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.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
THE OLD TOWN
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: “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
PAGE
THE OLD AND THE NEW vii
CHAPTER I 1
CHAPTER II 26
CHAPTER III 49
CHAPTER IV 78
CHAPTER V 104
CHAPTER VI 143
CHAPTER VII 169
CHAPTER VIII 186
CHAPTER IX. OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER 229
KING FREDERIK AT HOME 257
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“Post Office” _Frontispiece_
PAGE
“Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls” 9
“The old Domkirke reared its gray head” _facing_ 12
The Causeway in a Storm 15
Fanö Women 21
Seal of the Old Town in the Thirteenth Century 26
An Old House 31
The Iron Hand 32
A Watchman 38
“He found his prisoner faithfully guarding
the gun when he came back” _facing_ 48
“Eyes that spoke of things unseen by the crowd” 49
Peer Down’s Slip _facing_ 50
Neighbor Quedens 52
The Good Dean of the Domkirke 58
The Wife of the Middle-miller 60
Venus 61
“Did the honors on ceremonial occasions” _facing_ 62
Liar Hans 65
The Old Family Doctor _facing_ 74
“They crept about, the old men with their staffs” 77
The Christmas Sheaf 78
The Nisse _facing_ 80
“Blowing in Yule from the grim old tower” ” 84
“The whole family turned to and helped” ” 92
“We joined hands and danced around the tree” ” 95
“We ‘smashed’ the New Year in” ” 100
“We caught them napping there one dark night” ” 102
Getting Ready for the Review 104
The Stork came in April _facing_ 104
A Girl from the North Sea Islands ” 112
“There were booths with toys
and booths with trumpets” ” 115
The Girl Market ” 119
Where the Cows go in through the Street Door 121
“Trenchers of steaming sausage” 130
“I threw the last pebble” 141
King Harald’s Stone 143
“In my dreams I sit by the creek” 146
Where I shot my First Duck _facing_ 147
Picking Rävlinger in the Moor 153
Dagmar’s Despoiled Tomb 159
In Holme Week--The Old Ferry Raft _facing_ 162
Cruising up to the Seem Church 167
Riberhus 169
The King’s Ride over the Moor 176
“For God and the King” _facing_ 179
“The King and his men knelt
upon the battlefield” ” 180
Danish Women ransomed their King ” 181
“Comforted the King in sorrow and defeat” 181
Jackdaws in Council 186
“Ha! you were just going to fire it” 195
The Latin School Teachers 198
The Chimney-sweep 207
“We saw it on moonlight nights” 209
The North Gate 212
The Emperor’s Birthday _facing_ 215
“It’s come” 227
The Accursed Candlestick 229
A Strange Figure in Kilts 234
The Restored Domkirke _facing_ 235
The Cat-head Door ” 237
The Old Cloister-church 239
King Christian comes from Church 249
King Frederik 259
THE OLD TOWN
CHAPTER I
[Illustration]
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?
[Illustration: “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.
[Illustration: “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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.