[Illustration: KING HARALD’S STONE.]
The Old Town was set in a meadow, grass to the right of it, grass to
the left of it, stretching away toward the horizon until in the south
and east it came up against the black moor, and toward the sunset a
little way met the sands of the western sea. What sport was there
for boys in such a country? My own boys asked me that question with
something of impatience on a walk through the fields, for they had been
sizing up the lads of their own age on baseball and found them no good.
They threw the ball “just like girls.” Not many days after one of them
came home with a bruised nose and an increased respect for Danish
muscle. It was good for fighting, anyhow. But, in truth, we did not run
to baseball when I was a boy; and as for fighting, we had no more than
was good for us; when any Uitlander bragged, for instance. As I look
back now it seems to me we didn’t have time for either, so busy were we
with our sports.
There was the brook that led to the old manse, hidden quite behind a
wind-tossed thicket of scrub-oak that had run over the sunken walls
since the days when bishops were fighting men who went clad in iron
to the wars. Then the manse was one of the strongholds of the Ribe
prelates who led the armies of the King against the German counts,
notably the “Strong Master Jacob,” whose fists and sword saved many
a soul where preaching failed. The brook was now barely a step wide,
and we boys could easily jump over it in places; but the wild birds
built their nests in its banks in spring, and up where we had our early
bonfires it widened into a dark still pool, hedged in with mint and
forget-me-nots, where wary trout were always darting from the deep
shadows. I go to seek that pool first thing when I return to the Old
Town now, and it is not changed. But the boys of to-day seem to have
forgotten it.
[Illustration: “IN MY DREAMS I SIT BY THE CREEK.”]
And then the creek that meandered through the meadows miles and
miles from the great peat bog where our winter fuel came from,
making one turn more tortuous than another, with hole after hole in
the deep pockets that were fairly alive with yellow perch and their
silver-scaled neighbors, whatever you would call them. We called them
“skaller.” I could go to a dozen of them blindfolded, I think, even
now, and bait my hook and throw it in the exact spot where a perch is
waiting to pull the cork under with one quick, determined jerk. No
nibbling about him; his mind is always made up and ready. Sometimes
in my dreams I sit by the creek in one particular spot I have never
forgotten, with feet hanging over the edge, the slanting sunlight on
the dark waters, red-finned perch and silver fish darting hither and
thither, and the soft west wind in the grass; and then I am perfectly
happy. Our ambition did not rise to five-pound pickerel in those days.
Maybe there weren’t any. My little boy and I found plenty in after
years, and little else. My pretty fish seemed to be gone. Perhaps the
pickerel had eaten them up, like some mean trust on dry land. If he
had, we got square with him. We ate him in turn. They had reduced the
catching of him to an exact science. Drop your bait there, right in the
edge of the rushes, so--a swirl and a sudden tightening of the line!
Let him run, and take out your watch. Eight minutes to a dot, and he
is off again. That is when he turns the bait around in his mouth and
swallows it, having lain by waiting for signs of treachery. Now, pull
him in. Here he is! Hi, what a big fellow!
[Illustration: WHERE I SHOT MY FIRST DUCK.]
It was up here by this turn that I shot my first duck. It was in the
winter vacation, and I had found out that here, where there was a
stretch of open water, a flock of black-headed ducks were at home. I
burrowed through six feet of snow to the water’s edge and shot one of
them as they flew. It fell and dived, and I threw my clothes in the
snow and jumped after. Ugh! it was cold. I dodged the floating ice
as well as I could and kept turning the cakes over and over, looking
for my duck, but it was not there. It was not till I climbed ashore
again and dressed myself with chattering teeth that, happening to
look under the bank where the current had cut the earth away, I saw
it sitting composedly on the little shelving beach below. I can feel
now the throbbing of my heart as I leaned over, and reaching down with
infinite stealth, caught it by the neck and yanked it up. The pride of
that homeward procession with the head of the duck flapping from my
game-bag! And then, after all, the cook had to wring its neck. In my
joy I had forgotten to kill it. The shot had only stunned it.
