Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

ENCYCLICALS OF A TRAVELLER.

I.

Dear People,—We had a fine send-off from Christiania. The landlord of the Scandinavie sent up to know if we would do him the honor to drive down to the steamer in his private carriage. Katrina delivered the message with exultant eyes. "You see," she said, "he likes to show dat he do not every day get such in de house." We sent word back that we should consider ourselves most honored; and so when we went downstairs, there stood a fine landau open, with bouquets lying on the seats, and a driver in livery; and the landlord himself in the doorway, and the landlord's wife, who had sent us the bouquets, Katrina said, peering from behind the curtains. When she saw Katrina pointing her out, she threw the curtains back and appeared full in view, smiling and waving her hand; we lifted up our bouquets, and waved them to her, and smiled our thanks. Katrina sprang up, with my cloak on her arm, to the coachman's seat. "I tink I go down too," she exclaimed, "I see you all safe;" and so we drove off, with as much smiling and bowing and "fare-welling" as if we had been cousins and aunts of everybody in the Scandinavie. How we did hate to leave our great corner rooms, with five windows in them, the fifth window being across the corner, which is not a right-angled corner, but like a huge bay-window! This utilization of the corner is a very noticeable feature in the streets of Christiania. In the greater part of the best houses the corner is cut off in this way; the door into the room being across the opposite corner (also cut off), thus making a six-sided room. The improvement in the street-fronts of handsome blocks of buildings made by this shape instead of the usual rectangular corner is greater than would be supposed, and the rooms made in this fashion are delightfully bright, airy, and out of the common.

I did not quite fancy sailing in a steamer named "Balder,"—one gets superstitious in Norway,—but I think we had flowers enough on board to have saved us if Loki herself had wished us ill. Nothing in all Norway is more striking than the Norwegian's love of flowers. It is no exaggeration to say that one does not see a house without flowers in the window. In the better houses every window in the front, even up to the little four-paned window in the gable, has its row of flower-pots; and even in the very poorest hovels there will be at least one window flower-filled. This general love and culture of flowers makes it the most natural thing in the world for the Norwegian, when he travels, to be carrying along something in the shape of a plant. He is either taking it home or carrying it as a gift to some one he is going to visit. I have not yet been on a steamboat where I did not see at least a dozen potted plants, of one sort or another, being carefully carried along, as hand luggage, by men or women; and as for bouquets, they are almost as common as hats and bonnets. Of the potted plants, five out of seven will be green myrtles, and usually the narrow leaf. There is a reason for this,—the Norwegian bride, of the better class, wears always a chaplet of green myrtle, and has her white veil trimmed with little knots of it from top to bottom. The chaplet is made in front somewhat after the shape of the high gilded crowns worn by the peasant brides; but at the back it is simply a narrow wreath confining the veil. After I knew this, I looked with more interest at the pots of myrtle I met everywhere, journeying about from place to place; and I observed, after this, what I had not before noticed, that every house had at least one pot of myrtle in its windows.

There were a dozen different varieties of carnations in our bouquets. The first thing I saw as we moved off from the wharf was a shabbily dressed little girl with a big bouquet entirely of carnations, in which there must have been many more. In a few minutes a woman, still shabbier than the little girl, came down into the cabin with a great wooden box of the sort that Norwegian women carry everything in, from potatoes up to their church fineries: it is an oval box with a little peak at each end like a squirrel cage; the top, which has a hole in the middle, fits down around these peaks so tight that the box is safely lifted by this handle; and, as I say, everything that a Norwegian woman wants to carry, she puts into her tine (pronounced, "teener"). Some of them are painted in gay colors; others are left plain. Setting down the box, she opened it, and proceeded to sprinkle with water one of the most beautiful wreaths I have ever seen,—white lilies, roses, and green myrtle. I think it came from a wedding; but as she knew no English, and I no Norwegian, I could not find out. Two nights and a day she was going to carry it, however, and she sprinkled it several times a day. An hour later, when I went down into the cabin, there was a row of bouquets filling the table under the looking-glass; five pots of flowers standing on the floor, and in several staterooms whose doors were standing open I saw still more of both bouquets and plants. This is only a common illustration of the universal custom. It is a beautiful one, and in thorough keeping with the affectionate simplicity of the Norwegian character.

Christiania looked beautiful as we sailed away. It lies in the hollow, or rather on the shore rim of the fine amphitheatre of hills which makes the head of the Christiania Fjord. Fjord is a much more picturesque word than bay; and I suppose when a bay travels up into the heart of a country scores of miles, slips under several narrow strips of land one after the other, making lakes between them, it is entitled to be called something more than plain bay; but I wish it had been a word easier to pronounce. I never could say "fjord," when I read the word in America; and all that I have gained on the pronouncing of it by coming to Norway is to become still more distinctly aware that I always pronounce it wrong. I do not think Cadmus ever intended that j should be y, or that one should be called on to pronounce f before it.

The Christiania Fjord has nothing of grandeur about it, like the wilder fjords on the west coast of Norway. It is smiling and gracious, with beautifully rounded and interlocking hills,—intervals of pine woods, with green meadows and fields, pretty villages and hamlets, farm-houses and country-seats, and islands unnumbered, which deceive the eye continually, seeming to be themselves the shore. We left Christiania at two o'clock; at that hour the light on a Norway summer day is like high noon in other parts of the world,—in fact, it's noon till four o'clock in the afternoon, and then it is afternoon till ten, and then a good, long, very light twilight to go to bed by at eleven or twelve, and if you want to get up again at three o'clock in the morning you can wake without any trouble, for it is broad daylight: all of which is funny for once or twice, or perhaps for ten times, but not for very long.

It was not till four or five o'clock that we began to see the full beauty of the fjord; then the sun had gone far enough over to cast a shadow,—soften all the forest tops on the west side, and cast shadows on the east side. The little oases of bright green farm-lands, with their clusters of houses, seemed to sink deeper and deeper into their dark pine-tree settings,—the fjord grew wider and wider, and was as smooth as a lake: now and then we drew up by a little village and half stopped,—it seemed no more than that,—and somebody would climb on or off the steamer by little cockles of boats that bobbed alongside. Sometimes we came to a full stop, and lay several minutes at a wharf, loading or unloading bags of grain. I think we took on just as many as we took off,—like a game of bean-bags between the villages. The sailors carried them off and on their backs, one set standing still in their places to lift the bags up on their comrades' backs; they lifted with a will, and then folded their arms and waited till the bag-carriers came back to be loaded up again. If I could have spoken Norwegian, I should have asked whether those sets of men took turn and turn about, or whether one set always lifted up the loads and the others lugged them,—probably the latter. That's the way it is in life; but I never saw a more striking example of it than in the picture these sailors made standing with folded arms doing nothing, waiting till their fellows came back again to be loaded down like beasts of burden. It was at "Moss" we saw this,—a pretty name for a little town with a handful of gay-colored houses, red, yellow, and white, set in green fields and woods. Women came on board here with trays of apples and pears to sell,—little wizened pears red high up on one side, like some old spinsters' cheeks in New England. Children came too, with cherries tied up in bunches of about ten to a bunch; they looked dear, but it was only a few hundredths of a quarter of a dollar that they cost. Since I have found out that a kroner is only about twenty-seven cents, and that it takes one hundred ore to make a kroner, all the things that cost only a few ore seem to me so ridiculously cheap as not to be worth talking about. These children with the cherries were all barefoot, and they were so shy that they curled and mauled their little brown toes all the time they were selling their cherries, just as children one shade less shy twist and untwist their fingers.

We left Moss by a short cut, not overland exactly, but next door to it,—through land. The first thing we knew we were sailing through a bridge right into the town, in a narrow canal,—we could have thrown an apple into the windows of some of the houses as we glided by; then in a few moments out we were again into the broad open fjord.

At six o'clock we went down to our first Danish supper. The "Balder" is a Danish boat, and sailed by a Danish captain, and conducted on Danish methods; and they pleased us greatly. The ordinary Norwegian supper is a mongrel meal of nobody knows how many kinds of sausage, raw ham, raw smoked salmon, sardines, and all varieties of cheese. The Danish we found much better, having the addition of hot fish, and cutlets, and the delicious Danish butter. One good result of Denmark's lying low, she gets splendid pasturage for her cows, and makes a delicious butter, which brings the highest prices in the English and other markets.

When we came up from supper we found ourselves in a vast open sea; dim shores to be seen in the east and west,—in the east pink and gray, in the west dark with woods. The setting sun was sinking behind them, and its yellow light etched every tree-top on the clear sky. Here and there a sail gleamed in the sun, or stood out white in the farther horizon. A pink halo slowly spread around the whole outer circumference of the water; and while we were looking at this, all of a sudden we were not in an open sea at all, but in among islands again, and slowly coming to a stop between two stretches of lovely shore,—big solid green fields like America's on one side, and a low promontory of mossy rocks on the other. A handful of houses, with one large and conspicuous one in the centre, stood between the green fields and the shore. A sign was printed on this house in big letters; and as I was trying to spell it out, a polite Norwegian at my elbow said, "Shoddy factory! We make shoddy there; we call it so after the English," bowing flatteringly as if it were a compliment to the English. Kradsuld is Norwegian for shoddy, and sounds worlds more respectable, I am sure.

The roof of this shoddy factory had four dormer windows in it, with their tiled roofs running up full width to the ridge-pole, which gave the roof the drollest expression of being laid in box-plaits. I wish somebody would make a series of photographs of roofs in Norway and Denmark. They are the most picturesque part of the scenery; and as for their "sky-line," it is the very poetry of etching. I thought I had seen the perfection of the beauty of irregularity in the sky-line in Edinburgh; but Edinburgh roofs are monotonous and straight in comparison with the huddling of corners and angles in Scandinavian gables and ridges and chimneys and attics. Add to this freaky and fantastic and shifting shape the beauty of color and of fine regularity of small curves in the red tile, and you have got as it were a mid-air world of beauty by itself. As I was studying out the points where these box-plaited dormer windows set into their roof, the same polite Norwegian voice said to a friend by his side, "I have read it over twenty-five ones." He pronounced the word read as for the present indicative, which made his adverbs of time at the end still droller. Really one of the great pleasures of foreign travel is the English one hears spoken; and it is a pleasure for which we no doubt render a full equivalent in turn when we try speaking in any tongue except our own. But it is hard to conceive of any intelligible English French or German being so droll as German or French English can be and yet be perfectly intelligible. Polite creatures that they all are, never to smile when we speak their language!

As the sun sank, the rosy horizon-halo gathered itself up and floated about in pink fleeces; the sky turned pale green, like the sky before dawn. Latitude plays strange pranks with sunsets and sunrises. Norway, I think, must be the only place in the world where you could mistake one for the other; but it is literally true that in Norway it would be very easy to do so if you happened not to know which end of the day it was.

When we went down into our staterooms sorrow awaited us. To the eye the staterooms had been most alluring. One and all, we had exclaimed that never had we seen so fine staterooms in a Norwegian steamboat. All the time we were undressing we eyed with complacency the two fine red sofas, on one of which we were to sleep. Strangely enough, no one of us observed the shape of the sofa, or thought to try the consistency of it. Our experiences, therefore, were nearly simultaneous, and unanimous to a degree, as we discovered afterwards on comparing notes. The first thing we did on lying down on our bed was to roll off it. Then we got up and on again, and tried to get farther back on it. As it was only about the width of a good-sized pocket-handkerchief, and rounded up in the middle, this proved to be impossible. Then we got up and tried to pull it out from the wall. Vain! It was upholstered to the board as immovable as the stack-pipe of the boat. Then we tried once more to adjust ourselves to it. Presently we discovered that it was not only narrow and rounding, but harder than it would have seemed possible that anything in shape of tufted upholstered velvet could be. We began to ache in spots; the ache spread: we ached all over; we could neither toss, twist, nor turn on the summit of this narrow tumulus. Misery set in; indignation and restlessness followed; seasickness, in addition, seemed for once a trifle. The most indefatigable member of the party, being also the most fatigued, succeeded at last in procuring a half-dozen small square pillows,—one shade less hard than the sofa, she thought when she first lay down on them, but long before morning she began to wonder whether they were not even harder. Such a night lingers long in one's memory; it was a closing chapter to our experience of Norwegian beds,—a fitting climax, if anything so small could be properly called a climax. How it has ever come about that the Norwegian notion of a bed should be so restricted, I am at a loss to imagine. They are simply child's cribs,—no more; as short as narrow, and in many instances so narrow that it is impossible to turn over quickly in them without danger. I have again and again been suddenly waked, finding myself just going over the edge. The making of them is as queer as the size. A sort of bulkhead small mattress is slipped in under the head, lifting it up at an angle admirably suited to an asthmatic patient who can't breathe lying down, or to a small boy who likes to coast down-hill in his bed of a morning. The single pillow is placed on this; the short, narrow sheet flung loosely over it; blanket, ditto; coverlet, ditto—it may or may not be straight or smooth. The whole expression of the bed is as if it had been just hastily smoothed up temporarily till there should be time enough to make it. In perfect good faith I sent for a chambermaid one night, in the early days of my Norway journey, and made signs to her that I would like to have my bed made, when the poor thing had already made it to the very best of her ability, and entirely in keeping with the customs of her country.

