[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: THE STORK CAME IN APRIL.]
One day we heard it on its nest, jabbering out a noisy “How d’do”
through its long red bill, and then we children gathered below and sang
our song of welcome:
[Music:
Stork, Storkie long leg
Where were you this long while?
Saw you King Pharaoh’s lofty stone?
Stalk’d you in Nile River meadows?]
The swallow and the starling were not far behind it. They were all our
tenants and lived under our roof, or on it, but the stork was the only
one who paid rent formally. Payment was made in kind. Every other year
he threw an egg out of the nest, and the next year a fledgling stork.
For the rest he held aloof, disdaining haughtily to hold communication
of any kind with us. Even when a disabled stork became, by force of
circumstances, a member of the household, residing in the hen-house
through the winter, he never grew familiar, but accepted what was
given to him with quiet reserve as from a subject people; which, of
course, was his right, seeing that he was a public functionary of the
first importance. We had no stork on our house, but both our neighbors
did, and as if to make up for the apparent slight, he was a regular
visitor in our family. They seemed to always know when he was coming,
and when I was told of it, I never failed to leave a Tvebak for him in
the window which the nurse had left open so that he should not wake up
the whole house by rapping on the pane with his bill. And when it was
gone in the morning, I knew that a little brother had come to join our
company; and sure enough it was so.
The swallow sang for us, and we saw to it that his way out and in of
the hallway where he built his nest was free, by leaving a pane out of
the transom. If by any chance that was obstructed, we knew it by his
flying up and down before the doorway, waiting anxiously for some one
to open it, that he might slip in where a string of little round heads,
always set in a straight row, were clamoring with wide-open bills for
flies and gnats. When the starling sang his evening song in the big
poplar, the Old Town was white with the bloom of the elder. He left it
dyed a deep purple, for he was as fond of elderberries as we were of
the soup our mothers made of them, and the stain of them abides. In
between the blossoming and the berrying when his youngsters were grown,
he took himself off with his wife for several weeks, leaving only the
children behind. To France, it was said, he went, and to Mediterranean
olive groves, where they hunted him as a nuisance. We loved him and
gave him sanctuary. And he helped the farmer in turn by ridding his
field of pests. Where a flock of starlings settled down for luncheon,
no wriggling thing remained to tell the tale.
By the time the stork was settled on the Rector’s house and busy
repairing his nest, our boyish eyes turned speculatively toward the
swelling buds of the pear tree that hung temptingly over the narrow
way to the Latin School, and we tried to estimate how many of them had
pears in them, and what were the chances of their happening to hit
us as they fell, later on. Our daily walk took the direction of the
Castle Hill, and turned off at the big buckthorn hedge to the river
where we swam in summer. The cowslips were in the meadows then, and
forget-me-nots grew on the bank where the rushes nodded to the waters
going out to the sea, as if they would like to go too, but, being
unable, gave them a message of cheer and good luck on the way. And
the spring birds called to each other in the meadows. Then the bright
nights were at hand. They came, as night does in the hot countries,
suddenly. You saw in the almanac--the 6th of May, I think it was--that
they were due, and that night, or the next if it was clear, you noticed
a something in the atmosphere that was different. You walked with a
lighter step, and your glance strayed constantly to the west, where
the light never quite went out, but kept moving round north, to hail
the coming day in the east. And every morning it came earlier and left
later, till St. John’s Day was passed, when the days again began to
grow shorter. Then one night in early August, when we walked abroad on
the causeway, we knew that the summer was soon over. The light had gone
out of the sky, as suddenly as it came, and the world was changed.