If fish ran low in our own river because of the swans taking more
than their share, we could go to Konge-aaen (the King’s River), four
or five miles away, where there were jumping fish which an Englishman
came across the North Sea every year to catch with flies. This to us
was a very amazing thing, and quite like an Englishman: to angle with
a bit of hen feather, or even a grasshopper, when there were fine fat
worms to be had for the digging. Really, if the truth be told, it was
a rank imposition on the fish. I confess that it seems to me so even
yet--not exactly a square deal. The Englishman did not discourage this
attitude on our part. He went right on, and for years had a monopoly
of the salmon in the stream. For we did them little damage. Once in a
while very large salmon were speared by those living along the stream.
More frequently a farmer haying in his field spitted a sturgeon on
his pitchfork. Then there was a fight, the accounts of which we boys
listened to with breathless interest when the fish was brought to town.
Always it seemed to me to hark back to the days we so loved to dream
of; for the sturgeon was all clad in mail, as it were, just like the
knights of old, and it was often a question whether the fish would come
ashore or the man go into the brook. At least that was the way he told
it. If the fish said nothing, it looked grim enough to make you believe
almost anything.
But if one did not run to fishing,--though what healthy boy does
not?--there was the heath, and then the forest. Forest sounds big. All
there was of it was a patch of woodland some twenty or twenty-five
acres in extent, but to us in the mellow autumn days it was an
enchanted forest indeed. For under the gnarled oaks, only survivors
of the sturdy giants that had once covered the land, as the names of
half the villages bore witness, and had filled the seas with the bold
vikings’ ships, was a wilderness of hazel bushes that was the special
preserve of the Latin School boys on Saturday afternoons, or when we
had “month’s leave.” Month’s leave was an afternoon off, which the
school might choose itself once a month, if it had been good. Then a
committee of the oldest boys went to the Rector with the observation
that it was a fine day for play, while the rest of us stood with
beating hearts, and if the gout did not pinch him just then, he would
say, “Yes! be off,” and with a mighty shout we would run for our botany
boxes and crooked sticks, and for the woods, if it was in autumn.
The boxes were to hold the nuts; the crooked sticks served a double
purpose. They were for walking-staffs on the homeward way, for the
forest was three miles away; once there, they were indispensable to
hook down the branches with. The hazel bushes grew in the twilight of
the woods, much as dogwood grows with us, and were mostly big enough
to climb, but the nuts were on the farthest twigs, that could only be
reached and stripped by pulling them down. That was fine fun, with
enough tumbles to make it exciting, and a very substantial reward
if judgment were used in the picking. The supply so laid in often
lasted past Christmas, and we had little else. Walnuts were too dear.
Chestnuts we did not know at all, not the eatable kind. The other, the
horse-chestnut, made fine ammunition when, in autumn, we played “robber
and soldier.” The winter storms that drove in wreckage from the Gulf
Stream strewed our coast, indeed, with Brazil-nuts, sometimes whole
ship loads of them, but they were good only for making bonfires. The
sea or something else had cracked them. There was not a kernel in one
of them.
It does not seem to me that life could be worth much in the Latin
School without those nutting expeditions. And so, when I went there
with my own boys, and after wading through the old bog where the stork
stalked up and down fishing for frogs, we came to the cool shade of
the forest and found it hedged in with cheeky American barbed wire and
signs up warning intruders off, my spirit rose in instant rebellion.
This was a double disgrace not to be borne. And once back again in the
land of freedom I planned to defeat that wretched barbed-wire fence.
Not only must it go, but the forest itself must belong to the Latin
School, or else the undisputed right to go nutting there forever; and
while I had it in mind I thought I saw a way to drive in the edge of
democracy by vesting the control of it in the boys, with the proviso
that at least once a year they should invite the public school boys to
be their guests there. In my day they fought at the drop of a hat; the
recollection of the bitter feud between them stirs my blood even now
when I think of it. But alas for the best-laid plans of mice and men!
I was told, when I moved to the attack, that times had changed; that
school was dismissed at two o’clock, not at five, nowadays, and that
therefore month’s leave as we knew it had gone out of existence; that
Latin School and “plebs” were part of the same system, hence the strife
of the old times had ceased; and that anyhow boys rode cycles and made
century runs and such things, where we went nutting. Truly, the times
do change. I am glad I was a boy then, if I am a back number now.
[Illustration: PICKING RÄVLINGER IN THE MOOR.]