It is very needless to say that we all were up early the next morning; and there was something ludicrous enough in the tone in which each inquired eagerly of each, "Did you ever know such beds?" At ten we were anchored off the little town of Frederikssund; and here the boat lay five mortal hours, doing nothing but unloading and taking on bags of bran.

Another big steamer was lying alongside, doing the same thing. This was our first glimpse of Denmark. Very flat it looked,—just out of water, and no more,—like Holland. The sailors who were carrying the bags of bran wore queer pointed hoods on their heads, with long, tail-like pieces coming down behind, which made them look like elves,—at least it did for the first hour; after that they no longer looked queer. If we had gone on shore, we could have seen the Royal Estate of Iaegerspriis, which has belonged to kings of Denmark ever since the year 1300, and has a fine park, and a house decorated by sculptures by Wiedewelt,—a Danish sculptor of the last century,—and an old sepulchre which dates back to the stone age, and, best of all, a great old oak, called the King's Oak, which is the largest in Denmark, and dates back farther than anybody will know till it dies. A tree is the only living thing which can keep the secret of its own age, is it not? Nobody can tell within a hundred or two of years anything about it so long as the tree can hold its head up. The circumference of this tree is said to be forty-two feet four feet from the ground,—a pretty respectable tree, considering the size of Denmark itself. Now we begin to see where the old Vikings got the oak to build their ships. They carried it up from Denmark, which must have been in those days a great forest of beech and oak to have kept so many till now. It is only a few miles from Frederikssund, also, to Havelse, which is celebrated for its "kitchen middings,"—the archæological name for kitchen refuse which got buried up hundreds of years ago. Even potato parings become highly important if you keep them long enough! They will at least establish the fact that somebody ate potatoes at that date; and all things hang together so in this queer world that there is no telling how much any one fact may prove or disprove. For myself, I don't care so much for what they ate in those days as for what they wore,—next to what they did in the way of fighting and making love. I saw the other day, in Christiania, a whole trayful of things which were taken from a burial mound opened in Norway last spring. A Viking had been buried there in his ship. The hull was entire, and I have stood in it; but not even the old blackened hull, nor the oars, stirred me so much as the ornaments he and his horses had worn,—the bosses of the shields, and queer little carved bits of iron and silver which had held the harnesses together; one exquisitely wrought horse's head, only about two inches long, which must have been a beautiful ornament wherever it was placed. If there had been a fish-bone found left from his last dinner or from the funeral feast which the relations had at his wake, I should not have cared half so much for it. But tastes differ.

An afternoon more of sailing and another awful night on the red velvet ridges, and we came to Copenhagen itself, at five of the morning. At four we had thought it must be near,—long strips of green shore, with trees and houses,—so flat that it looked narrow, and seemed to unroll like a ribbon as we sailed by; but when we slipped into the harbor we saw the difference,—wharves and crowds of masts and warehouses, just like any other city, and the same tiresome farce of making believe examine your luggage. I should respect customs and custom-houses more if they did as they say they will do. As it is, to smuggle seems to me the easiest thing in the world as well as the most alluring. I have never smuggled because I have never had the means necessary to do it; but I could have smuggled thousands of dollars worth of goods, if I had had them, through every custom-house I have ever seen. A commissionnaire with a shining beaver hat stood on the shore to meet us, we having been passed on with "recommendations" from the kindly people of the Scandinavie in Christiania to the King of Denmark Hotel people in Copenhagen. Nothing is so comfortable in travelling as to be waited for by your landlord. The difference between arriving unlooked for and arriving as an expected customer is about like the difference between arriving at the house of a friend and arriving at that of an enemy. The commissionaire had that pathetic air of having seen better days which is so universal in his class. One would think that the last vocation in the world which a "decayed" gentleman would choose would be that of showing other gentlemen their way about cities; it is only to be explained by the same morbid liking to be tantalized which makes hungry beggars stand by the hour with their noses against the outside of the panes of a pastry-cook's window,—which they all do, if they can! Spite of our flaming "recommendations," which had preceded us from our last employer, the landlord of the Scandinavie, satisfactory rooms were not awaiting us. Sara Bernhardt was in town, and every hotel was crowded with people who had come for a night or two to see and hear her. It is wonderful how much room a person of her sort can take up in a city; and if they add, as she does, the aroma of a distinct and avowed disreputability, they take up twice as much room! Since her visit to England I wonder she does not add to her open avowal of disregard of all the laws and moralities which decent people hold in esteem, "By permission of the Queen," or "To the Royal Family."

But this is not telling you about Copenhagen. It was five o'clock when we landed, and before seven I had driven with the commissionnaire to each one of the four first-class hotels in Copenhagen in search of sunny rooms. None to be had! All four of the hotels were fully occupied, as I said, by Sara Bernhardt in some shape or other. So we made the best of the best we could do,—breakfasted, slept, lunched, and at two o'clock were ready to begin to see Copenhagen. At first we were disappointed, as in Christiania, by its modern look. It is a dreadful pity that old cities will burn down and be rebuilt, and that all cities must have such a monotony of repetitions of blocks of houses. By the end of another century there won't be an old city left anywhere in the world. There are acres of blocks of houses in Copenhagen to-day that might have been built anywhere else, and fit in anywhere else just as well as here. When you look at them a little more closely, you see that there are bits of terra-cotta work in friezes and pilasters and brackets here and there, which would not have been done anywhere except in the home of Thorwaldsen. If he had done nothing else for art than to stamp a refined and graceful expression on all the minor architectural decorations of his native city, that would have been worth while. There is not an architectural monstrosity in the city,—not one; and many of the buildings have an excellent tone of quiet, conventional decoration which is pleasing to the eye. The brick-work particularly is well done; and simple variations of design are effectively used. You see often recurring over doorways and windows terra-cotta reproductions of some of Thorwaldsen's popular figures; and they are never marred by anything fantastic or bizarre in cornice or moulding above or around them. Among the most noticeable of the modern blocks are some built for the dwellings of poor people. They are in short streets leading to the Reservoir, and having therefore a good sweep of air through them. They are but two stories and a half high, pale yellow brick, neatly finished; and each house has a tiny dooryard filled with flowers. There are three tenements to a house, each having three rooms. The expression of these rows of gay little yellow houses with red roofs and flower-filled dooryards and windows, and each doorway bearing its two or three signs of trade or artisanry, was enough to do one's heart good. The rents are low, bringing the tenements within easy reach of poor people's purses. Yet there is evidently an obligation—a certain sort of social standard—involved in the neighborhood which will keep it always from squalor or untidiness. I doubt if anybody would dare to live in those rows and not have flowers in his front yard and windows. For myself, I would far rather live in one of these little houses than in either of the four great palaces which make the Royal Square, Amalienborg, and look as much like great penitentiaries as like anything else,—high, bulky, unadorned gray piles, flat and straight walls, and tiresome, dingy windows, and the pavements up to their door-sills. They may be splendid the other side the walls,—probably are; but they are dreary objects to look at as you come home of an evening. The horse-cars are the most unique thing in the modern parts of Copenhagen. How two horses can draw them I don't see: but they do; and if two horses can draw two-story horse-cars, why don't we have them in America, and save such overcrowding? The horse-cars here not only have a double row of seats on top as they have in London, but they have a roof over those seats, which nearly doubles the apparent height. As they come towards you they look like a great square-cornered boat, with a long pilot-house on top. Of course they carry just double the number. Women never ride on the top; but men do not mind going upstairs outside a horse-car and sitting in mid-air above the heads of the crowd; and if two horses really are able to draw so many, it is a gain.

The one splendid sight in Copenhagen is its great dragon spire. This, one could stand and gaze at by the day. It is made of four dragons twisted together, heads down, tails up; heads pointing to the four corners of the earth; tails tapering and twisting, and twisting and tapering, till they taper out into an iron rod, which mounts still higher, with three gilded balls, and three wrought gilded circles on it, and finally ends in a huge gilded open-work weather-cock. This is on an old brick building now used as the Exchange. It was built early in 1600 by Christian IV., who seems to me to have done everything best worth doing that was ever done in Denmark. His monogram (

) is forever cropping out on all the splendid old things. They are enlarging this Exchange now; and the new red brick and glaring white marble make a very unpleasing contrast to the old part of the building, although every effort has been made to copy the style of it exactly. It is long, and not high, the wall divided into spaces by carved pilasters between every two windows. Each pilaster begins as a man or a woman,—arms cut off at the shoulders, breasts and shoulders looking from a distance grotesquely like four humps. Where the legs should begin, the trunk ends in a great gargoyle,—a lion's head, or a man's, or a bull's,—some grotesque, some beautiful; below this, a conventional tapering support. In the pointed arch of each of the lower windows, also a carved head, no two of them alike, many of them beautiful. It is a grand old building, and one might study it and draw from it by the week. Passing this and crossing an arm of the sea,—which, by the way, you are perpetually doing in Copenhagen to go anywhere, the sea never having fully made up its mind to abandon the situation,—you come to another quaint old building in the suburbs, called Christianshaven. This is Vor Frelser's Church (Our Saviour's Church), built only fifty years later than the Exchange. It is a dark red brick church, with tiny flat dormer windows let in and painted green on a shining tile roof; a square belfry; clock face painted red, black, and blue; above this, a spire, first six-sided and then round, 288 feet high, covered with copper, which is bright green in places, and wound round and round by a glittering gilded staircase, which goes to the very top and ends under a huge gilt ball, under which twelve people can stand. This also is a fine kind of spire to have at hand at sunset; it flames out like a ladder into the sky.

One more old church has a way up, which is worth telling, though you can't see it from the outside. This is another of that same Christian IV.'s buildings,—it was built for an observatory, and used for that for two hundred years, but then joined to a church. The tower is round, 115 feet high, 48 feet in diameter, and made of two hollow cylinders. Between these is the way up, a winding stone road, smooth and broad; and if you'll believe it, in 1716 that rascal Catherine of Russia actually drove up to the top of it in a coach and four, Peter going ahead on horseback. I walked up two of the turns of this stone roadway, and it made me dizzy to think what a clatter the five horses' hoofs must have made, with stone above, below, and around them; and what a place it would have been to have knocked brains out if the horses had been frightened! In this inside cylinder all the University treasures were hidden when the English bombarded the city in 1807, and a very safe place it must have been.

Opposite this church is still another of Christian IV.'s good works,—a large brick building put up for the accommodation of poor students at the University. One hundred poor students still have free lodgings in this building, but part of it looks as if its roof would fall in before long.

Along the arms of the sea which stretch into or across the city—for some of them go way through, come out, and join the outer waters again—are rows of high warehouses for grain, some seven and eight stories high. These have two-storied dormer windows, and terraced roofs, and a great beak like a ship's prow projecting from the ridge-pole of the dormer window. From this the grain is lowered and hoisted to and from the ships below. The ships lie crowded in these narrow arms, as in a harbor, and make picturesque lanes of mast-tops through the city. On many of them are hung great strings of flounders drying, festooned on cords, from rope to rope, scores of them on a single sloop. They look better than they smell; you could not spare them out of the picture.

The last thing we saw this afternoon was the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, which has just been put up in the great garden of Rosenborg Castle. This garden is generally called Kongen's Have ("The King's Garden"). It was planned by the good Christian, but contains now very little of his original design. Two splendid avenues of horse-chestnut trees and a couple of old bronze lions are all that is left as he saw it. It is a great place of resort for the middle classes with their children. A yearly tax of two kroners (about fifty cents) permits a family to take its children there every day; and I am sure there must have been two hundred children in sight as I walked up the dark dense shaded avenue of linden trees at the upper end of which sits the beloved Hans Christian, with the sunlight falling on his head. "The children come here every day," said the commissionnaire; "and that is the reason they put him here, so they can see him." He looked as if he also saw them. A more benignant, lifelike, tender look was never wrought in bronze. He sits, half wrapped in a cloak, his left hand holding a book carelessly on his knee, the right hand lifted as if in benediction of the children. The statue is raised a few feet on a plain pedestal, in a large oval bed of flowers: on one side the pedestal is carved the "Child and the Stork;" on the other, the group of ducks, with the "ugly" one in the middle,—pictures that every little child will understand and love to see; on the front is his name and a wreath of the bay he so well earned. Written above is,—

"PUT UP BY THE DANISH PEOPLE;"

and I thought as I stood there that he was more to be envied than Christian IV. with his splendors of art and architecture, or than the whole Danish dynasty, with their priceless treasures and their jewelled orders. And so ended our first day in Copenhagen.