There lives in my memory such an evening in after years. I had been
home--for ever the Old Town remained home to one whose cradle was
rocked there--and was going my farewell rounds among the old people and
the old places before packing off with the stork and his family. My
way took me past the Castle Hill in the early twilight. A man stood
up there, a lonely figure sharply outlined against the light that was
fading out of the western sky. He stood watching it as if he would hold
it fast if he could, never stirring once while the warm pink changed
to a steely gray, cold as the moonlight on Arctic ice. Behind him the
town lay buried in its shadows. I almost fancied I saw him shiver as
they crept up the hill to close him in their long night. I knew him, a
schoolmate of mine, a man in good position who had remained unmarried
and was now past middle age, always a lonesome sort of fellow. He stood
there yet when the houses shut him out of my sight, and I did not see
him again. Three days later, on the day we sailed from Copenhagen, I
heard that he was dead. He had killed himself, no one knew why. He was
comfortable as the world goes, and there was no explanation of his act,
they said. To me none was needed. The picture of him, standing there
alone, the twilight of summer and of life closing in upon him, rose up
before me, and I thought I understood.
With the coming of the bright nights the Old Town grew young again.
Its staid habits were laid aside; the watchmen cried the bedtime hour
in vain. At all hours of the night, till the midnight bell sounded and
sometimes later, young and old were abroad, on the causeway, in the
Plantage, or driving to the shore and taking their supper there. The
young rowed and sang on the river in the long glowing twilight and had
a good time. School and university were closed, and the students came
back to visit old friends and to make love. With midsummer came “Holme
week,” of which more hereafter, when they all went out and sported in
the hay together. An endless procession of young couples have driven
home on the hay wagons, watching the midnight glow in the northern
heavens from the top of the load, hand in hand, and thinking earth a
new-found paradise for Two, while Cupid laughed at the ferry-landing
to see them go. In Holme week he was always a regular boarder with
the ferry-master. But the young never suspected it, or if they did,
showed no fear; and their elders, who knew, having met him there in
their time, held their peace. I am not sure that they did not even
surreptitiously pay his board. For they were sly, the good people of
the Old Town.
Early in August the young storks began to gather on the high roof of
the Cloister-church, and every day we saw them manœuvring there in
agitated rows, between practice flights into the fields that grew
longer and longer toward the time for their departure. At the final
review, we knew, any of them that could not fly well enough and far
enough would be killed by the rest, for no laggards were wanted on
their long trip to King Pharaoh’s land. We watched them soaring high,
high up, and hoped fervently that our own stork, or the neighbor’s we
knew so well, might pass muster and not be stabbed to death with those
long bills which we had seen carrying home snakes and frogs and lizards
to the nest so often, and always raised in loud thanksgiving as the
feast was spread before the brood. Then they seemed the gentlest of
birds; but all at once the red beaks became swords to our imagination,
to pierce the helpless youngster who got a bad report at his “exam.”
Every day we looked to see if they were all there and were glad when
none was missing. Then one morning we looked out, and the Cloister roof
was bare. The storks were gone. Every nest in the town was empty. We
searched awhile, incredulous; then, with a little shiver, went to look
up our skates and our mittens.
[Illustration: A GIRL FROM THE NORTH SEA ISLANDS.]
Before we had use for them, however, came the annual fair in September.
The Ribe Fair was famous throughout the middle ages, when the town
was the chief seaport of the country. Then merchants came from far
and near, and the court bought its purple and fine linen of them. In
our day it had dwindled, as had the Old Town itself, until barely a
baker’s dozen of traders from abroad brought their wares. But the Ribe
merchants built their booths in the Square, and there came embroideries
from Schleswig, pottery from the country to the north--the black “Jute
pots,” that alone were deemed fit to cook in by a careful housewife.
The woman who served fried eels, and coffee out of a copper kettle
with rock sugar in lumps,--lovely lumps, strung on a thread, can I ever
forget!--sat at the Cat-head Door of the Domkirke. To us she was as
much of an institution as the Domkirke itself and twice as important,
for she came only once a year, while the church was there all the
time. In the narrow lane between the booths multitudes of farm-folk
swarmed, togged out in their best, admiring it all and meeting friends
at every step. The blue of the border gendarmes and the red and green
of the Fanö girls made a pretty picture. The Fair was in fact the great
opportunity of the country folk for social intercourse in the days
when newspapers were rare, railroad and telegraph as yet to come, and
a letter an event news of which spread through a country neighborhood
and was discussed at its firesides in all its probable bearings. The
peasants came to the Fair, the men to dicker and trade, if nothing
else their pipes, it being understood that a treat went with the
trade, so that they became speedily mellow and sometimes loud over the
tavern board. The women laid in their supply of ribbons, calico,
and such like for the year, heard and discussed the news of weddings,
christenings, and funerals; and the foundation of many a match was laid
with a parting invitation to the prospective suitor to “come and see
the farm” as the next step in the negotiations.