Maybe they ride right through the heath on their senseless runs, and
don’t stop to pick Rävlinger. If they do, I am done; I have nothing
more to say. Rävlinger are the little black berries that grow on the
creeping heather in the sterile moor, quite like our blueberries, only
there are many more of them. Very likely you would think them sour; we
thought them heavenly, and there is enough of the boy left in me to
back up that opinion to-day against the riper judgment of the years.
We gathered them by the bucketful, paying little heed to the heath
farmer’s warning not to touch them after midsummer night, for then
the devil had greased his boots with them, and came home with black
faces and hands and terrible tales of the “worms”--_i.e._ snakes--we
had encountered in the heath. And, indeed, there are enough of these
poisonous reptiles there yet. But, now as then, a fellow can keep out
of their way. Some of the dearest recollections of my boyhood are
of the long tours I made through this lonesome moor, where a rare
shepherd knitting his woollen stocking and a gypsy’s cart are often the
only “humans” one meets in a day’s journey. Met, I should have said,
perhaps, for in another generation even the moor will be a thing of
the past. Already half of the six hundred thousand acres of heath land
in the Danish peninsula has been planted with seedling pine, American
pine, that has grown up finely, and a great and salutary change has
been wrought, no doubt. But if there is to be a day without moor,
without heather, without the sweet honey the bees gathered there when
the broom was purple, and without Rävlinger, I--well, I am glad I was a
boy when I was.
Which brings to my mind an adventure of one of my lonely trips in the
heath. This one went far, extending over a whole vacation week. I
had come at the end of a long summer day to an inn, where they gave
me a big box-bed to sleep in; and I had barely got into it when a lot
of scratching under me made me aware that a family of rats shared my
couch. But I was too sleepy to care; we snuggled up together and did
one another no harm in the night. I remember it because of the terror
it caused my mother when she heard of it. She had a great dread of
rats. It was on that same trip that, coming to the shore, I supped at a
fisherman’s hut on smoked dogfish and thought it the finest I had ever
tasted. I was a boy and hungry. But I do not know why it should not be
good. The dogfish I am thinking of are the small sharks that infest the
North Sea coast in great numbers. They ate the flesh and sold the skin
for sandpaper in those days. It was scratchy and did very well for that
purpose.
The Seem woods, where we went nutting, covered, as I said, but a little
patch, but a dozen miles to the eastward there were real forests, in
which a boy might get lost; and there were deer in them, which made
a picnic there ever so exciting. That had to be engineered by the
grown-ups, for it meant impressing practically the entire rolling stock
of the town for the day. Then its half-dozen ancient Holsteiners,
yellow-wheeled open wagons with seats for eight or a dozen, pulled
up early in the Square, where all upper-tendom was waiting with much
provender to board them for Gram. Many were the dubious headshakes
of those who were left behind as to the promises of the weather. The
wind was in the east, and the clouds prophesied rain. They did that
regularly, and they kept their promise at least half the time. It was
sometimes a bedraggled crowd that made cover at sunset. But if even
half the day was fair, it paid well for the trip. The change from the
barren, rather stern outlook from the Old Town, where the sea-wind
stunted tree and thicket so that it always sloped down to nothing in
the west as if some giant scythe had trimmed it so, to the beech woods
with their shelter and quiet and their luxury of color and vegetation,
was very alluring. While our elders took tea at the forester’s, where
the tea-urn was always simmering, expecting company, and duly admired
the furniture in the Countess’s drawing-room at the Château, we boys
organized a mighty hunt for boar and bear, and sometimes were lucky
enough to start a roebuck. Then, indeed, was the hunt a success, and
our minds were stocked for many a day to come with stuff for day-dreams.
