked, said “Happy New Year,” and received a silver mark or an “eight-skilling,” which was half a mark, as the case might be, with the thanks of the householder. The chimney-sweep was there, washed and cleaned for once,—on other days he made it a point to look “like his trade,”—and the official mourner, who alternately bade the town to weddings and funerals, or gave notice that the stork had been around with a baby. A regular “cinch” had he, since sooner or later every well-regulated family must employ his service. His was areal profession, and he kept a special face for each of his functions. When he was bidding to a funeral his gait was slow and measured, his face grave, and his voice had a mournful droop that matched his rusty black coat and ancient silk hat. If it was a wedding, he was cordial, his step was light and his tile was set at a rakish angle. The man was an artist. And so in their limited sphere were the funeral bearers, who were among our New Year’s callers, too. They were a remnant from the days of the executioner, farther back even, to the time of the Black Death that killed half the people inthe town. Their guild was organized then, a sort of mutual insurance concern that made a man sure of getting underground at all events; and, having been established, stayed, as did everything else till it fell to pieces of itself. The aforesaid ordinances bear witness that it took much Dutch courage to carry the dead in the days of pestilence. There is one which forbids giving the “bearers” a barrel of beer at each funeral as wasteful and unseemly. The Old Town did some things after all that are worth considering. We do with less than a barrel in our day, but even when we do without it altogether, there is still waste enough about our funerals that is both unseemly and unfit in a Christian land.

“We saw it on moonlight nights.”

The head of the house sat in state with a plate full of silver coins beside him on the day these callers made their rounds, and responded to each salutation in kind; said “Thank you, same to you,” and handed the caller his coin. He twirled his cap, spat on the silver for good luck, put it in his pocket, scraped out, and made room for the next comer. If it was the night-watchman, he hadperhaps a word about the wind being in the northwest, “blowing up to a storm,” or about the marten that ate the last batch of squabs. The marten lived in the attic under the roof beams, where it had its young in peace. It was not disturbed, though it made an occasional raid on the hen roost or the pigeon coop; but that was to be guarded against. To make up for it, it ate the rats that infested the old houses, and for this service it was let alone. We saw it sometimes on moonlight nights, a black shadow up among the pointed gables, big as a cat, it seemed to me, and with a cat’s long tail. The watchman knew all its haunts, being a night prowler himself, and could tell when it was “getting too many” for the peace of the hen roost.Then shot-guns came out, and after some still-hunting by moonlight things were evened up again and put upon a peace basis.

As pater familias sat awaiting his New Year’s callers, he had the advantage always of knowing who was in the offing making for his door, and could arrange his contribution accordingly. That was because of the universal use of window reflectors, two mirrors set at an angle and fixed on the outside of the window. Sitting in your chair by it, you could tell who was coming from either side, half a block away. I often wonder why they are not more used on this side of the ocean. I should think they would be a great convenience if one did not wish to be “at home” for undesirable callers. Perhaps that was how the Bishop’s wife escaped meeting the Burgomaster’s lady they used to tell of in Copenhagen. They were not exactly friends, but their position required them to be agreeable before the world. So they exchanged visits, and upon one of these occasions the Burgomasterinde found the Bishop’s Manse deserted, with evidences of hasty flight.Now the good Bishop’s wife was not noted nearly as much for tidiness as for her sharp wit, and the Burgomasterinde took a long chance when, seeing the mahogany table covered with a thick layer of dust, she wrote on it “P-i-g.” But she felt better, no doubt, and went on her way rejoicing.

Some days later the two ladies met on the street. “Oh!” said the Burgomaster’s wife, “I called at your house last week, but you were not in.”

“Yes, I am so sorry,” from the other, sweetly, “I found your card on the table.”

They played the Old Town a trick once, those reflectors, that is hard to forgive. It was when the burghers who dwelt in the Main Street insisted upon the town removing the North Gate that obstructed their view. They “could not see past it.” No more they could, for it fairly blocked the way. But it was the last remnant of the old walls, which, imperfect as they were, for they never reached around, had borne the brunt of many an assault, and it was over this the iron hand was fixed in the days of rigorous Ribe justice. It was a wretched fate thatsacrificed it to the whim of a lot of curious women who wanted to spy on their neighbors. However, they got their deserts. They had forgotten that the street turned just beyond the gate, and when it was down and out of the way, behold! they could see no farther than before. I do not know what they did. I know what sensible people said about it twenty years after. But I suppose the gate would have gone anyway, so it’s no use grieving.