[Illustration: “THERE WERE BOOTHS WITH TOYS AND BOOTHS WITH TRUMPETS.”]
To us children it was all an enchanted land. There were booths with
toys and booths with trumpets and booths with great “honey-cakes” with
an almond heart right in the middle. No such cakes are made nowadays,
and the trumpets in the toy-shops send forth no such blasts of rapture
as did those we bought at the Fair in the Old Town and blew till our
cheeks bulged and our eyes stared with the strain. Up and down we
trooped, through lane after lane, dragging weary but happy mothers in
our wake, trumpeting--I can hear those peals across all the toilsome
years. Tin horns--bah! Those were _trumpets_, I tell you, red and green
and silver-shine. And at last we brought up in front of the Great
Panorama and stopped, breathless, to look and listen.
The panorama man kept no booth. He was above it. His entire outfit
consisted of a sheet of canvas hung upon a pole and painted all
over with the scenes he sang about. For he was a singer, the
nineteenth-century descendant of the Skjald of our forefathers; far
descended, alas! his song was ever about murder and horror on sea and
land. He was the real precursor of the yellow press--pictures, songs,
and all. Whether he made the latter up himself, or merely sang the
ballad of the day, I do not know. If it was not about a man who took
his girl to a dance and, getting her aside,
[Music:
He took his knife from his pocket
And opened it up,]
preparatory to stabbing her with great detail and deliberation, then
it dealt with the latest world horror, the full circumstances of
which were set forth in lurid words, and even more lurid paint, on
the canvas. Thus, for instance, the burning of the emigrant steamer
_Austria_ in mid-ocean. I can see him now, slapping the canvas with
his rattan, and hear every inflection of his strident voice as he drew
attention to the picture of it steaming peacefully along, and sang:
[Music:
Proudly o’er the ocean waves
Sped the steamer Austria.
Passengers it had in numbers
Going to America.
To the captain who commanded
Never dream came of the blow
Which fate for him upon this voyage
Unluckily prepared has.]
Then the fire and the horror, the women throwing the children overboard
and being swallowed up by yellow and crimson flames that sent grewsome
thrills up and down our backbones--and then the hat passed around for
the troubadour. His was the _pièce de résistance_ of the Fair, and we
went home, when we had heard him through, impressed that we had heard
the heart of the great world throb.
[Illustration: THE GIRL MARKET.]
Besides the Fair which in olden times was known as Our Lady’s Fair,
perhaps because of the Domkirke,[9] in the shadow of which it was held,
more likely because it came on the Virgin’s feast-day, there were two
other kinds, the cattle fairs and the “girl market.” The last was
in the spring and fall, when farmers hired their help. Those who were
for hire then came to the Old Town on a set date, and stood in two
long rows in front of the old tavern in the Square, which remained
unchanged, as did the custom no doubt, from the Sixteenth Century. The
women bared their arms to the shoulder, and the farmers felt them,
approvingly or not as they thought them strong to do their work.
There are tricks in all trades. An old country parson from one of the
neighboring villages tells that a mistress at whose house hard scrabble
ruled would sometimes be found to smear her mouth with bacon to give
the impression that there was fat living where she was at home. When
a pair were suited, the dickering began, and the bargain made had the
sanction of law. Indeed, the applicant’s “book” was the first thing
asked for if the physical inspection had been satisfactory. In it his
or her character was recorded by successive employers, and attested by
the police, to whom it had to be presented each time the owner of it
made a change of base.