There was enough of that lying all about, for field and heath were
dotted with the cairns that covered the ashes of the bold vikings. Off
to the northeast from Gram, buried in a thicket of scrub-oak where
once had been deep forest, lay a large boulder, twice as high as a
big man, that always seemed to me to span the thousand years between
the old days and ours as no dry books could. Stones are not common
in that country; this one had come down from Norwegian mountains on
an ice-floe in ages long past. But no geological speculation chained
our imagination to it. It had a story of its own. Harald Blaatand,
grandfather of Knud (Canute) the Great, had chosen it to put over the
grave of his mother, Queen Thyra, and was hauling it across the country
with an army of oxen and thralls, when word came that his son had risen
against him to take the kingdom. He dropped it there to take up arms,
and there it had been since. The top of it was split open. The priest
in a neighboring parish had tried, a hundred years before, to quarry
it for his parsonage, but like King Harald was halted before he had
gone far. What was the matter with the parsons in those days, I cannot
imagine. When they opened the graves of King Valdemar and Queen Dagmar,
of whom I have told elsewhere, they found her tomb a jumble of broken
brick and rubbish. A priest attached to the church, to make a nice
roomy burial-place for himself, had calmly cut into the resting-place
of Denmark’s best-beloved queen, throwing the bones he found there
to the scrap-heap. A hundred years and over, the skull of the gentle
Dagmar, which some one had picked up, lay about the church and was then
carried off by a thief. A gold cross the queen had worn was saved,
having “value” in the eyes of the vandals, and in the course of time
found its way into the possession of the government and into the museum
of antiquities, where it now is, its most precious relic.
[Illustration: DAGMAR’S DESPOILED TOMB.]
“Holme week” was the great time of the year for us all. It came late
in July, when the hay was all in and we got our fishing-tackle out;
for the hay was the great crop thereabouts, and until it had been cut
it was not a good thing to be caught by the farmer wading through
his meadows. Out toward the sea the river made a great bend, and in
it, near its mouth, lay a stretch of marshland where the grass grew
exceeding rich and sweet. This was the “Holme,”[12] which in the
thirteenth century had been given to the town by the King in return for
its building a wall around Ribe the better to defend it. The wall was
never built, though they got so far as digging a ditch, but they kept
the land, and after the Reformation divided it up among themselves,
to their great gain. When now the last of the hay had been cut and
stacked, the Old Town went a-picnicking, bag and baggage. Those who
could afford it drove out; those who couldn’t walked, or sailed, or
rowed out, depending on a lift from the tide to help them back. And
all of them had hampers or baskets, filled to the brim. There is no
occasion that I know of in Denmark when these are left behind. There,
on the meadow that was like a smooth, green-carpeted floor, they
sported and ran and tumbled, pelting one another with hay, children and
grown-ups together, all day. I never knew who paid for the hay, or if
it was just a contribution to the general good-will of the time, but
no one ever put a damper on our fun. The climax of it for us boys was
always the attack on the Fold, a kind of fort on the meadow into which
the cattle were driven in case of flood. The Fold had earth walls and a
living hedge, and to roll off that wall with a bloody nose, or better
still, to climb over it and give the other fellow one, was enough to
make any boy feel like a real hero, especially with the girls looking
on and showing great concern.
When the sun set over the meadows and we came back from our campaign,
tired and sore, supper was spread on the grass beside a comfortable
hay-stack, and it was good. There is nothing anywhere half so good to
eat when you are hungry as the Danish Smörrebröd, particularly the kind
they make in Ribe. Only, I guess, you’ve got to have a boy’s stomach,
for you will want to eat it all, and the last time I did--well, never
mind! I will lay that up against my American training. It never
happened when I was a boy but once; that was when a ship had been
wrecked with a cargo of Messina raisins, and the man who had bought it
saw us snooping around where he had laid those raisins out to dry on
great tarpaulins and told us we might eat as many as we liked. We did,
and ouch! let me forget it. I sure thought I was going to die.
In the gloaming they lit tallow candles set in beer bottles in the
dancing tent, and to the tune of an old cracked fiddle everybody had
a turn on the sod with everybody else. If there were classes and
distinctions in the Old Town, there were none out there. The Bishop’s
wife or the Rector’s daughter danced with the shoemaker’s lad and had a
good time. The old ferry raft that was pulled from shore to shore with
a rope, plied back and forth over the river, carrying great loads of
hay one way, and bigger and bigger loads of merry-makers from the town,
for those were the midsummer nights when nobody kept account of time.
That was the Old Town’s real holiday. It came to an end with the third
Sunday, I think it was, in July, after which the cattle were turned in
to graze on the Holme and the herdsman was left in sole possession;
by no means a sinecure, for soon the North Sea gave warning that at any
moment his life and the safety of his charges might be at stake, if
they were outstripped in the race with the angry floods.
[Illustration: IN HOLME WEEK--THE OLD FERRY RAFT.]
But while the sea yet slumbered in summer sunshine we boys had our
shore days, and they were fine. Then we arose with the sun and walked
the four miles to the beach, which thereabouts is very flat and wide.
