Jacob A. Riis

“ Blowing in the Yule from the grim old tower that had stood eight hundred years against the blasts of the North Sea was one of the customs of the Old Town that abide, however it fares with the Nisse; that I know. At sun-up, while yet the people were at breakfast, the town band climbed the many steep ladders to the top of the tower, and up there, in fair weather or foul,—and sometimes it blew great guns from the wintry sea,—they played four old hymns, one to each corner of the compass, so that no one was forgotten. ”

“ Then the sun shone always in summer, the autumn days were ever mellow as the ripened nuts we shook from the hazel bushes, and in winter we skated from Christmas until the March winds woke the slumbering spring. At least so it seems to me now. They tell me that this generation of boys has almost forgotten the art of skating; that they do not know how to cut the figure 8, or the name of the girl they like best, in the ice, because [Pg 230] there is no ice more than half the time; that in summer they have to hurry so between showers that all the fun is gone out of the haying. ”

“ 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. [Pg 187] 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. ”

“ I saw them walk up the broad aisle of the Domkirke together, followed by many brave knights and fair ladies, and before the altar they knelt and were blest by the venerable priest who had held the King in his arms at his christening. The bells of the thirteen churches and chapels in the town were rung, and masses were said for the twain at their altars. And I heard many a wassail drunk at the wedding-feast in the great halls of the castle and in the thronged streets of the town, where torches burned from sundown to sunrise and the people made merry through the long summer nights. ”

“ Wax candles are the only real thing for a Christmas tree, candles of wax that mingle their perfume with that of the burning fir, not the by-product of some coal-oil or other abomination. What if the boughs do catch fire; they can be watched, and too many candles are tawdry, anyhow. Also, red apples, oranges, and old-fashioned cornucopias made of colored paper, and made at home, look a hundred times better and fitter in the green; and so do drums and toy trumpets and wald-horns, and a rocking-horse reined up in front that need not have cost forty dollars, or anything like 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the young it was a joyous picnic; and many a time their laughter in the quiet streets, where ghosts walked in broad daylight to our sight at every turn, made us stop and listen wistfully. For in the Old Town nothing was changed. The stork stood one-legged upon the peak of the red-tiled roof, holding majestically aloof from the ways of men; and in the doorway the swallow hatched her young as of old. There was the broken pane in the transom I knew so well, to let her in, the right of way for which she paid in coin of sweetest song. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Where the cows had been pastured, suddenly [Pg 248] there was water, and the royalties turned out, eager to see the famed “storm-flood.” But the wind died down, and the cows went back to their own. Night found the Old Town in a blaze of light. In every window of every house stood lighted candles; the river was alive with boats carrying colored lanterns and joyous singers. Above it all a black cloud of bewildered rooks flew with loud squawks from the old Cloister to the Dom and back again, frightened out of their night’s rest, and thinking, no doubt, that the end of the world had come. ”

“ When I was in the Latin School, a cranky burgomaster, whose door had been freshly painted, gave orders to the watchmen to stop it and gave them an unhappy night, for they were hard put to it to find a way it was safe to look, with the streets full of the best citizens in town, and their [Pg 101] wives and daughters, sneaking singly by with bulging coats on their way to salute a friend. That was when our mothers—those who were not out smashing in New Year—came out strong, after the fashion of mothers. They baked more doughnuts than ever that night, and beckoned the watchman in to the treat ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 8] 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 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. ”

“ Christopher, who took the sceptre last, was poisoned by a monk in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the Domkirke; and in the division of the kingdom between the brothers that gave cause for their quarrels, began Denmark’s woes, which in our own day culminated in her dismemberment, when Germany took Slesvig, Abel’s dukedom. Queen Bengerd herself was the worst-hated woman in Danish history, as Dagmar is yet the best-beloved. In death the people’s hatred would not let her rest. ”

“ In this last the loser had his nose blackened with the snuff from the candle until advancing civilization substituted a burnt cork. Christmas without pepper-nuts would have been a hollow mockery indeed. We rolled the dough in long strings like slender eels and then cut it, a little on the bias. They were good, those nuts, when baked brown. I wish I had some now.
It all stood for the universal desire that in the joyous season everybody be made glad. I know that in the Old Town no one went hungry or cold during the holidays, if indeed any one ever did. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a prime article of faith with the Danes to this day that for any one to go out of a friend’s house, or of anybody’s house, in the Christmas season without partaking of its cheer, is to “bear away their Yule,” which no one must do on any account. Every house was a bakery from the middle of December until Christmas Eve, and oh! the quantities of cakes we ate, and such cakes! We were sixteen normally, in our home, and Mother mixed the dough for her cakes in a veritable horse-trough kept for that exclusive purpose. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One peasant, come to town to see the show, was halted by Prince Frederik in the market square, as was I, and greeted as an old comrade. They had been recruits together in one regiment; for the royal princes in Denmark have to serve in the ranks with their fellow-citizens. They are not made generals at birth. In Copenhagen I was told that the Prince kept tab on all that went on in the Rigsdag, and the man without convictions dreaded nothing so much as his long memory. ”

“ So he hit upon a contrivance, a sort of lever under the roost, which, when the hens jumped upon it, opened the hives and let the bees out. After that he could lie in bed and laugh while his husbandry went on. He was the only inventor I ever knew the Old Town to turn out, unless you count in the telegrapher who came when the wires had been strung to our coast. He was a lonesome, morose man, fond of taking long walks by himself. On one of his tramps a vagrant dog attached itself to him, and the two became friends. ”

“ 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 [Pg 161] 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. ”

“ But the river divides us no longer, and though the shadows lengthen and the frost is upon our heads, into our hearts it cannot come. Hand in hand, we look trustfully across to that farther shore, to the land of the rising sun where we shall find what we vainly seek here: our youth in the long ago. ”

“ She did the crying of fish and meat in the market, and such like, or if any one had lost anything. He, having been once a soldier, did the honors on ceremonial occasions, as when a fat steer, or a horse, was to be killed [Pg 63] at the butcher’s, good horse-meat being neither unwelcome on the poor man’s table, nor unpalatable either. Then he led the procession through the town, proclaiming between rolls of his drum the virtues of the victim that stalked after, adorned with ribbons and flowers. The steer never took any interest in the proceedings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 16] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. [Pg 225] I tried to buy it; I offered two hundred kroner for it, which was a small fortune to the Old Town. ”

“ 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. ”