The next morning, Sunday, I drove out to church in the island of Amager, of which that paradoxical compound of truth and falsehood, Murray, says: "It offers absolutely nothing of interest." I always find it very safe to go to places of which that is said. Amager is Copenhagen's vegetable garden. It is an island four miles square, and absolutely flat,—as flat as a piece of pasteboard; in fact, while I was driving on it, it seemed to me to bear the same relation to flatness that the Irishman's gun did to recoiling,—"If it recoiled at all, it recoiled forrards,"—so it was a very safe gun. If Amager is anything more or less than flat, it is bent inwards; for actually when I looked off to the water it seemed to be higher than the land, and the ships looked as if they might any minute come sailing down among the cabbages. Early in the sixteenth century it was filled up by Dutch people; and there they are to this day, wearing the same clothes and raising cabbages just as they did three hundred years ago. To reach Amager from Copenhagen, you cross several arms of the sea and go through one or two suburbs called by different names; but you would never know that you were not driving in Copenhagen all the time until you come out into the greenery of Amager itself. It was good luck to go of a Sunday. All the Dutch dames were out and about in their best, driving in carts and walking, or sitting in their doorways. The women were "sights to behold." The poorer ones wore shirred sunbonnets on their heads, made of calico, coming out like an old poke-bonnet in front, and with full capes which set out at a fly-away angle behind. They seemed to have got the conception of the cape from the arms of their own windmills (of which, by the way, there are several on the island; and their revolving arms add to the island's expression of being insecurely at sea!). Next below the sunbonnet came a gay handkerchief crossed on the breast, over a black gown with tight sleeves; a full bright blue apron, reaching half-way round the waist and coming down to within two inches of the bottom of the overskirt, completed their rig. It was droller than it sounds. Some of them wore three-cornered handkerchiefs pinned outside their poke-bonnets, pinned under their chins, and the point falling over the neck behind. These were sometimes plain colors, sometimes white, embroidered or trimmed with lace. The men looked exactly like any countrymen in England or Scotland or America. If we haven't an international anything else, we have very nearly an international costume for the masculine human creature; and it is as ugly and unpicturesque a thing as malignity itself could devise. The better class of women wore a plain black bonnet, made in the same poke shape as the sunbonnets, but without any cape at all on the back, only a little full crown tucked in, and the fronts coming round very narrow in the back of the neck, and tied there with narrow black ribbons. Don't fancy these were the only strings that held the roof in its place,—not at all. Two very broad strings, of bright blue, or red, or purple, as it might be, came from somewhere high up inside the front, and tied under the chin in a huge bow, so that their faces looked as if they had first been tied up in broad ribbon for the toothache, and then the huge bonnet put on outside of all. Strangely enough, the effect on the faces was not ugly. Old faces were sheltered and softened, double chins and scraggy necks were hid, and younger faces peered out prettily from under the scoop and among the folds of ribbon; and the absolute plainness of the bonnet itself, having no trimming save a straight band across the middle, gave the charm of simplicity to the outline, and vindicated the worth of that most emphatically when set side by side in the church pews with the modern bonnets,—all bunches and bows, and angles and tilts of feathers and flowers and rubbish generally.

The houses were all comfortable, and some of them very pretty. Low, long, chiefly of a light yellow straw, latticed off by dark lines of wood-work, some of them entirely matted with ivy, like cottages in the English lake district, all of them with either red-tiled or thatched roofs, and the greater part surrounded by hedges. The thatched roofs were delightful. The thatch is held on and fastened down at the ridge-pole by long bits of crooked wood, one on each side, the two crossing and lapping at the ridge-pole and held together there by pins. The effect of a long, low roof set thick with these cross-pieces at the top is almost as if dozens of slender fishes were set there with forked tails up in the air; and when half a dozen sparrows are flitting and alighting on these projecting points of board, the effect is of a still odder trimming. Some of the red-tiled roofs have a set pattern in white painted along the ridge-pole, corners, and eaves. These are very gay; and some of the thatched roofs are grown thick with a dark olive-green moss, which in a cross sunlight is as fine a color as was ever wrought into an old tapestry, and looks more like ancient velvet.

The church in Amager is new, brick, and ugly of exterior. But the inside is good; the wood-work, choir, pulpit, sounding-board, railings, pews, all carved in a simple conventional pattern, and painted dark-olive brown, relieved by claret and green,—in a combination borrowed no doubt from some old wood-work centuries back. In the centre a candelabra, hanging by a red cord, marked off by six gilded balls at intervals; the candelabra itself being simply a great gilded ball, with the simplest possible candle-holders projecting from it. Two high candle-holders inside the railing had each three brass candlesticks in the shape of a bird, with his long tail curled under his feet to stand on,—a fantastic design, but singularly graceful, considering its absurdity. The minister wore a long black gown and high, full ruff, exactly like those we see in the pictures of the divines of the Reformation times. He had a fine and serious face, of oval contour; therefore the ruff suited him. On short necks and below round faces it is simply grotesque, and no more dignified than a turkey-cock's ruffled feathers. He preached with great fervor and warmth of manner; but as I could not understand a word he said, I should have found the sermon long if I had not been very busy in studying the bonnets and faces, and choir of little girls in the gallery. More than half the congregation were in the ordinary modern dress, and would have passed unnoticed anywhere. All the men looked like well-to-do New England farmers, coloring and all; for the blue-eyed, fair-haired type prevails. But the women who had had the sense and sensibility to stick to their own national clothes were as pretty as pictures, as their faces showed above the dark olive-brown pews, framed in their front porches of bonnets,—for that is really what they are like, the faces are so far back in them. Some were lined with bright lavender satin, full-puffed; some with purple; some with blue. The strings never matched the lining, but were of a violent contrast,—light blue in the purple, gay plaid in the lavender, and so on. The aprons were all of the same shade of vivid blue,—as blue as the sky, and darker. They were all shirred down about two inches below the waist; some of them trimmed down the sides at the back with lace or velvet, but none of them on the bottom. One old woman who sat in front of me wore a conical and pointed cap of black velvet and plush, held on her head by broad gray silk strings, tied with a big bow under her chin, covering her ears and cheeks. The cap was shaped like a funnel carried out to a point, which projected far behind her, stiff and rigid; yet it was not an ungraceful thing on the head. These, I am told, are rarely seen now.

When the sermon was done, the minister disappeared for a moment, and came back in gorgeous claret velvet and white robes, with a great gilt cross on his back. The candles on the altar were lighted, and the sacrament was administered to a dozen or more kneeling outside the railing. This part of the ceremony seemed to me not very Lutheran; but I suppose that is precisely the thing it was,—Luther-an,—one of the relics he kept when he threw overboard the rest of the superstitions. Before this ceremony the sexton came and unlocked the pew we occupied, and I discovered for the first time that I and the commissionnaire had been all that time locked in. After church the sexton told us that there would be a baptismal service there in an hour,—eleven babies to be baptized. That was something not to be lost; so I drove away for half an hour, went to a farm-house and begged milk, and then, after I had got my inch, asked for my habitual ell,—that is, to see the house. The woman was, like all housekeepers, full of apologies, but showed me her five rooms with good-will,—five in a row, all opening together, the kitchen in the middle, and the front door in the back yard by the hen-coop and water-barrel! The kitchen was like the Norwegian farm-house kitchens,—a bare shed-like place, with a table, and wall-shelves, and a great stone platform with a funnel roof overhead; sunken hollows to make the fire in; no oven, no lids, no arrangement for doing anything except boiling or frying. A huge kettle of boiling porridge was standing over a few blazing sticks. Havremels grod—which is Norwegian, and Danish also, for oatmeal pudding—is half their living. All the bread they have they buy at the baker's.

The other rooms were clean. Every one had in it a two-storied bed curtained with calico, neat corner cupboards, and bureaus. There were prints on the wall, and a splendid brass coffee-pot and urn under pink mosquito netting. But the woman herself had no stockings on her feet, and her wooden shoes stood just outside the door.

When we reached the church again, the babies were all there. A wail as of bleating lambs reached us at the very door. A strange custom in Denmark explained this bleating: the poor babies were in the hands of godmothers, and not their own mothers. The mothers do not go with their babies to the christening; the fathers, godfathers, and godmothers go,—two godmothers and one godfather to each baby. The women and the babies sat together, and rocked and trotted and shook and dandled and screamed, in a perfect Babel of motion and sound. Seven out of those eleven babies were crying at the top of their lungs. The twenty-two godmothers looked as if they would go crazy. Never, no, never, did I see or hear such a scene! The twenty-two fathers and godfathers sat together on the other side of the aisle, stolid and unconcerned. I tried to read in their faces which men owned the babies, but I could not. They all looked alike indifferent to the racket. Presently the sexton marshalled the women with their babies in a row outside the outer railing. He had in his hand a paper with the list of the poor little things' names on it, which he took round, and called the roll, apparently so as to make sure all was right. Then the minister came in, and went the round, saying something over each baby and making the sign of the cross on its head and breast. I thought he was through when he had once been round doing this; but no,—he had to begin back again at the first baby and sprinkle them. Oh, how the poor little things did scream! I think all eleven were crying by this time, and I couldn't stand it; so at the third baby I signed to my commissionnaire that we would go, and we slipped out as quietly as we could. "Will there be much more of the service?" I asked him. "Oh, yes," he said. "He will preach now to the fathers and to the godfathers and godmothers." I doubt if the godmothers knew one word he said. The babies all wore little round woollen hoods, most of them bright blue, with three white buttons in a row on the back. Their dresses were white, but short; and each baby had a long white apron on to make a show with in front. This was as long as a handsome infant's robe would be made anywhere; but it was undisguisedly an apron, open all the way behind, and in the case of these poor little screaming creatures flying in all directions at every kick and writhing struggle. I was glad enough to escape the church; but twenty-two women must have come out gladder still a little later. On the way home I passed a windmill which I could have stayed a day to paint if I had been an artist. It was six-sided; the sails were on red beams; a red balcony all round it, with red beams sloping down as supports, resting on the lower story; the first story was on piles, and the spaces between filled up solid with sticks of wood,—the place where they kept their winter fuel. Next to this came a narrow belt painted light yellow; then a black belt, with windows in it rimmed with white; then the red balcony; then a drab or gray space,—this made of plain boards; then the rest to the top shingled like a roof; in this part one window, with red rims in each side. A long, low warehouse of light yellow stuccoed walls, lined off with dark brown, joined the mill by a covered way; and the mill-owner's house was close on the other side, also with light yellow stuccoed walls and a red-tiled roof, and hedges and vines and an orchard in front. Paint this, somebody; do!

This is the tale of the first two days in Copenhagen. In my next I will tell you about the museums if I come out of them alive; it sounds as if nobody could. One ought to be here at least two weeks to really study the superb collections of one sort and another.

I will close this first section of my notions of Denmark with a brief tribute to the Danish flea. I considered myself proof against fleas. I had wintered them in Rome, had lived familiarly with them in Norway, and my contempt for them was in direct proportion to my familiarity. I defied them by day, and ignored them by night. But the Danish flea is as David to Saul! He is a cross between a bedbug and a wasp. He is the original of the famous idea of the Dragon, symbolized in all the worships of the world. I bow before him in terror, and trust most devoutly he never leaves the shores of Denmark.

Good-by. Bless you all!

II.

Dear People,—I promised to tell you about the museums in Copenhagen. It was a very rash promise: and there was a rash promise which I made to myself back of that,—that is, to see the Copenhagen museums. I had looked forward to them as the chief interest of our visit; they are said to be among the finest in the world, in some respects unequalled. One would suppose that the Dane's first desire and impulse would be to make it easy for strangers to see these unrivalled collections, the pride of his capital; on the contrary, he has done, it would seem, all that lay in his power to make it quite out of the power of travellers to do anything like justice to them. To really see the three great museums of Copenhagen—the Ethnographic, the Museum of Northern Antiquities, and the Rosenborg Castle collection—one would need to stay in Copenhagen at least two weeks, and even then he would have had but fourteen hours for each museum.

The Ethnographic is open only on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, and open only two hours at a time,—on Sunday, from twelve to two; on the week days, from ten to twelve. There are in this museum over thirty large rooms, and nearly six hundred cases of labelled and numbered objects. All the rooms are of great interest; one could easily spend the whole two hours of the allotted time in any one of them. To attempt even to walk through the whole museum in the two hours is undertaking too much.

The Museum of Northern Antiquities is open on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from twelve to two; on Tuesdays, from five to seven. On Sundays, you see, it is at the same hour as the Ethnographic! In this museum are eighteen large rooms filled with objects of the greatest interest, from the old "dust heaps" of the lake dwellers down to Tycho Brahe's watch.

The Rosenborg Castle Collection is probably, to travellers in general, the most interesting of all the collections. It is called a "Chronological Collection of the Kings of Denmark,"—which, being interpreted, means that it is a collection of dresses, weapons, ornaments, etc., the greater proportion of which have belonged to Danish kings, from the old days of Christian IV. (1448) down to the present time. These are most admirably arranged in chronological order, so that you see in each room or division a graphic picture of the royal life and luxury of that period. The whole of the great Rosenborg Castle, three floors, is devoted to this collection. How many rooms there are, I do not know,—certainly twenty; and there is not one of them in which I would not like to spend a half-day. Now, how do you think the Danish Government (for this is a national property) arranges for the exhibition of this collection? You may see it, on any day, by applying for a ticket the day beforehand; the hour at which you can be admitted will be marked on your ticket; you will arrive, with perhaps twelve others (that being the outside number for whom tickets are issued for any one hour); you will be walked through that whole museum in one hour, by one of the Government Inspectors of the museum; he will give you a rapid enumeration of the chief objects of interest as you pass; and you will have no clearer idea of any one thing than if you had been fired through the rooms out of a cannon.

Have I spoken unjustly when I say that the Dane appears to have done all in his power to shut up from the general public of travellers these choicest collections of his country?

Now I will tell you all I know of the Rosenborg Collection, and how it happens that I know anything; and my history begins like so many of the old Danish histories, with a fight.