The North Gate.

Speaking of women’s ways, a fashion grew upthree hundred years ago of wearing their cloaks or petticoats over their heads instead of on their shoulders, in the street and to church, where, so shrouded, they slumbered peacefully through the sermon and, say the contemporary accounts, even slept at the altar-rail through the communion service. Talk about women wearing hats in church! Those cloaks became such a nuisance to the clergy that the practice was sternly forbidden in town council under penalty of a fine. Widows and mourners were excepted, but the latter only for six months. There is no mention of a petticoat revenue, so probably the practice ceased of itself.

A custom that made a deep impression on us children was the semi-annual “offering” in the Domkirke. Part of the revenues of priest and deacon was derived from free gifts of the people at Easter and Christmas—free, that is, to all appearances; but custom prescribed the exact amount of what was really a tax upon every householder. On these Sundays, when the last hymn had been sung and the sexton’s purse on itslong pole had been poked into the farthest pew, the Dean put on his crimson robe with the big white cross down the back that made him look as if he were clad in the national flag, and took his place at the altar. The organist pulled a stop that set a little bell tinkling and started a silver star spinning in the organ loft. That was the signal for all the men to rise, and with the Amtmand, the Rector, and the Burgomaster leading on, they marched up to the altar and laid their gifts there in two piles, one for the priest, the other for the clerk, always silver, which made quite a heap before the last coin had clinked upon it. The organist always played the hymn with the longest and slowest metre while the procession was passing, to give it time, I suppose, and the order of procedure was rigidly maintained. For a boss carpenter, for instance, to have gone before a teacher in the Latin School, even though his offerings had been twice the size of the other’s, would not have done at all. They kept step very well to the music, going and coming back, though I fancied their march was a little brisker on thereturn, as if they were glad it was over. Odd what impressions children get and keep. To me, looking back, it seems the one really great religious ceremony in the Domkirke I remember, always excepting the time the King came and one other. That was when the Austrian soldiers, during the occupation in ’63-’64, celebrated the birthday of their Emperor with a high mass. There had not been a Catholic service in the cathedral since the Reformation, and there has not been one since. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was the whole setting of august ceremonial and warmth and color that were foreign there; the uniforms, the bugles, the incense, with the strange tongue and the evident devotion of the soldiers who knelt on the marble floor—it all left an impression on my mind and heart that has never faded. It is rank heresy, of course, and I would never subscribe to it in cold blood, but it did seem somehow as if the old House of God came to its rights once more. Saints of old whose knees, bent in worship, had hallowed those ancient stones, walked again in the vaulted aisles,and the image of the martyred Bishop Leofdag in the wall outside seemed to nod as with understanding as we went by. I saw the lights go out with regret. Perhaps, unknown to myself, it had something to do with my desire in years long after to put a couple of stained-glass windows in the chancel that looks so white and cold. But they did not want them. They were not in the style, they said. Perhaps they were right. But oh! for a little warmth in our worship now and then, even at the sacrifice of being right in the matter of style.

The Emperor’s Birthday.

It may be that the fact that the Emperor’s birthday came in summer, if my memory serves me right, had something to do with it. The most loyal friend of the Domkirke could not have sat out the services there in winter without discomfort. There was no way of heating it, had not been since the beginning of our century, when the “fire-pan” given to it by a pious burgher in 1473 was taken out and sold for old iron. A legacy went with it that was forever to keep it in coal, so that “the poor and the church-goers”should not suffer from the cold. What became of that, I don’t know. They did many queer things in the days before reverence for the great past, and its memories and landmarks, awoke with the struggle for nationality and for freedom in our own time. Among other things they stripped some of the ancient grave-stones of their beautiful engraved brass plates for the melting pot, when a new bell had to be cast. And down in Holstein, where the sacred banner that fell from heaven to the Danish knights in the Esthland crusade and saved the battle that was all but lost, had been left by the indifference of a later day in hostile hands, they took it at housecleaning time and, esteeming it just a moth-eaten and tattered rag, burned it with other rubbish in the public road.