All through the spring great droves of steers came through the town on
their way to the Holstein marshlands, where they were to be fattened
for the Hamburg and London trade. Ribe was on one of the ancient cattle
tracks from the north to the great southern pastures. Then we heard
the tread of many hurrying hoofs at early dawn and the loud hop-how!
of the herders trying to keep their droves together. While they passed
through the town, the people kept discreetly indoors. Indeed, there was
no room for them outside; but they bore it patiently, being used to
it. Often enough the cows that lived in the town went in by the same
door their owners used, and naturally there came to be a neighborly
feeling between them, which was extended to these wayfarers. Sometimes,
instead of cattle, flocks of Jutland horses came through with braided
manes and tails, headed south for the armies of Prussia or France or
Austria. Twice a year, I think, they halted at the Old Town, and the
market square became the scene of a great cattle fair. It was on one
of these occasions that I made my first bid for a horse. I must have
been seven or eight years old, and had with much argument brought my
mother over to my notion that a little horse was a good thing to have
about the house. It could be stabled in the peat shed, where we kept
our winter fuel, and in summer grass enough to more than keep it grew
between the cobble-stones in our street, and on the narrow sidewalk.
So it was decided that I might buy a horse at the next fair, if I
could get it for eight skilling,--about five cents, I should say. That
was the appropriation, and with it I sped, my heart beating fast, to
the Square and interviewed a dealer, telling him that I only wanted a
little horse, being but a little boy; and besides, the peat shed was
small. I had seen some that were just the kind I wanted, running along
with a farmer’s team sometimes.
[Illustration: WHERE THE COWS GO IN THROUGH THE STREET DOOR.]
The dealer heard me through very gravely, and as gravely inspected
the eight skilling which I unwrapped and showed him as a guarantee of
good faith. He ran his eye over his sleek mares and regretted that
those little horses were scarce that year, and just then he had none
in stock. But he was going south, where they were plentiful, he said,
and if I would save my money till he came back, he would be sure to
bring me one. And I went home joyfully to report my success and get
the shed ready, and also to drive off the weeding women, who came most
inappropriately that very spring to dig out the dandelions in our
gutter. They were to be kept as a choice morsel for my horse. I waited
anxiously all through that summer and kept a lookout for every drove of
horses that came through, but my trader I never saw again, and in none
of the herds was my little horse. After a while I forgot about it in
the great overwhelming sensation of the time. The King came to the town.
In its old age that was an honor it had rarely enjoyed. No one there
had, I think, seen the King, unless in the field as a soldier seven
years before, in ’49-’50. King Frederik, furthermore, was a great
favorite of the people. He had given them constitutional government,
and he was the popular hero whose army had driven the invaders back
after two years of hard fighting. So we turned out to receive him, to
the last inhabitant. He came, impressive, kingly, yet with a bonhomie
about him that made the common people accept him as their own wherever
he went. They told of how he had fared with a steady Jutland farmer
who entertained him and his suite on the journey across country. Those
yeomen still said “thou” to the King, as their forefathers did in the
long ago, and knew little of the ways of courts--cared less, I fancy.
Also, they are as close-fisted as they are square in a trade with
“known man.” A neighbor is safe in their hands; others may look out
for themselves. So when the King went to his host and thanked him for
his trouble, calling him by his first name as was his wont, for he
understood his men, Hans scratched his head.
“It’s all right with the trouble, King,” he answered; “but about the
expense. That’s worse.”
The King laughed long and loud and squared up, and they parted friends.
This was the man we turned out in a body to honor. The men who had
horses and could ride received him as an escort, miles up the road.
All the countryside was there to see and to cheer; most of the men had
carried muskets in the war, and to the tune of “Den tappre Landsoldat”
they brought him in. The streets were hung with garlands of green, and
little girls in white strewed flowers before the royal procession. I
remember it all as if it were yesterday. In the evening there was a
great time in the Domkirke. The King sat inside the altar-rail in his
blue soldier’s uniform and with a big silver helmet on. Years and
years after, going through the National Museum at Copenhagen, I saw
it hanging there in a glass case, and clear across the room I knew it
at sight. That was the way a king ought to look, and it was the way
King Christian, his successor, did look when I saw him in the same
seat nearly fifty years later. Only he was slender and youthful of
figure despite his eighty odd years. King Frederik was stout. Stout or
slender, he was our boyish ideal of a king.