In the outset I paid for a full ticket, as there happened to be no one else who had applied to go in that afternoon. Later, two Englishmen wishing to see the museum, their commissionnaire came to know if I would not like to have them go at the same time, which would reduce the price of the tickets by two thirds. This I declined to do, preferring to have the entire time of the Museum Inspector for my own benefit in way of explanations, etc. With the guide all to myself, I thought I should be able far better to understand and study the museum.

Equipped with my note-book and pen and catalogue, and with the faithful Harriet by my side, I entered, cheerful, confident, and full of enthusiasm, especially about any and all relics of the famous old Christian IV., whose impress on his city and country is so noticeable to this day.

The first scene of my drama opens with the arrival of the Inspector whose duty it was on that occasion to exhibit the museum. There are three of these Inspectors, who take turns in the exhibition. He was a singularly handsome man,—a keen blue eye; hair about white, whiter than it should have been by age, for he could not have been more than fifty or fifty-five; a finely cut face, with great mobility, almost a passionateness of vivacity in its expression; a tall and graceful figure: his whole look and bearing gave me a great and sudden pleasure as he approached. And when he began to speak in English, my delight was kindled anew; I warmed at once in anticipation of my afternoon. Mistaken dream!

I said to him, "I am very sorry, indeed, that we have so short a time in which to see these beautiful and interesting collections. Two hours is nothing."

"Oh, I shall explain to you everything," he said hastily, and proceeded to throw open the doors of mysterious wall-closets in the room which was called the Presence Chamber of Christian IV.

The walls of this room are of solid oak, divided off into panels by beautiful carved pillars, with paintings between. The ceiling is like the walls, and the floor is of marble. In the south wall are four closets filled with more rare and exquisite things than I could describe in a hundred pages; all these in one side of the first room! The first thing which my noble Dane pointed out was the famous old Oldenborg horn, of which I had before read, and wished much to see,—an old drinking-horn of silver, solid chased, from brim to tip. The legend is that it was given to Count Otto of Oldenborg by a mountain nymph in a forest one day in the year 909.

As he pointed out this horn, I opened my catalogue to find the place where it was mentioned there, that I might make on the margin some notes of points which I wished to recollect. I think I might have been looking for this perhaps half of a minute, possibly one whole minute, when thundering from the mouth of my splendid Dane came, "Do you prefer that you read it in the catalogue than that I tell you?"

I am not sure, but my impression is that I actually jumped at his tone. I know I was frightened enough to do so. I then explained to him that I was not looking for it in the catalogue to read then and there, only to associate what I saw with its place and with the illustrations in the catalogue, and to make notes for future use. He hardly heard a word I said. Putting out his hand and waving my poor catalogue away, he said, "It is all there. You shall find everything there, as I tell you; will you listen?"

Quite cowed, I tried to listen; but I found that unless I carried out my plan of following his explanations by the list in the catalogue, and made little marginal notes, I should remember nothing; moreover, that it was impossible to look at half the things, as he rapidly enumerated them. I opened my catalogue again, and began to note some of the more interesting things. The very sight of the catalogue open in my hands seemed to act upon him like a scarlet flag on a bull. Instantly he burst out upon me again; and when I attempted to explain, he interrupted me,—did not give me time to finish one sentence,—did not apparently comprehend what I meant, or what it was that I wished to do, except that it reflected in some way on him as a guide and explainer. In vain I tried to stem the tide of his angry words; and the angrier he got, the less intelligible became his English.

"Perhaps you take me for a servant in this museum," he said. "Perhaps my name is as good in my country as yours is in your own!"

"Oh, do—do listen to me one minute," I said. "If you will only hear me, I think I can make you understand. I do implore you not to be so angry."

"I am not angry. I have listen to you every time,—too many time. I have not time to listen any more!"

This he said so angrily that I felt the tears coming into my eyes. I was in despair. I turned to Harriet and said, "Very well, Harriet, we will go."

"You shall not go!" he exclaimed. "Twenty years I have shown this museum, and never yet was any one before dissatisfied with what I tell them. I have myself written this catalogue you carry," he cried, tapping my poor book with his fingers. "Now I will nothing say, and you can ask if you wish I should explain anything." And thereupon he folded his arms, and stepped back, the very picture of a splendid man in a sulk. Could anything be imagined droller, more unnecessary? I hesitated what to do. If I had not had a very strong desire to see the museum, I would have gone away, for he had really been almost unpardonably rude; yet I sympathized fully in his hot and hasty temper. I saw clearly wherein his mistake lay, and that on his theory of the situation he was right and I was wrong; and I thought perhaps if he watched me for a few minutes quietly he would see that I was very much in earnest in studying the collection, and that nothing had been further from my mind than any distrust of his knowledge. So I gulped down my wounded feelings, and went on looking silently at the cases and making my notes. Presently he began to cool down, to see his mistake, and before we had gone through the second room was telling me courteously about everything, waiting while I made my notes, and pointing out objects of especial interest. In less than half an hour he had ceased to be hostile, and before the end of the hour he had become friendly, and more,—seized both my hands in his, exclaiming, "We shall be good friends,—good!" He was as vivacious, imperious, and overwhelming in his friendliness as in his anger. "You must come again to Rosenborg; you must see it all. I will myself show you every room. No matter who sends to come in, they shall not be admitted. I go alone with you."

In vain I explained to him that I had only one more day in Copenhagen, and that I must spend that in going to Elsinore.

"No, you are not to go to Elsinore. It is not necessary. You shall not leave Copenhagen without seeing Rosenborg. Promise me that you will come again to Rosenborg. Promise! Take any hour you please, and I will come. You shall have four—five hours. Promise! Promise!" And he seized my hand in both of his, and held it, repeating, "Promise me! Promise! Oh, we shall be very good friends,—very good."

"Ah," I said, "I knew, if you only understood, you would be friendly; but I really cannot come again."

He pulled out his watch, made a gesture of despair. "I have to leave town in one little half-hour; and there are yet seventeen rooms you have not seen. You shall not leave Copenhagen till you have seen. Do you promise?"

I believe if I had not promised I should be still standing in the halls of the Rosenborg. When I finally said, "Yes, I promise," he wrung my hand again, and said,—

"Now we are good friends, we shall be all good friends. I will show to you all Rosenborg. Do you promise?"

"Yes," I said, "I promise," and drove away, leaving him standing on the sidewalk, his steel blue eyes flashing with determination and fire, and a smile on his face which I shall not forget. Never before did I see such passionate, fierce fulness of life in a man whose hair was white.

I promised, but I did not go. From the Rosenborg I drove to the Museum of Northern Antiquities,—from five to seven of that day being my only chance of seeing it at all. By the time I had spent two hours in the hurried attempt to see the most interesting things in this second collection, my brain was in a state of chaos, and I went back to my hotel with a sense of loathing of museums, only to be compared to the feeling one would have about dinners if he had eaten ten hearty ones in one day. One does not sleep off such an indigestion in one night. The next morning, nothing save actual terror could have driven me into a museum; and as my noble Dane was not present to cow me into obedience, I had energy enough to write him a note of farewell and regret. The regret was indeed heartfelt, not so much for the museum as for him. I would have liked to see those blue eyes flash out from under the gray eyebrows once more. I too felt that we would be "good friends,—good."

Now I will try to tell you a little of the little I remember of the Rosenborg. I only got as far as Frederick IV.'s time, 1730. Many of the most beautiful things in the museum I did not see, and of many that I did see I recollect nothing, especially of all which I looked at while I was in disgrace with the guide; I might as well not have seen them at all.

One little unpretending thing interested me greatly: it was a plain gold ring, with a small uncut sapphire in it; round the circle is engraved, "Ave Maria gr. [gratiosissima]." It was given by King Christian to his wife, Elizabeth, on their wedding-day, Aug. 12, 1515,—three hundred years and two weeks before the day I saw it. It lay near the great Oldenborg drinking-horn, and few people would care much for it by the side of the other, I suppose. Then there was another bridal ornament of a dead queen,—it had belonged to Dorothea, wife of Christian III.,—a gold plate, four or five inches square, with an eagle in the centre, bearing an escutcheon with the date 1557: on the eagle's breast a large uncut sapphire; over the eagle, an emerald and a sapphire; and under it, a sapphire and an amethyst, all very large. There are also pearls set here and there in the plate. This was given to the city of Copenhagen by the queen, to be worn by the daughters of the richest and most honored of the Danish people on their wedding-day. It was for many generations kept and used in this way, but finally the custom fell into disuse; and now the Copenhagen brides think no more of Queen Dorothea at their weddings, than of any other old gone-by queen,—which is a pity, it seems to me, for it surely was a lovely thought of hers to ally her memory to the bridals of young maidens in her land for all time.

There was in this room, also, Frederick II.'s Order of the Elephant, the oldest in existence, and held in great veneration by people who esteem ornaments of that sort. It is much less beautiful than some other orders of less distinction. The elephant is a clumsy beast, carve him never so finely, enamel him all you will, and call him what you like.

There is also here the Order of the Garter, of that same king—twenty-six enamelled red roses on blue shields held together by twists of gold cord; diamonds and pearls make it splendid, and that bit of gospel truth "Evil to him that evil thinks," is written on it in rubies, as it deserves to be written everywhere.

This Frederick must have been a gay fellow; for here stands a glass goblet, five inches in diameter, and fifteen high, out of which he and his set of boon companions fell to drinking one day on wagers to see who could drink the most, and scratched their names on the glass as they drank, each man his mark and record, little thinking that the glass would outlive them three centuries and more, as it has; and is likely now, unless Rosenborg burns down, to last the world out.

The thing I would rather own, of all this Frederick's possessions, would be one—I would be quite content with one—of the plates which Germany sent to him as a present. They are red in the middle, with gold escutcheons enamelled on them; the borders are of plain clear amber, rimmed with silver,—one big circle of amber! The piece from which it was cut was big enough to have made the whole plate, if they had chosen, but it was more beautiful to set it simply as a rim. Nothing could be dreamed of more beautiful in the way of a plate than this.

I told you in my last letter what a stamp Christian IV. had left on the capital of his kingdom. I fancy, without knowing anything about it, that he must have been one of the greatest kings Denmark ever had; at any rate, he built well, planned well for poor people, worked with a free hand for art and science, fought like a tiger, and loved—well, he loved like a king, I suppose; for he had concubines from every country in Europe, and no end of illegitimate princes and princesses whom he brought up, maintained, and educated in the most royal fashion. He lived many years in this Rosenborg; and when he found he must die, was brought back here, and died in a little room we should think small to-day for a man to lie mortally ill in; but he lived only one week after he was brought back, and it was in winter-time, so the open fireplace ventilated the room.

The upper half of the walls is covered with dark green moire silk, with gold flowers on it; the lower half is covered with paintings, many portraits among them; and in places of honor among the portraits, the king's favorite dogs, Wild-brat and Tyrk.

Here are his silver compasses and his ship hand-lantern; the silver scales in which he weighed out his gold and silver; a little hand printing-press, dusty and worn, with the brass stamp with his monogram on it,—his occupation in rainy days of leisure. Here, also, are the tokens of his idle moments,—a silver goblet made out of money won by him from four courtiers, who had all betted with him, on one 6th of February, which would be first drunk before Easter. These were the things that I cared most for,—more than for the splendors, of which there were closets full, glass cases full, tables full: goblets of lapis lazuli, jasper, agate, and crystal, gold and silver; lamps of crystal; cabinets of ebony; orders and rings and bracelets and seals and note-books and clocks and weapons, all of the costliest and most beautiful workmanship; rubies and diamonds and pearls, set and sewed wherever they could be; a medicine spoon, with gold for its handle and a hollowed sapphire for its bowl, for instance,—the sapphire nearly one inch across. One might swallow even allopathic medicine out of such a spoon as that: and I dare say that it was when she was very ill, and had a lot of nasty doses to take, that Madame Kirstin—one of the left-handed wives—got from the sympathizing king this dainty little gift. "C" and "K" are wrought into a monogram on the handle, which is three inches long, of embossed gold. Another sapphire, clear as a drop of ocean water with sunlight piercing it, and one inch square, is in the same case with the medicine spoon. A chalice, with wafer-box, paten, and cup, all of the finest gold, engraved, enamelled, and set thick with precious stones, has a gold death's-head and cross-bones on the stem of the chalice; and the eyes of the death's-head are two great rose diamonds, which gleam out frightfully. Another gold chalice has on its under side a twisted network of Arabesque, with sixty-six enamelled rosettes, all openwork on it.

In the room called Christian's workroom is a set of caparisons for a horse,—saddle, saddle-cloth, housing, and holsters, all of black velvet, sewn thick, even solid, with pearls and gold, rubies, sapphires, and rose diamonds. The sight of them flashing in sunlight on a horse's back must have been dazzling. These were a wedding present from King Christian to his son.