In Ribe, for a hundred years the people put on their overcoats and mufflers and their rubbers when they went to church and sat it out as they could; or else they stayed at home. Even so clothed we sat and shivered, our toes growing numb on the stone floor. When it was over, welimped out and took a quick walk around the Castle Hill to “get up circulation.” The walls of the Domkirke were thick, and it was past Christmas before the winter had quite moved in; but then it stayed well into the summer, refusing to be dislodged by spring until the roses were in bloom. In the great restoration, of which more hereafter, it was at last the upstart factory across the Linden Square, that had once so piqued the conservatism of the Old Town, which, having been by that time abandoned, gave its boiler house to be a heating plant for the church. And so the old and the new met once again, and atonement was made for past misconduct.

I have spoken of the square red tower which, though part of the Domkirke, and its great and distinguishing feature seen from afar, did yet belong under the civil government as the stronghold of the burghers in time of trouble, typifying curiously the union of church and state, and crumbling slowly like that in my day. It had given fair warning to more than one generation. There was a house in Priest Street, straight upfrom the tower, with the old arms of the town picked out in colors above its door, which I never could pass without a shudder. As far as that, tradition had it, the tower fell on Christmas morning in the year 1283, when it collapsed during early mass while the church was full of people. Very many were killed. It was in the time after the death of the great Valdemar when the country was torn by dissension within and onslaught from without. An earthquake had shaken the land eleven years before, probably contributing its share to the insecurity of the tower, and one can imagine the “great fear that prevailed” among the people. Again in 1594 the upper part of the tower fell, and in the rebuilding it received the shape and height which it has kept.

The tower falcon, a fierce-eyed, solitary bird of prey, was its rightful tenant in my day; had been, I fancy, from the beginning. He seemed to fit in with its warlike traditions. The boys caught him in traps, sometimes, and kept him chained about the house, but never for long,for he was utterly untamable and his shriek was not melodious. Furthermore, his diet of meat, preferably live mice, kept us scurrying in a way we quickly tired of. The falcon has moved. A score of years ago they overhauled the village church at Seem, three miles up the river, and dislodged a family of rooks that lived there. In search of new quarters they struck the Domkirke, liked it, and stayed. The newcomers were great chatterers, while the falcon is a silent bird, and moreover they brought all their relations. In disgust, I suppose, at the racket they made, the falcon betook himself to the Plantage and became a dweller in trees. My boy reports that he is there yet. He has been up to see. The rooks stayed and multiplied exceedingly. At least I supposed them to be rooks, till, last summer, I stood on the top of the tower in Windsor Castle and was told by the caretaker that the black birds hopping about were jackdaws. They were the very same.

Jackdaws or rooks, they took possession of the big tower and of the little one, and they havekept it since. By day they go afield for their food; but sundown always finds them in loud and general debate on the stone railing of the red tower. They sit in military files discussing the subject in hand in very human fashion: now one at a time, and again all together, squawking at the top of their voices. Year by year their number grows, since no marten can reach them on their roost. There came a time when it seemed as if something ought to be done, if they were not to practically own the town. The matter came up in council, and the debate that ensued was worthy of the best days of the Old Town. The consensus of opinion was that they were getting to be a nuisance; but how to stop it was another matter.

“They are here,” said one of the city fathers, “and what are you going to do about it?” There was no answer. Upon the question what was their diet no one could shed any definite light; but it suggested a ray of hope to one.

“They might,” he ventured, “be good to eat.” The city fathers considered one another thoughtfully.They were certainly fat. If they were to turn out a new kind of game, now! It ended, after long debate, in a committee being appointed to take the matter under practical advisement, with directions to report at a future meeting whether the rooks were good eating, or, if not, how they disagreed with a councilman’s stomach. Six months had passed when last I fished with a member of the committee. He screwed up his mouth and shook his head dubiously as he made a cast for a pickerel hiding in the rushes.