There was the gala dinner to which our father and mother went and came
home in the small hours of the morning with their pockets full of
bonbons, and with wondrous tales of the show that made our ears tingle
all that winter. And then there was the discovery on the Castle Hill,
made for the occasion expressly. That was the very peak and pinnacle of
it all.
Ever since anybody could remember there had been stories about a secret
passage leading from the Castle Hill under the moat into town--now, it
was said, to the Bishop’s Manse, and then again to the Cloister, or to
the Domkirke itself. It was supposed to be a way they had in the old
fighting days of getting out and taking the enemy in the rear, when
the castle was besieged and they were hard put to it. No one ever knew
the truth of it, and so we all believed it; but now by some fortunate
chance the secret passage was actually found. The mouth of it had
been uncovered, and the King was to see it. It was a tunnel built of
the big brick the monks made, and which we still knew as monk-brick.
Half the Old Town is built of it, that is to say, castle, cloisters,
and churches long since gone live again in the walls of the houses
built since the Reformation. What is quite evidently a part of the
mantelpiece from the castle adorns the entrance to the silversmith’s on
the corner of the street through which King Valdemar rode to his dying
queen, and the searcher of to-day, seeking vainly a trace of his famous
castle where it stood, walks over it, unthinking, when he goes in to
buy a souvenir of his visit. This secret way stirred the town mightily.
It was confirmation of the old rumors, and it was in itself a mystery.
Where was the other end of the hole?
The King saw, but declined the honor of being the explorer. He
suggested first one then another of his suite with less avoirdupois.
But they all had excuses. In fact, a small boy might barely have done
it; further, the hole led downward and was black and ill-smelling.
So it remained unexplored. It stood open for some time, an object of
awe and many speculative creeps to us boys; then it was covered up. I
regret to have to add, as destroying a long-cherished illusion that had
a glamour about it which it is hateful to dispel, that when diggings
were made in the Castle Hill last summer, under competent leadership,
our secret passage was discovered to be an old sewer that led no
farther than the dry moat. It was just as well none of the King’s
courtiers went down.
Those close-fisted farmer neighbors of ours were sometimes very
well-to-do; but a hard fight with a lean soil had taught them the
value of money earned, perhaps overmuch. In the Old Town, as I have
said, there were no very rich people, but the poor were not poor
either in the sense in which one thinks of poverty in a great city.
They had always enough to eat and were comfortably housed. There were
no beggars, unless you would count as such the travelling “Burschen,”
mechanics making the rounds of Denmark and Germany under their guild
plan, working where they could and asking alms when they had nothing,
the which we freely gave. It was an understood thing that that was not
charity in any sense, but a kind of lift to a traveller on his way. So
he was getting experience in his work, whatever it might be, by seeing
the ways of other communities, and by and by would return to his own,
better regarded as man and mechanic for having “travelled” in his
years. It was, of course, the old mediæval system of which we saw the
last. There is very little left of it to-day, I imagine.
I said that there were no beggars in the Old Town. There are indeed
few in Denmark, where prosperity is very evenly distributed. It was,
nevertheless, there I encountered the slyest little beggar it was
ever my fortune to come across. It was in one of the cemeteries of
Copenhagen, where we had been to look up a friend’s grave, that we came
upon a little girl, a child of ten, who was fashioning a little mound
in the dust and putting a monument over it, a piece of a broken slate.
She looked up as we stopped beside her, noticing our serious faces and
no doubt checking us off at once as being there on business, not mere
chance visitors.
“Here lies my cat,” she said. “It was red.”
“Oh!” We were interested at once. “And what did it die of?”
“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.
[Illustration: “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 of steaming sausage were carried around among the neighbors
who had no pigs, that they also might taste of the good things of
the earth. Blood sausage was there, big and round and red, and good
to eat, fried with syrup; and liver sausage, pale but appealing; and
sausage with rice in and sausage with spices in; and roll sausage,
which sometimes I buy in delicatessen shops nowadays; but they must
have lost the art of making them, for they don’t taste as they did
then. The trencher must have been welcome in Mother’s larder, for with
so many mouths to fill we were taught to look upon meat as a relish
rather than the mainstay of the meal. Not that we did not have enough.