In this room also are several suits of Christian's clothes,—jerkin, trousers, and mantle, in the fashion of that day, dashing enough, even when made of common stuffs; but these are of cloth of gold, silver moire, black Brabant lace, trimmed in the most lavish way with gold and silver laces, and embroidered with pearls and gold. There is a suit of dirty and blood-stained linen hanging in one of the locked cabinets which does him more credit than these. It is the suit he wore at the great naval battle where he lost his eye. A shell exploding on the deck, a fragment of it flew into his face and instantly destroyed his right eye. His men thought all was lost; but he, seizing his handkerchief, clapped it into the bleeding socket, and fought on. One reads of such heroic deeds as this with only a vague thrill of wonder and admiration; but to see and touch the very garments the hero wore is another thing. This old blood-stained velvet jerkin is worth more to the Danish people than all the scores of bejewelled robes in the Rosenborg; and I think there are literally scores of them.

Next to Christian IV. came Frederick III.; and in his reign the rococo style ruled everything. Three rooms in the Rosenborg are devoted to the relics of this king's reign; and a great deal of hideous magnificence they hold, it must be confessed,—cabinets and tables and candlesticks and ceilings and walls, which are as jarring to the eye as the Chinese gong is to the ear, and appear to be just about as civilized. But the rococo had not yet spoiled everything. The jewelled cups and boxes and spoons and miniatures are as beautiful as ever; a set of glass spoons with handles of gold and of agate and of crystal; the gold knives and forks that Frederick III. and his queen used to travel with. In those days when you were asked to tea you carried your own implements; ivory cups, gold goblets, and goblets of crystal, a goblet made out of one solid topaz, and a great tankard made of amber,—these are a few of the little necessaries of every-day life to Frederick's court. His motto was "Dominus providebit;" it is on half of his splendid possessions,—on his mosaic tables and his jewelled canes and pomade boxes; everywhere it looms up, in unwitting but delicious satire on the habit Frederick had of providing for himself, and most lavishly too, all sorts of superfluities, which the Lord never would think of providing for any human being!—such, for instance, as a jewel box of silver, with fifteen splendidly cut crystals let into the sides, so that one can look through into the box and see on the bottom a fine bit of embossed work, the picture of the Judgment of Paris. Around these crystals sixty-two large garnets are set, and these again are surrounded by wreaths of flowers and leaves in embossed work, set thick with more diamonds than could be counted. A very pretty thing in its way, to stand on a dressing-table and hold the kind of rings worn at this time by the kind of persons who reigned in Denmark! Another pretty little thing he had,—not so useful as the jewel-box, but in far more perfect taste,—was a crystal goblet, in shape of a shell, resting on the back of a bending Cupid. Eight beautiful heads are cut on the sides of this cup, and there is standing on its curling base a winged boy. Its translucent shades and shadows are beautiful beyond words. It is said to be the most beautiful specimen in the world of work in pure crystal. The topaz goblet and the amber tankard, however, would outrival it in most eyes. I longed to see the topaz cup held up to the sun, filled with pale wine. I believe you could hear it shine! The third of the rooms devoted to Frederick and his reign is called the Marble Chamber, and is a superb icy place; floor and walls all marble. In cabinets in this room are some of Frederick's clothes,—every-day clothes, such as dark brown cloth, ornamented down every seam with gold and silver lace; and a dress of his queen's, the only dress of a woman which has come down from that age. It is one solid mass of embroidery in gold and gay colors on silk, stiff as old tapestry; loops of faded pink ribbon down the front, and a long jabot of old point lace all the way down the front. There are also a sword and sword-belt, and a gun bearing the initials of this lady. The gun has a medallion of ivory let in at the butt end, with her initials, "S. A.," and her motto, "In God is my hope." There is something uncommonly droll in these mottoes of faith in God's providing, inscribed on so many articles of luxury by people who must have certainly spent a good part of their time in providing for themselves.

In the last part of the seventeenth century things in Denmark were more and more stamped by the French influence. Christian V., who succeeded to Frederick III., had spent some time in the court of Louis XIV., and wanted to make his own court as much like it as possible. So we find, in the rooms devoted to Christian V.'s reign, tapestries and cabinets which might all have come from France. One of the saloons is hung with superb tapestry, all with a red ground; and the tables and mirrors and chairs are all gilded and carved in the last degree of fantastic decoration. This red room used to be Christian's dining-room; and the plate-warmers still stand before the fireplace,—two feet high, round, solid silver, every inch engraved.

Caskets of amber, of ivory; drinking-horns,—one-third horn and two-thirds embossed silver,—bowls and globes of wrought silver, hunting-cups of solid silver made to fit into deer's antlers and with coral knobs for handles; closets full of fowling-pieces, pistols, silver-sheathed hunting-knives, falcon hoods set with real pearls and embroidered in gold,—orders of all sorts known to Denmark; elephants and St. Georges in silver and crystal and cameo; gold jugs, gold beakers, bowls of green jade, with twisted snakes for handles and dragons' heads at bottom; goblets of solid crystal, of countless shapes and sizes,—one in shape of a flying-fish borne by two dolphins; onyx and jasper and agate and porcelain, made into no end of shapes and uses;—these are a few of the things which "God provided" for this Danish king and queen. One of these rooms is hung with tapestries of lilac silk and gold moire, embroidered with gold and silver threads and colors. These were provided by Frederick himself, who brought them from Italy.

But you don't care a fig who brought the things, or when they were brought; and perhaps you don't care very much about the things anyhow. I dare say they do not sound half as superb as they were; but I must tell you of a few more. What do you think of a room with walls, ceiling, and a large space in the centre of the floor all of plate glass, the rest of the floor being of exquisite mosaic in wood; and of a coat of crimson velvet embroidered thick with silver thread, to be worn with a pale blue waistcoat, also embroidered stiff with silver thread; and of cups cut out of rubies; and a great bowl of obsidian set with rubies and garnets; and of topazes big enough to cut heads on in fine relief? There are hundreds and hundreds more of things I have not mentioned, and hundreds of things I did not see even, in the rooms I walked through; and there were seventeen rooms more into which I did not even go. If I had, I should have seen twelve superb tapestries, 12 feet in height, by 10 to 20 feet broad, each giving a picture of a battle, and all strictly historical; the Royal Font, of solid embossed silver, inside which is placed at every christening another dish of gold; one whole room full of the costliest and rarest porcelain from all parts of the world,—here is the splendid and famous "Flora Danica" service. I saw at a porcelain shop a reproduction of this service, every article bearing some Danish flower most exquisitely painted. A great platter heaped full of wild roses was as lovely as a day in June. Here also are the Danish Regalia, kept in a room hung with Oriental carpets, and with a floor of black and white marble. "In the middle of the floor a pyramid arises behind clear thick plate glass, from the flat sides of which, covered with red velvet, the rays of gold and precious stones flash upon us, whilst the summit is adorned by a magnificent and costly crown." This sentence is from the catalogue written by my friend the noble Dane, and is a very favorable specimen of his English. Bless him, how I do wish I had gone back to that museum! At this distance of time it seems incomprehensible to me that I did not. But that day I felt as if one more look at the simple door of a museum would make a maniac of me. So this is all I can tell you about the famous Rosenborg. And with the others I will not bore you much, for I have made this so long; only I must tell you that in the Ethnographic, which is in some respects, I suppose, the most valuable of them all, having five rooms full of Prehistoric antiquities from the stone, bronze, and early iron ages in every part of the world, and twenty or thirty rooms more full of characteristic things,—dresses, implements, ornaments, weapons, of the uncultivated savage or semi-savage races, also of the Chinese, Persians, Arabians, Turks, East Indians, etc.;—in this museum I found a most important place assigned to the North American Indian; and Dr. Steinhauer, the director of the museum, a man whose ethnographical studies and researches have made him known to all antiquarians in the world was full of interest in them, and appreciation of their noble qualities, of their skill and taste in decoration, and still more of the important links between them and the old civilizations. Here were portraits of all the most distinguished of our Indian chiefs; a whole corridor filled with glass cases full of their robes, implements, weapons, decorations; several life-size figures in full war-dress: and their trappings were by no means put to shame, in point of design and color, by the handsomest trappings in Rosenborg; in fact, they were far more wonderful, being wrought by an uncivilized race, living in wildernesses, with only rude paints, porcupine quills, and glass beads to work with. My eyes filled with tears, I confess, to find at last in little Denmark one spot in the world where there will be kept a complete pictorial record of the race of men that we have done our best to wipe out from the face of the earth,—where historical justice will be done to them in the far future, as a race of splendid possibilities, and attainments marvellous, considering the time in which they were made. Here was a superb life-size figure of a Blackfeet warrior on his horse; the saddle, trappings, etc., are exactly the same in shape and style as an old Arab saddle used hundreds of years ago. On the warrior's breast is a round disk of lines radiating from a centre, in gay colors, of straw and beads, of a device identical with a rich Moorish ornament; the same device Dr. Steinhauer pointed out to me on a medicine-bag of the Blackfeet tribe.

Here was a figure of a chief of the Sacs and Foxes, in full array; by his side the portrait of his father, with the totem of the tribe tattooed on his breast. With enthusiasm Dr. Steinhauer pointed out to me how in one generation the progress had been so great that on the robe of the son was set in a fine and skilful embroidery the same totem which the father had rudely tattooed on his breast. Here were specimens of the handiwork of every tribe,—of their dresses, of their weapons; those of each tribe carefully assorted by themselves. Dr. Steinhauer knew more, I venture to say, about the different tribes, their race affinities and connections, than any man in America knows to-day. When I told him a little about the scorn and hatred which are felt in America towards the Indians, the indifference with which their fate is regarded by the masses of the people, and the cruel injustice of our government towards them, he listened to me with undisguised astonishment, and repeated again and again and again, "It is inexplicable; I cannot understand."

You can imagine what a thrilling pleasure all this was to me. But it was marred by the keenest sense of shame of my country, that it should have been left for Denmark alone to keep a place in historical archives for a fair showing and true appreciation of the "wards of the United States Government."

I might fill another letter with accounts of the "Collection of Northern Antiquities;" but don't be frightened: I won't, only to tell you that it is far the largest and most complete in Europe. And you may see there a specimen of everything that has been made, wrought, and worn in the way of stone, bronze, iron, or gold and silver, in the north countries, from the rude stone chisel with which the prehistoric man pried open his oyster and clam shells at picnics on the shore, and went away and left his shells and "openers" in a careless pile behind him, so that we could dig them all up together some thousands of years later, down to the superb gold bracelets worn by the strong-armed women who queened it in Norway ten centuries ago. It is a great thing for us that those old fellows had such a way of flinging their ornaments into lakes as offerings to gods, and burying them by the wheelbarrow-full in graves. It wasn't a safe thing to do, even as long ago as that, however; for there are traces in many of these burial-mounds of their having been opened and robbed at some period far back. In one of the rooms of this museum are several huge oak coffins, with the mummied or half-petrified bodies lying in them, just as they were buried sixteen hundred years ago. The coffins were made of whole trunks of trees, hollowed out so as to make a sort of trough with a lid; and in this the body was laid, with all its usual garments on. There is an indescribable and uncanny fascination in the sight of one of these old mummies,—the eyeless sockets, the painful cheekbone, the tight-drawn forehead; they look so human and unhuman at once, so awfully dead and yet somehow so suggestive of having been alive, that it stimulates a far greater curiosity to know what they did and thought and felt, than it is possible to feel about neighbors to-day. I never see half a dozen of these mummies together without wishing they would sit up and take up the thread of their gossip where they left it off,—so different from the feeling one has about live gossips, and so utterly unreasonable too; for gossip is gossip all the same, and nothing but an abomination in any age, whether that of Pharaoh or Ulysses Grant. If I did not feel a dreadful misgiving that you had had enough museum already, and would be bored by more, I really would like to tell you about a few more of these things: a necklace, found in a peat bog by a poor devil who had begged leave to cut a bit of turf there to burn, and to be sure he found eleven beautiful gold things of one sort and another. The necklace is very heavy to lift. I asked permission to take it in my hands. I laid it around my neck, and it would have hurt to wear it ten minutes. It was a great snake coil of solid gold, the body half as big as my wrist! If Queen Thyra wore it, she must have been a giantess, or else have had a wadded "chest protector" underneath her necklaces. She and her husband, King Gorm, were buried in two enormous mounds in Jutland, some fourteen hundred years ago. The mounds were so high that they nearly overtopped the little village church; and yet, at some time or other, robbers had burrowed into them, and carried off a lot of things, so that when the mounds were scientifically excavated, few relics were found. Stealing from that sort of grave seems to make the modern methods of body-snatching quite insignificant. Even A. T. Stewart's body would have been safe if it had been in a mound as high as the church steeple.

Now I must tell you a little more about Harriet. She leaves me to-morrow, and I shall grieve at parting with the garrulous old soul. Niobe, I call her in my own mind; for she melts into tears at the least emotion. I am afraid nobody has ever been very good to her; for the smallest kindness touches her to the quick, and she cannot refrain from perpetually breaking out into expressions of fondness for me, and gratitude, which are sometimes tiresome. The explanation of her good English is that her parents were English, though she was born in Copenhagen, has lived there all her life, and married a Dane when she was quite young. He was a tradesman, and they lived in comparative comfort, though, as she said, "we never could lay up a penny, because we always sent the children to the best schools; and for ten children, ma'am, it does take a heap of schooling!"