When the tide is out, there is a stretch of quite half a mile of white
sand to deep water. Over this the flood tide comes stealing in so
stealthily, yet so swiftly, that it takes a pretty good runner to get
to the land without very wet feet or worse, if he is caught far out by
the turn of the tide. We would sometimes bring home quite a store of
amber from these trips, and then little files would be busy for days
making hearts, sabots, and other trinkets for the girl each boy liked
best. Hearts were the most popular and also the easiest to fashion. We
made those things ourselves, and it was a sort of manual training not
to be despised.
“Treading” flounders was a unique kind of fishing that took a whole
day from earliest dawn, but sometimes turned up a bigger yield of fish
than one could carry home. A perfectly calm day was needed for that,
when there was no “wash.” The boys followed the outgoing tide, tramping
hard with bare feet in the soft sand and steering by the church on the
island out in the sea. When they had gone as far as they wanted, they
tramped back by another route, and then put in the long wait till the
tide had come in and was ebbing again, building fires, catching crabs,
or whatever they felt like. With the next ebb-tide came their harvest.
Following their tracks of the morning, they would find, wherever they
had made them deep enough, a little pool left by the receding waters,
and in each pool one or two, and sometimes three, flounders about the
size of my hand, very much like the Catalina sand dabs of the Pacific.
These they would unceremoniously heave into a sack they carried between
them, and before long it grew heavy with their catch. It seems that the
bottom of the North Sea is fairly covered with multitudes of these
fish, which served the islanders of that coast as both meat and bread.
They dried and toasted them, and served them with their afternoon
coffee, and you might look long for a better dish. I think of it often
as being quite like Tvebak[13] slightly salted, only better to my
youthful taste.
Out along the river mouth was famous hunting for water-fowl. In the
migrating season great flocks of duck alighted there, and geese and
every other kind of game that flies. I can hear yet the cry of the
sickle-billed curlew in those meadows. It prophesied rain, we said, and
the promise was usually kept. When I was a big boy, the first telegraph
line was built to the Old Town, and that autumn an odd thing happened.
Morning after morning dozens of shore-birds were found dead under the
wires. We thought first that the electric current had slain them as
they roosted on the wires; but as it was apparent that some of them
couldn’t roost that way, a better explanation was sought and found.
They had been killed flying against the wires. It seems that they were
strung just at the height at which they flew. It is clear to me that
birds have some power of reasoning, for after a while we found no more
dead. Evidently they had learned to fly higher, or lower perhaps.
Once or twice in autumn, on their way south, great flights of
kramsfowl, a bird highly esteemed by the cook, roosted in the Plantage,
a little grove just outside of town. Just when that would be, no one
could tell, but for weeks after the leaves began to turn some of us set
our snares,--a willow bough bent in a triangle, with horse-hair loops
in each of the uprights, and baited with rowan-berries below. The bird
would sit and swing in the triangle, and, bending to get at the berries
under its feet, would put its head through one or both of the loops and
be strangled. Morning after morning we would sneak out before breakfast
to look to our snares and come home empty-handed. Then some brisk
morning, when the first touch of frost was in the air, we would drag
such loads of the big black birds into town that there would be talk
of it for days. Every sick person we knew had a feast, and we felt that
we were mighty hunters indeed.
[Illustration: CRUISING UP TO THE SEEM CHURCH.]
So there was no lack of sport in the Old Town, and I haven’t begun to
tell you of it all. In the winter there was the river that was then
dammed back and became a great frozen lake five or six miles long.
Then we would strap on our skates good and tight for a long trip,
and go cruising up from the Kannegrove,[14] the big ditch down by the
Cloister, to the Seem church, clear at the further end, and, spreading
our jackets out, let the wind use them as sails on the run back. I tell
you we came down in a hurry. No time for fancy skating then. But a
mighty sharp lookout had to be kept on that trip, for if a skate slid
into a crack there was a wrench and a fall, and it was apt to be a bad
one. When the snow lay deep, there was such coasting as you do not
often find. For though the country was flat as a pancake, the Castle
Hill was there with its deep moat. Almost clear up on the other side
the rush would fetch you. I haven’t seen a better coasting hill in New
England. But, on the other hand, I must own that American boys are “up”
on steering to an extent we didn’t dream of. The “leg out” is a Yankee
invention, and it is great. We just slid.