We always had that, but dishes made of flour, of potatoes, of peas
and other vegetables, played a greater rôle in the economic cookery
of the day and country than nowadays. And we liked it. I defy any one
to find a summer dish that compares with “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’s proceedings, there was some
doubt about their ability to transport the bell from the foundry to
the Domkirke, until the Rector of the Latin School put it up to his
boys, who at once took hold and dragged it all the way alone. Whether
they came in under the subsequent largesse of beer is not stated,
but probably not. Two barrels would not have gone very far then. All
this seems queer to us nowadays. It is strange to find that in that
century the privileged Town Hall dramshop--the Rathhaus-keller, in
fact--achieved a competitor in the Domkirke itself. The chapter of
clerics opened one of their own in their cellar under the north end
of the chancel, on the plea that they must have wine for churchly
functions, of a proper quality, and kept it going for I don’t know
how long. Much later than that, in 1683, clergymen were forbidden by
law to distil whiskey, but in 1768 “priest and deacon” were expressly
confirmed in their right to distil it for their own use. So there was
ecclesiastical sanction, and to spare, for all the beer and spirits
that were consumed. Clear down to my time, when the Jutland peasant
brewed,[10] it was the custom to throw the first three handfuls of malt
into the mash “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
And the same man who did that, as the next step shut all the doors of
the brewing room, placed a glowing coal on each doorstep, put three
coals in the vat with a wisp of straw bound in form of a cross, and
finally stirred it all with the iron tongs from the fireplace, to keep
evil eyes from spoiling the brew![11] No wonder there were spooks in
the Old Town, the werwolf that haunted the graveyard by night, and the
hell-horse on its three legs.
Whenever I think of that last and the horror we held it in, it comes
to me that our dread of crawling things must be largely a matter of
legs, due to our prejudice in favor of the standard two or four. The
hell-horse was ever so much more horrible because of its limping about
by night on three. We hate a spider, which has six or eight, and loathe
the thousand-leg worm with cause. And at the other end, when it comes
to the snake, that has no legs at all, we are prompted by an instant
impulse to kill it. It is not a religious prejudice at all, no Garden
of Eden notion, but an instinctive recoil from the thing that does not
conform to the established standard in legs. 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 closest figuring. Large
families were the rule rather than the exception. Not till my father
was long in his grave and I was looking over his old papers and
accounts, did I suspect how bitter was the fight he waged those forty
years and to what straits he was put. To turn a coat when the right
side was worn threadbare was a common expedient in those days of honest
cloth, but Father had his overcoat turned twice to tide him over an
evil time. As for us boys, we didn’t have any half the time. I remember
the winter when, being in such case and making a virtue of bald
necessity, I tried to organize a Spartan Society among my schoolmates,
the corner-stone of which was contempt of overcoats as plain
mollycoddling. As a means of attracting the boys there were secret
passwords and an initiation that had to be worked at dusk in the moat
by the Castle Hill and was supposed to be very grewsome. It took for a
while, until the mothers put a stop to it. I believe one of them who
had read Æsop’s fable about the fox that had lost its tail and tried to
persuade the other foxes that it was the latest fashion, 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, he had 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.
[Illustration: “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 betook myself to the Long Bridge, where I
could be alone, to think it over, my pockets, in the depths of which
reposed the miraculous coin, filled with pebbles to punctuate my ideas
withal. I stood on one of the arches and threw them in, watching the
rings they made in the water, and as they widened till they reached
from shore to shore and I dug deeper and deeper into my pocket, my
ambition and my hopes rose with them. Until, all unknowing, I threw
the last pebble and, as it sped forth in the sunshine, saw that it was
my four-skilling. The waters closed over it with a little splash I can
hear yet, and I saw its silver sheen as it turned and sank. I did not
weep. The disaster was too great. I stood awhile dumb, then went home
and told no one. Darkness had settled upon my life with a sorrow so
great that I felt it invested even with a kind of dignity as a vast
and irreparable misfortune. I cannot even now laugh at it. It was too
terrible to ever quite forget.