Of the ten children, six are still living; and Harriet, at sixty-four, has thirty-six grandchildren. When she first came to me she looked ten years older than she does now. Good food, freedom from care, and her enjoyment of her journey have almost worked miracles on her face. Every morning she has come out looking better than she did the night before. I see that she must have been a very handsome woman in her day,—delicate features, and a soft dark brown eye, with very great native refinement and gentleness of manner. Poor soul! her hardest days are before her, I fear; for the daughter with whom she lives, and for whom she works night and day, is the wife of that worthless fellow, our commissionnaire. He is a drunkard, and not much more than four fifths "witted." Harriet is pew-opener at the English church, and gets a little money from that; the clergyman is very kind to her, and she has the promise of a place at last in a sort of "Old Lady's Home" in Copenhagen. This is her outlook! I must send you the verses she presented to me yesterday. I had left her alone for the greater part of the forenoon, and she took to her pen for company. That was the way Katrina used to amuse herself when I left her alone. I always found her sitting with her elbows on the table, a pile of scribbled sheets in front of her, her hair pushed off her forehead, and a general expression of fine frenzy about her. Katrina's English did not compare with Harriet's at all; that is, it was not so good. I liked it far better. It was one perpetual fund of amusement to me; but I think Katrina had more nearly a vein of genius about her, and she was not sentimental; whereas Harriet is a sentimentalist of the first water,—no, of the "seventy thousandth"!

Paris, September 19.

I kept my letter and brought it here to tell you about Ole Bull's funeral, full accounts of which reached the H——'s just before we left Munich on the 9th. It was a splendid tribute to the dear old man; I shall always regret that I did not see it. His home is on a beautiful island about sixteen miles from Bergen. If it were only possible to make you understand how much more the word island means in Norway than anywhere else! But it is not. To those of you who know the sort of mountain pasture in which great hillocks of moss and stone are thrown up, piled up, crowded in, in such labyrinths that you go leaping from one to the other, winding in and out in crevice-like paths, never knowing where moss leaves off and stone begins,—where you will strike firm footing, and where you will plunge your foot down suddenly into moss above your ankles; and to those of you who love the country and the spring in the country so well that you know just the look of a feathery young birch-tree on the first day of June, and of slender young spruce-trees all the year round, it is enough to say that if you take a dozen miles or so of such a pasture, and make the hillocks many feet high, and then set in here and there little hollows full of the birches, and a ravine or two full of the young spruces, and then launch your hillocks and birches and spruces straight out into deep blue sea, you'll have something such an island as there are thousands of on the Norway coast. Ole Bull's home was on such an island as this, and he had made it an ideally beautiful place. Eighteen miles of pathway he had made in the labyrinths of the island; had brought soil from the shore, and set gardens in hollows here and there. The house is a picturesque and delightful one; and in the great music-room, nearly a hundred feet long, there he lay dead, two days, in state like a king, with steamers full of sorrowing friends and mourning strangers coming to take their last look at his face. The king sent a letter of condolence to Mrs. Bull, and the peasants came weeping to the side of his bed; from highest to lowest, Norway mourned. On the day of the funeral, after some short services at the house, the body was carried on board a steamer, to be taken to Bergen. The steamer was draped with black and strewn with green. I believe I have told you of the beautiful custom the Norwegians have of strewing green juniper twigs in the street in front of their houses whenever they have lost a friend. No matter how far away the friend may have lived, when they hear of his death they strew the juniper around their house to show that a death has given them sorrow. It was a commentary on human life (and death!) that I never went out in Bergen without seeing in some street, and often in many, the juniper-strewn sidewalks. As the steamer with Ole Bull's body approached the entrance of Bergen harbor, sixteen steamers, all draped in black, with flags at half-mast, sailed out to meet it, turned, and fell into line on either side to convoy it to shore. Bands were playing his music all the way. At the wharf they were met by nearly all Bergen; and the body was borne in grand procession through the streets, which were strewn thick with juniper from the wharf to the cemetery, at least two or three miles. The houses were all draped with black, and many of the people had put on black. The golden wreath which was given him in San Francisco was borne in the procession by one of his friends, and a procession of little girls bore wreaths and bouquets of flowers. The grave was hidden and half filled with flowers; and last of all, after the body had been laid there,—last and most touching of all, came the peasants, crowds of them, gathering close, and each one flinging in a fern leaf or a juniper bough or a bunch of flowers. Every one had brought something, and the grave was nearly filled up with their offerings. It is worth while to be loved like that by a people. Whatever scientific critics may say of Ole Bull's playing, he played so that he swayed the hearts of the common people; and his own nation loved him and were proud of him, just as the Danes loved Hans Christian Andersen, with a love that asked no indorsement and admitted no question from the outside world. The school of music to which Ole Bull belonged has passed away; but what scientific art has gained the people have lost. It will never be seen that one of these modern violinists can make uneducated people smile and weep as he did. The flowers that are dying on his coffin are all immortelles. Such blossoms as these will never again be strewn by peasant hands in a player's grave.

It took two days to come from Munich to Paris,—two hard days, from seven in the morning till six at night. We broke the journey by sleeping at Strasburg, where we had just one hour to see the wonderful cathedral and its clock. The clock I didn't care so much about, though the trick of it is a marvel; but the twilight of the cathedral, lit up by its great roses of topaz and amethyst, I shall never forget as long as I live. In my next letter I will tell you about it. But now I have only time to copy Harriet's verses, and send off this letter. Here they are:—

DENMARK.

When again in your own bright land you are,

And with all that dearly you love,

And at times you look up at the Northern Star

That stands on the sky above,

Remember, then, that near forgot,

Here, near the Gothic strand,

There is on the globe a little spot,—

'T is Denmark, a beautiful land.

Now at harvest time from there you flew,

Like the birds from its tranquil shore;

They return at springtime, kind and true:

May, like them, you return once more!

Dear Mrs. Jakson, I remain your humble and thankful servant,

Harriet.

Poor thing! when she bade me good-by she began to shed tears, and I had to be almost stern with her to stop their flow. "Tell your husband," she said, "that there's a little creature in Denmark that you've made very happy, that'll never forget you," and she was gone. In about ten minutes a tap at the door; there was Harriet again, with a big paper of grapes and a deprecating face. "Excuse me, ma'am, but they were only one mark and a half a pound, and they 're much better than you'd get them in the hotel. Oh, I'll not lose my train, ma'am; I've plenty of time." And with another kiss on my hand she ran out of the room. Faithful creature! I shall never see her again in this world, but I shall remember her with gratitude as long as I live. Surely nowhere except in Norway and Denmark could it have happened to a person to find in the sudden exigency of the moment two such devoted servants as Katrina and Harriet; and that they should have both been rhymers was a doubling up of coincidences truly droll.

Paris is as detestable as ever,—literally a howling and waste place! Of all the yells and shrieks that ever made air discordant, surely the cries of Paris are the loudest and worst. My room looks on the street; and I should say that at least three different Indian tribes in distress and one in drunken hilarity were wailing and shouting under my windows all the time! As for the fiacre-men,—how like fiasco, fiacre looks written!—they drive as if their souls' salvation depended on just grazing the wheel of every vehicle they pass. When two of them yell out at once, as they go by each other, it is enough to deafen one.

III.

Dear People,—I couldn't give you a better illustration of what happens to you in foreign countries when you pin your faith on people who are said to "speak English here," than by giving you the tale of how I went from Copenhagen to Lubeck. To begin with, I explained to the porter of the König von Denmark Hotel, who is one of the English-speaking attachés of that very good hotel, that I wished, in going to Lubeck, to avoid water as much as possible. I endeavored to convey to him that my horror of it was in fact hydrophobic, and that I could go miles out of my way to escape it. He understood me perfectly, he said; and he explained to me a fine route by which I was to cross island after island by rail, have only short intervals of water between, and come comfortably to Lubeck by eight in the evening, provided I would leave Copenhagen at 6.45 in the morning, which I was only too happy to do for the sake of escaping a long steamboat journey. So I arranged everything to that end; explained to the one waiter who spoke English that I must have breakfast on the table at 5.40, as I was to leave the house at 6.15. He understood perfectly, he said. (I also commissioned him to buy a pound of grapes for my lunch-basket; the relevancy of this will appear later.) I then carefully explained to the worthy old lady who had promised for a small consideration to take me to Munich, that she must be on the spot at six, with her luggage; and that she was on no account to bring anything to lift in her hands, because my own hand-luggage would be all she could well handle. Then I asked for my bill, that it might be settled the night beforehand, to have nothing on hand in the morning but to get off. This was doubly important, as the landlord had promised to change my Danish money into German money for me,—the Danish bankers having no German money. They so hate Germany that they consider it a disgrace, I believe, even to handle marks and pfennigs. The clerk, who also "speaks English," said he understood me perfectly; so I went upstairs cheerful and at ease in my mind. In half an hour my bill arrived; and I sent down by the waiter, who spoke "a leetle" English, five hundred Danish crowns to pay my bill, and have four hundred crowns returned to me in marks. Waited one hour, no money; rang, same waiter appeared.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, it have gone out; it will soon return. He is not here."

Waited half an hour longer; rang again.

"Where is my money?"

"Yees, strachs. He shall all right, strachs."

"But I am very tired; I wish to go to bed."

"Yees, it shall be kommen."

Waited another half-hour,—it was now quarter of eleven; wrote on a bit of paper, "I have gone to bed; cannot take the money to-night. Have it ready for me at six in the morning." Rang, and gave it to the waiter, ejaculating, "Bureau;" and pointing downstairs, shut the door on him and went to bed. The last thing I heard from him, as I shut the door, was, "Strachs, strachs!" That means "Immediately;" and there is a Norwegian proverb that "when the Norwegian says 'Strachs,' he will be with you in half an hour."

At twenty-five minutes before six I was in the dining-room, bonneted, all ready; no sign or symptom of breakfast. I went to the little room beyond, where the waiters are to be found. There was the one who speaks least English. "Oh, goodness!" said I, "where is Wilhelm?" Wilhelm being the one mainstay of the establishment in the matter of English, and the one who had waited upon me during all my stay.

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm here; soon will be kommen."

"But I must have my breakfast; I leave the house in half an hour."

"Ya, ya. Wilhelm is not yet. He sleeps." And the good-natured little fellow darted off to call him. Poor Wilhelm had indeed overslept; but he appeared in a miraculously short time, got my breakfast together by bits, got the money from the clerk, and did his best to explain to me how it was that a given sum of money was at once more and less in marks than it was in kroner. I crammed it all into my pocket, and ran downstairs to find—no old lady; her "knapsack" on the driver's seat, but she herself not there. Four different people said something to me about it, and I could not understand one word they said; so I stepped into the carriage, sat down, and resigned myself to whatever was coming next. After about ten minutes she appeared, breathless, coming down the stairs of the hotel. She had mounted to my room, and, unmindful of the significant fact that the door was wide open and all my luggage gone, had been waiting there for me. This augured well for the journey! However, there was no time for misgivings; and we drove off at a tearing rate, late for the train. Suddenly I spied a most disreputable-looking parcel on the seat,—large, clumsy, done up in an old dirty calico curtain, from which a few brass rings were still hanging.

"What is that?" I exclaimed.

"Only my best gown, ma'am, and my velvet cloak. I couldn't disgrace you, ma'am."

"Disgrace me!" thought I. "I was never before disgraced by such a bundle."

"But I told you to bring nothing whatever to carry in your hands," I said; "you must put that into your knapsack. My roll and basket are all you can possibly lift."

"Oh, ma'am, it would ruin it to put it in the knapsack. I'm not a rich lady, like you, ma'am; it's all I've got: but I'd not like to disgrace you. I was out last night trying to hire a small trunk to bring; but you wouldn't believe it, ma'am, they wanted eight kroner down for the deposit for the value of it. But I'll not disgrace you, ma'am, and I'll forget nothing. I've a good head at counting. You'll see I'll not overlook anything."

"Never mind," I said; "you must wear your cloak [she had on only a little thin, clinging, black crape shawl,—the most pitiful of garments, and no more protection than a pocket-handkerchief against cold], and the dress must go into the knapsack at Lubeck. I will put it into my own roll as soon as we are in the cars."

At the station—luckily, as I thought—the ticket-seller spoke English, and replied readily to my inquiry for a ticket to Lubeck, by rail, "Yes, by Kiel." Then there came a man who wanted three kroner more because my trunk was heavy, and another who wanted a few pfennigs for having helped the first one lift it. I tried for a minute to count out the sum he had mentioned, and then I said, "Oh, good gracious, take it all!" emptying the few little coppers and tiny silver bits—which I knew must be, all told, not a quarter of a dollar—into his hand. He said something which, in my innocence, I supposed was thanks, but Brita told me afterwards that he was a "fearfully rough man, and what he said was to call me a 'damned German devil!' You see, ma'am, they all hate the Germans so, and hearing me speak English, he thought it was German. The French, too, ma'am,—they hate the Germans too. They say that Sara Bernhardt,—I dare say you've seen her, ma'am,—they say she nearly starved herself all in her travelling through Germany, because she wouldn't eat the German food."