“They are fat, yes,” he said ruefully. “They might be good, and then again—they might make you sick.”

Caution, says an ancient Danish proverb, is the virtue of a burgomaster. It ought at least to be the privilege of a councilman.

A friend who, like myself, had long been in foreign parts where they have other ways, once told me that he believed the Danes had no business capacity, at least the Danes who stayed at home, because he found them charging the big summer hotel a cent more for milk thanthey exacted from the poor fishermen who lived on the shore; and when he asked them why, he was told that “the hotel took so much more and it was more trouble.” But in the first place that was true; and, further, I think it was their inborn sense of fairness plus their stubborn democracy that was breaking out there. The small folk were to be protected against the wealthier neighbor. A people without business capacity would never have thought of the expedient the Old Town hit upon in a dispute with the local gas company, long after I had gone away. The sidewalks are narrow, with never room for more than one, and the nights are sometimes very dark. So, as the gas company refused to give in and the town refused to burn gas till it did, and consequently, all parties to the quarrel being Jutlanders, there was no telling when the dispute would be settled, if ever, the council ordered that the lampposts be painted white to avoid collision and suits for damages. If that is not business sense, what is it?

No. The Old Town moves with deliberation, it is true. But then, the rest of us are in too much of a hurry. No one ever is, there. What is there to run after? The clock that has counted the hours since before Napoleon stirred up the dry bones of Europe still stands in its corner and ticks the seconds, the hours, the years, twice a day pointing its slow finger to the date graven on its face: 1600-1700-1800—why should one hurry? If we but wait, the years will come to us and carry us with them to our long rest. And there will be others where we are now. The world will move; men will live and labor and love; and the old clock will tick in the hall, counting the hours, the days, the years. It is the Old Town’s philosophy. If it has not made it rich, or powerful, or great, it has made it content. Who shall say then that it is not as good as the best?

There is one that ticks in a house I know of where eyes I loved smiled to it and nodded to it every day in passing. In 1792 it was made in Ribe, where famous clock-makers lived then.I tried to buy it; I offered two hundred kroner for it, which was a small fortune to the Old Town. But its owner shook his head. It had been in the family since his great-great-great-grandfather, and it would stay there as long as there were any of them left. I shook his hand. I should have been sorry had he been willing to sell. It would have been like betraying an old friend. They were poor, but they were loyal. It was the Old Town all over. Years ago the last of the clock-makers lived in Black Friars Street, in our block. One morning there was a great crash. It was their house that had fallen down. The neighbors hastened up to help, and when a way had been made through the wreck, found the old man and his wife lying calmly in bed. The beams had formed a shelter over them, and they were safe till the next cave-in. They urged them to hurry out, but the old couple refused. It was their home. They had always lived in it and, now they were old, would die in it if need be rather than seek another. They were like Heine’s lovers:

Wir Beide bekümmern uns um nichtsUnd bleiben ruhig liegen.

Wir Beide bekümmern uns um nichts

Und bleiben ruhig liegen.

They had to take them out by force.

No need of haste. The mail-coach waited for you in the old days, once you were registered as a passenger, till you came. It would have been base to desert you. The train waits now till you climb aboard and station-master and conductor have exchanged the last item of news. The red-coated mail-carrier taps on your window with the expected letter and a sympathetic “It’s come.” The telegraph messenger who meets you in the street with his message goes home with you to hear the good news; he knows it is good. The mill-wheels drone in the stream their old drowsy lay that was old when you were born. Down by the castle garden a worn wheel whirs and hums in the rope walk where father and son go spinning their endless cord, side by side, as did their people before them as far back as any one can remember. Why should one hurry? The sun sinks low in the west. Far upon the horizon there is a gleamof silver: it is the sea, sleeping in a calm. The bells of the Old Town peal forth their even song. The cows come home from the meadows. In the Cloister shadows trembling hands are trimming the evening lamp, tired old feet tottering to their rest. A day is ended. Above blossoming gardens the stork looks down from its nest, wiser than the world of men: another will dawn. So that its evening be peace, what matters the rest? It is the message of the Old Town.

“It’s come.”

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