At the train to see me off were two dear warm-hearted Danish women,—mother and daughter,—to whom I had brought a letter from friends in America. With barely time to thank them and say good-by, I and my old lady and her bundle and my own three parcels were all hustled into a carriage, the door slammed and locked, and we were off. Then I sank back and considered the situation. I had fancied that all that was necessary was to have a person who could speak,—that if I had but a tongue at my command, it would answer my purposes almost as well in another person's head as in my own. But I was fast learning my mistake. This good old woman, who had never been out of Denmark in her life, had no more idea which way to turn or what to do in a railway station than a baby. The first five minutes of our journey had shown that. She stood, bundles in hand, her bonnet falling off the back of her head, her crape shawl clinging limp to her figure; her face full of nervous uncertainty,—the very ideal of a bewildered old woman, such as one always sees at railway stations. The thought of being taken charge of, all the way from Copenhagen to Munich, by this type of elderly female, was, at the outset, awful; but very soon the comical side of it came over me so thoroughly that I began to think it would, on the whole, be more entertaining.

When she had told me the day before, as we were driving about in Copenhagen, that she had never in her life been out of Denmark, though she was sixty-four years old, I said, "Really that is a strange thing,—for you to be taking your first journey at that age."

"Oh, well, ma'am," she said, "I'm such a child of Nature that I shall enjoy it as much as if I were younger, and I've all the Danish history, ma'am, at my tongue's end, ma'am. There's nothing I can't tell you, ma'am. Though we've been very hard-working, I've always been one that was for making all I could: and I've been with my children at their lessons always,—we gave them all good schooling; and I've a volume of Danish poetry I've written, ma'am,—a volume that thick," marking off at least two inches on her finger.

"Danish?" said I. "Why did you not write it in English?"

"Well, ma'am, being raised here, the Danish tongue is more my own, much as I spoke English always till my parents died; but I'll write some in English for you, ma'am, before we part."

So I had for the third time alighted on a poet. "Birds of a feather," thought I to myself; but it really is extraordinary. Norwegian, Dane—I wonder, if I take a German maid to carry me to Oberammergau, if she also will turn out "a child of Nature" and a scribbler of verses.

The way from Copenhagen southward and westward by land is delightful. It plunges immediately into a rich farming-country, level as an Illinois prairie, and with comfortable farm-houses set in enclosures of trees, as they are there; and I presume for the same reason,—to break the force of the winds which might sweep from one end of Denmark to the other, without so much as a hillock to stay them: no fences, only hedges, and great tracts without even a hedge, marked off and divided by differing colors from the different crops. The second crop of clover was in full flower; acres of wheat or barley, just being sheaved; wagons piled full, rolling down shaded roads with long lines of trees on each side. Roeskilde, Ringsted, Soro,—three towns, but seemingly only one great farm, for seventeen miles out of Copenhagen. Then we began to smell the salt water, and to get a fresh breeze in at the windows; and presently we came to Kosör, where we were to take boat. A big man in uniform stood at the door of the station, looked at our tickets, said "Kiel," and waved his hand toward a little steamer lying at the dock.

"They say they fear it will be rough, ma'am, as the wind is from the southeast," said the old lady.

"Oh, well," said I, "it is only an hour and a half across. We cross the Big Belt to Nyborg."

She accepted my statement as confidingly as a child, and we made ourselves comfortable on the upper deck. It was half-past nine o'clock. I took out my guide-book and studied up the descriptions of the different towns we were to pass through after our next landing. A green dome-like island came into sight, with a lighthouse on top, looking like the stick at the top of a haystack. "That's in the middle of the Belt, ma'am," said Brita. "In the winter many's the time the passengers across here have to land there and stay a day, or maybe two; and sometimes they come on the ice-boats. Very dangerous they are; they pull them on the ice, and if the ice breaks, jump in and row them."

It seemed to me that we were bearing strangely to the south: land was disappearing from view; the waves grew bigger and higher; spray dashed on the deck; white-caps tossed in all directions.

"I believe we are going out to sea," said I.

"It does look like it, ma'am," replied the "child of Nature." "Shall I go and ask?"

"Yes," I replied, "go and ask." She returned with consternation in every line of her aged face.

"Oh, ma'am, it's strange they should have told you so wrong. We're on this boat till four in the afternoon."

And so we were, and a half-hour to boot, owing to the southeast wind which was dead ahead all the way. Everybody was ill,—my poor old protectress most of all, and for the first time in her life.

"Oh, ma'am, I did not think it could be like this," she gasped. "I never did feel so awful." I sat grimly still in one spot on the deck all that day. What a day it was! About noon it occurred to me that some grapes would be a relief to my misery. Opening the basket and taking out the bag in which the English-speaking waiter had told me were my grapes, I put in my hand and drew out—a hard, corky, tasteless pear! Thanks to the southeast wind, we came a half-hour late to Kiel, and thereby missed the train to Lubeck which we should have taken, waited two hours and a half in the station, and then had to take three different trains one after the other, and pay an extra fare on each one; how we ever stumbled through I don't know, but we did, and at half-past eleven we were in Lubeck, safe and sound, and not more than three quarters dead! and I shall laugh whenever I think of it as long as I live.

Lubeck is an old town, well worth several days' study; and the Stadt Hamburg is a comfortable house to sleep and be fed in. You can have a mutton-chop there, and that is a thing hard to find in Germany; and you can have your mutton-chop brought to you by an "English-speaking" waiter who speaks English; and you may have it delicately served in your own room, or in a pretty dining-room, or on a front porch, walled in thick by oleander-trees, ten and fifteen feet high,—a lustrous wall of green, through which you have glimpses of such old gables and high peaked roofs, red-tiled, and scooped into queer curves, as I do not know elsewhere except in Nuremberg. It all dates back to 1100 and 1200, and thereabouts,—which does not sound so very old to you when you have just come from Norway, where a thing is not ancient unless it dates back to somewhere near Christ's time; but for a mediæval town, Lubeck has a fine flavor of antiquity about it. It has some splendid old gateways, and plenty of old houses, two-thirds roof, one-third gable, and four-fifths dormer-window, with door-posts and corners carved in the leisurely way peculiar to that time. Really, one would think a man must have his house ordered before he was born, to have got it done in time to die in, in those days. I have speculated very much about this problem, and it puzzles me yet. So many of these old houses look as if it must have taken at least the years of one generation to have made the carvings on them; perhaps the building and ornamentation of the house was a thing handed down from father to son and to son's son, like famous games of chess. Nothing less than this seems to me to explain the elaboration of fine hand-wrought decorations in the way of carving and tapestries, which were the chief splendors of splendid living in those old times. There is a room in the Merchants' Exchange in Lubeck, which is entirely walled and ceiled with carved wood-work taken out of an ancient house belonging to one of Lubeck's early burgomasters. These carvings were done in 1585 by "an unknown master," and were recently transferred to this room to preserve them. The panels of wood alternate with panels of exquisitely wrought alabaster; two rows of these around the room. There were old cupboard doors, now firmly fastened on the wall, never to swing again; and one panel, with a group of wood-carvers at work, said—or guessed—to be the portraits of the carver and his assistants. The old shutters are there,—each decorated with a group, or single figure,—every face as expressive as if it were painted in oil by a master's hand. Every inch of the wall is wrought into some form of decorations; the ceiling is carved into great squares, with alabaster knobs at the intersections; a superb chandelier of ancient Venetian glass hangs in the middle; and the new room stands to-day exactly as the old one stood in the grand old burgomaster's day. It is kept insured by the Merchants' Guild for $30,000, but twice that sum could not replace it. The Merchants' Guild of Lubeck must contain true art-lovers; a large room opening from this one has also finely carved walls, and a frieze of the old burgomasters' portraits, and another fine Venetian glass chandelier, two centuries old. Through the window I caught a glimpse of a spiral stair outside the building; it wound in short turns, and the iron balustrade was a wall of green vines; it looked like the stair to the chamber of a princess, but it was only the outside way to another room where the Merchants held their sittings.

The largest of the Lubeck churches is the Church of Saint Mary. This was built so big, it is said, simply to outdo the cathedral in size, the Lubeck citizens being determined to have their church bigger than the bishop's. The result is three hundred and thirty-five feet of a succession of frightful rococo things, enough to drive the thought of worship out of any head that has eyes in it. The exterior is fine, being of the best style of twelfth-century brick-work, and there are some fine and interesting things to be seen inside; but the general effect of the interior is indescribably hideous, with huge grotesque carvings in black and white marble and painted wood, at every pillar of the arches. In one of the chapels is a series of paintings, ascribed to Holbein,—"The Dance of Death." It is a ghastly picture, with a certain morbid fascination about it,—a series of fantastic figures, alternating with grim skeleton figures of Death. The emperor, the pope, the king and queen, the law-giver, the merchant, the peasant, the miser,—all are there, hand in hand with the grim, grappling, leaping skeleton, who will draw them away. Under each figure is a stanza of verse representing his excuse for delay, his reply to Death,—all in vain. This chapel had the most uncanny fascination to my companion.

"Oh, ma'am! oh, indeed, ma'am, it is too true!" she exclaimed, walking about, and peering through her spectacles at each motto. "It is all the same for the pope and the emperor. Death calls us all; and we all would like to stay a little longer."

By a fine bronze reclining statue of one of the old bishops she lingered. "Is it not wonderful, ma'am, the pride there is in this poor world?" she said. The reflection seemed to me a very just one, as I too looked at the old man lying there in his mitre, with the sacred wafer ostentatiously held in one hand, and his crosier in the other; every inch of him, and of the great bronze slab on which he lay, wrought as exquisitely as the finest etching.

At twelve o'clock every day a crowd gathers in this church to see a procession of little figures come out of the huge clock; the Lubeck people, it seems, never tire of this small miracle. It must be acknowledged that it is a droll sight: but one would think, seeing that there are only forty thousand people in the town, that there would now and then be a day without a crowd; yet the sacristan said, that, rain or shine, every day, the little chapel was full at the striking of the first stroke of twelve. The show is on the back of the clock, which detracts very much from its effect. At the instant of twelve a tiny white statue lifted its arm, struck a hammer on the bell twelve times; at the first stroke a door opened, and out came a procession of eight figures, called the Emperor and the Electors; each glided around the circle, paused in the middle, made a jerky bow to the figure of Christ in the centre, and then disappeared in a door in the other side, which closed after them. The figures seemed only a few inches tall at that great height; and the whole thing like part of a Punch and Judy show, and quite in keeping with the rococo ornaments on the pillars. But the crowd gazed as devoutly as if it had been the elevation of the Host itself; and I hurried away, fearing that they might resent the irreverent look on my countenance.

There are some carved brass tablets which are superb, and a curious old altar-piece, with doors opening after doors, like a succession of wardrobes, one inside the other, the first doors painted on the inside, the second also painted, and disclosing, on being opened, a series of wonderful wood carvings of Scriptural scenes, these opening out again and showing still others; a fine canopy of wrought wood above them, as delicate as filigree. These are disfigured, as so many of the exquisite wood carvings of this time are, by being painted in grotesque colors; but the carving is marvellous. The thing that interested me most in this church was a tiny little stone mouse carved at the base of one of the pillars. You might go all your life to that church and never see it. I searched for it long before I found it. It is a tiny black mouse gnawing at the root of an oak; and some old stone-worker put it in there six hundred years ago, because it was the ancient emblem of the city. There was also a line of old saints and apostles carved on the ends of the pews, that were fine; a Saint Christopher with the child on his shoulder that I would have liked to filch and carry away.

In the Jacobi Kirche—a church not quite so old—is a remarkable old altar, which a rich burgomaster hit on the device of bestowing on the church and immortalizing his own family in it at the same time. To make it all right for the church, he had the scene of the crucifixion carved in stone for the centre; then on the doors, which must be thrown back to show this stone carving, he had himself and his family painted. And I venture to say that the event justifies his expectations; for one looks ten minutes at the burgomaster's sons and daughters and wife for one at the stone carving inside. It is a family group not to be forgotten,—the burgomaster and his five sons behind him on one door, and his wife with her five daughters in front of her on the other door. They are all kneeling, so as to seem to be adoring the central figures,—all but the burgomaster's wife, who stands tall and stately, stiff in gold brocade, with a missal in one hand and a long feather in the other; a high cap of the same brocade, flying sleeves at the shoulder, and a long bodice in front complete the dame's array. Three of the daughters wear high foolscaps of white; white robes trimmed with ermine, falling from the back of the neck, thrown open to show fine scarlet gowns, with bodices laced over white, and coming down nearly to their knees in front. Two little things in long-sleeved dark-green gowns—"not out" yet, I suppose—kneel modestly in front; and a nun and a saint or a Virgin Mary are thrown into the group to make it holy. The burgomaster is in a black fur-trimmed robe, kneeling with a book open before him,—the very model of a Pharisee at family prayers,—his five sons kneeling behind him in scarlet robes trimmed with dark fur.

The sacristan said something in German to Brita, which she instantly translated to me as "Oh, ma'am, to think of it! They're all buried here under our very feet, ma'am,—the whole family! And they'd to leave all that finery behind them, didn't they, ma'am?" The thought of their actual dust being under our feet at that moment seemed to make the family portraits much more real. I dare say that burgomaster never did anything worthy of being remembered in all his life; but he has hit on a device which will secure him and his race a place in the knowledge of men for centuries to come.

In the Rathhaus—which is one of the quaintest buildings in Lubeck—there is an odd old chimney-piece. It is downstairs, in what one would call vaults, except that they are used for the rooms of a restaurant. It has been for centuries a Lubeck custom that when a couple have been married in the Church of Saint Mary (which adjoins the Rathhaus), they should come into this room to drink their first winecup together; and, by way of giving a pleasant turn to things for the bridegroom, the satirical old wood-carvers wrought a chimney-piece for this room with a cock on one side, a hen on the other, the Israelitish spies bearing the huge bunch of the over-rated grapes of Eshcol between them, and in the centre below it this motto: "Many a man sings loudly when they bring him his bride. If he knew what they brought him, he might well weep." It is an odd thing how universally, when this sort of slur upon marriage is aimed at, it is the man's disappointment which is set forth or predicted, and not the woman's. It is a very poor rule, no doubt; but it may at least be said to "work both ways." There used to be an underground passage-way by which they came from the church into this room, but it is shut up now. While we sat waiting in the outer hall upstairs for the janitor to come and show us this room, a bridal couple came down and passed out to their carriage,—plain people of the working class. She wore a black alpaca gown, and had no bridal sign or symptom about her, except the green myrtle wreath on her head. But few brides look happier than she did.

The Rathhaus makes one side of the Market-place, which was, like all market-places, picturesque at eleven in the morning, dirty and dismal at four in the afternoon. I drove through it several times in the course of the forenoon; and at last the women came to know me, and nodded and smiled as we passed. Their hats were wonderful to see,—cocked up on top of a neat white cap, with its frill all at the back and none in front; the hats shaped—well, nobody could say how they were shaped—like half a washbowl bent up, with the little round centre rim left in behind! I wonder if that gives an idea to anybody who has not seen the hat. The real wonder, however, was not in the shape, but in the material. They are made of wood,—actually of wood,—split up into the finest threads, and sewed like straw; and the women make them themselves. All the vegetable women had theirs bound with bright green, with long green loops hanging down behind; but the fishwomen had theirs bound with narrow black binding round the edge, lined with purple calico, and with black ribbon at the back. Finally, after staring a dozen of the good souls out of countenance looking at their heads, I bought one of the bonnets outright! It was the cleanest creature ever seen that sold it to me. She pulled it off her head, and sold it as readily as she would have sold me a dozen eels out of her basket; and I carried it on my arm all the way from Lubeck to Cassel, and from Cassel to Munich, to the great bewilderment of many railway officials and travellers. Before I had concluded my bargain there was a crowd ten deep all around the carriage. Everybody—men, women, children—left their baskets and stalls, and came to look on. I believe I could have bought the entire wardrobe of the whole crowd, if I had so wished,—so eager and pleased did they look, talking volubly with each other, and looking at me. It was a great occasion for Brita, who harangued them all by instalments from the front seat, and explained to them that the bonnet was going all the way to America, and that her "lady" had a great liking for all "national" things, which touched one old lady's patriotism so deeply that she pulled off her white cap and offered it to me, making signs that my wooden bonnet was incomplete without the cap, as it certainly was. On Brita's delicately calling her attention to the fact that her cap was far from clean, she said she would go home and wash it and flute it afresh, if the lady would only buy it; and three hours later she actually appeared with it most exquisitely done up, and not at all dear for the half-dollar she asked for it. After buying this bonnet I drove back to the hotel with it, ate my lunch in the oleander-shaded porch, and then set off again to see the cathedral. This proved to me a far more interesting church than Saint Mary's, though the guide-books say that Saint Mary's is far the finer church of the two. There is enough ugliness in both of them, for that matter, to sink them. But in the cathedral there are some superb bronzes and brasses, and a twisted iron railing around the pulpit, which is so marvellous in its knottings and twistings that a legend has arisen that the devil made it.

"How very much they seem to have made of the devil in the olden time, ma'am, do they not?" remarked Brita, entirely unconscious of the fact that she was philosophizing; "wherever we have been, there have been so many things named in his honor!"

The clock in this church has not been deemed worthy of mention in the guide-books; but it seemed to me far more wonderful than the one at Saint Mary's. I shall never forget it as long as I live; in fact, I fear I shall live to wish I could. The centre of the dial plate is a huge face of gilt, with gilt rays streaming out from it; two enormous eyes in this turn from side to side as the clock ticks, right, left, right, left, so far each time that it is a squint,—a horrible, malignant, diabolical squint. It seems almost irreverent even to tell you that this is to symbolize the never-closing eye of God. The uncanny fascination of these rolling eyes cannot be described. It is too hideous to look at, yet you cannot look away. I sat spellbound in a pew under it for a long time. On the right hand of the clock stands a figure representing the "Genius of Time." This figure holds a gold hammer in its hand, and strikes the quarter-hours. On the other side stands Death,—a naked skeleton,—with an hour-glass. At each hour he turns his hour-glass, shakes his head, and with a hammer in his right hand strikes the hour. I heard him strike "three," and I confess a superstitious horror affected me. The thought of a congregation of people sitting Sunday after Sunday looking at those rolling eyes, and seeing that skeleton strike the hour and turn his hour-glass, is monstrous. Surely there was an epidemic in those middle ages of hideous and fantastic inventions. I am not at all sure that it has not stamped its impress on the physiognomy of the German nation. I never see a crowd of Germans at a railway station without seeing in dozens of faces resemblance to ugly gargoyles. And why should it not have told on them? The women of old Greece brought forth beautiful sons and daughters, it is said, because they looked always on beautiful statues and pictures. The German women have been for a thousand years looking at grotesque and leering or coarse and malignant gargoyles carved everywhere,—on the gateways of their cities, in their churches, on the very lintels of their houses. Why should not the German face have been slowly moulded by these prenatal influences?

Above this malevolent clock was a huge scaffold beam, crossing the entire width of the church, and supporting four huge figures, carved with some skill; the most immodest Adam and Eve I ever beheld; a bishop and a Saint John and a Mary,—these latter kneeling in adoration of a crucifixion above. The whole combination—the guilty Adam and Eve, the pompous bishop, the repulsive crucifixion, the puppet clock with its restless eyes and skeleton, and the loud tick-tock, tick-tock, of the pendulum,—all made up a scene of grotesqueness and irreverence mingled with superstition and devotion, such as could not be found anywhere except in a German church of the twelfth century. It was a relief to turn from it and go into the little chapel, where stands the altar-piece made sacred as well as famous by the hands of that tender spiritual painter, Memling. These altar-pieces look at first sight so much like decorated wardrobes that it is jarring. I wish they had fashioned them otherwise. In this one, for instance, it is almost a pain to see on the outside doors of what apparently is a cupboard one of Memling's angels (the Gabriel) and the Mary listening to his message. Throwing these doors back, you see life-size figures of four saints,—John, Jerome, Blasius, and Ægidius. The latter is a grand dark figure, with a head and face to haunt one. Opening these doors again, you come to the last,—a landscape with the crucifixion in the foreground, and other scenes from the Passion of the Saviour. This is less distinctively Memling-like; in fact, the only ones of them all which one would be willing to say positively no man's hand but Memling's had touched, are the two tender angels in white on the outside shutters.

We left Lubeck very early in the morning. As we drove to the station, the milkmen and milkwomen were coming in, in their pretty carts, full of white wooden firkins, brass bound, with queer long spouts out on one side; brass measures of different sizes, and brass dippers, all shining as if they had been fresh scoured that very morning, made the carts a pretty spectacle. And the last thing of all which I stopped to look at in Lubeck was the best of all,—an old house with a turreted bay-window on the corner, and this inscription on the front between the first and second stories of the house:—

"North and south, the world is wide:

East and west, home is best."

It was in Platt Deutsch; and oddly enough, the servant of the house, who was at the door, did not know what it meant; and the first two men we asked did not know what it meant,—stared at it stupidly, shrugged their shoulders, and shook their heads. It was a lovely motto for a house, but not a good one for wanderers away from home to look at. It brought a sudden sense of homesickness, like an odor of a flower or a bar of music which has an indissoluble link with home.

It took a whole day to go from Lubeck to Cassel, but the day did not seem long. It was a series of pictures, and poor Brita's raptures over it all were at once amusing and pathetic. As soon as we began to see elevated ground, she became excited. "Oh, oh, ma'am," she exclaimed, "talk about scenery in Denmark! It is too flat. I am so used to the flat country, the least hill is beautiful." "Do you not call this grand?" she would say, at the sight of a hill a hundred or two feet high. It was a good lesson of the meaning of the word relative. After all, one can hardly conceive what it must be to live sixty-four years on a dead level of flatness. A genuine mountain would probably be a terror to a person who had led such a life. Brita's face, when I told her that I lived at the foot of mountains more than twelve times as high as any she had seen, was a study for incredulity and wonder. I think she thought I was lying. It was the hay harvest. All the way from Lubeck to Cassel were men and women, all hard at work in the fields; the women swung their scythes as well as the men, but looked more graceful while raking. Some wore scarlet handkerchiefs over their heads, some white; all had bare legs well in sight. At noon we saw them in groups on the ground, and towards night walking swiftly along the roads, with their rakes over their shoulders. I do not understand why travellers make such a to-do always about the way women work in the fields in Germany. I am sure they are far less to be pitied than the women who work in narrow, dark, foul streets of cities; and they look a thousand times healthier. Our road lay for many hours through a beautiful farm country: red brick houses and barns with high thatched roofs, three quarters of the whole building being thatched roof; great sweeps of meadow, tracts of soft pines, kingdoms of beeches,—the whole forest looking like a rich yellow brown moss in the distance, and their mottled trunks fairly shining out in the cross sunbeams, as if painted; wide stretches of brown opens, with worn paths leading off across them; hedges everywhere, and never a fence or a wall; mountain-ash trees, scarlet full; horse-chestnuts by orchards; towns every few minutes, and our train halting at them all long enough for the whole town to make up their minds whether they could go or not, pack their bags, and come on board; bits of marsh, with labyrinths of blue water in and out in it, so like tongues of the sea that, forgetting where I was, I said, "I wonder if that is fresh water." "It must be, ma'am," replied the observant Brita, "inasmuch as the white lilies are floating beautiful and large in it."

"Oh," she suddenly ejaculated, "how strange it was! Napoleon III. he thought he would get a good bit of this beautiful Germany for a birthday present, and be in Berlin on his birthday; and instead of that the Prussians were in Berlin on his birthday."

At Lüneburg we came into the heather. I thought I knew heather, but I was to discover my mistake. All the heather of my life heretofore—English, Scotch, Norwegian—had been no more than a single sprig by the side of this. "The dreary Lüneburg Heath," the discriminating Baedeker calls it. The man who wrote that phrase must have been not only color-blind, he must have been color-dead! If a mountain is "dreary" when it turns purple pink or pink purple five minutes before the rising sun is going to flash full on its eastern front, then the Lüneburg Heath is "dreary." Acres of heather, miles of heather; miles after miles, hour after hour, of swift railroad riding, and still heather! The purple and the pink and the browns into which the purple and pink blended and melted, shifted every second, and deepened and paled in the light and the shadow, as if the earth itself were gently undulating. Two or three times, down vistas among the low birches, I saw men up to their knees in the purple, apparently reaping it with a sickle. A German lady in the car explained that they cut it to strew in the sheep-stalls for the sheep to sleep on, and that the sheep ate it: bed, bed-blanket, and breakfast all in one! Who would not be a sheep? Here and there were little pine groves in this heath; the pine and the birch being the only trees which can keep any footing against heather when it sets out to usurp a territory, and even they cannot grow large or freely. Three storks rose from these downs as we passed, and flew slowly away, their great yellow feet shining as if they had on gold slippers.

"The country people reckon it a great blessing, ma'am, if a stork will build its nest on their roof," said Brita. "I dare say it is thought so in America the same." "No, Brita, we have no storks in America," I said. "I dare say some other bird, then, you hold the same," she replied, in a tone so taking it for granted that no nation of people could be without its sacred domestic bird that I was fain to fall back on the marten as our nearest approach to such a bird; and I said boastfully that we built houses for them in our yards, that they never built on roofs.

At Celle, when she caught sight of the castle where poor Caroline Matilda died, she exclaimed, "Oh, ma'am, that is where our poor queen died. It was the nasty Queen Dowager did it; it was, indeed, ma'am. And the king had opened the ball with her that very night that he signed the order to send her away. They took her in her ball-dress, just as she was. If they had waited till morning the Danes would have torn her out of the wagon, for they worshipped her. She screamed for her baby, and they just tossed it to her in the wagon; and she was only twenty."

Pages of guide-book could not have so emphasized the tragedy of that old gray castle as did Brita's words and her tearful eyes, and "nasty old Queen Dowager." I suppose the truth will never be known about that poor young queen; history whiffles round so from century to century that it seems hardly worth while to mind about it. At any rate, it can't matter much to either Caroline or Struensee, her lover, now.

Cassel at nine o'clock. Friendly faces and voices and hands, and the very air of America in every room. It was like a dream; and like a dream vanished, after twenty-four hours of almost unceasing talk and reminiscence and interchange. "Blessings brighten," even more than "when they take their flight," when they pause in their flight long enough for us to come up with them and take another look at them.

Cassel is the healthiest town in all Germany; and when you see it you do not wonder. High and dry and clear, and several hundred feet up above the plain, it has off-looks to wide horizons in all directions. To the east and south are beautiful curves of high hills, called mountains here; thickly wooded, so that they make solid spaces of color, dark green or purple or blue, according to the time calendar of colors of mountains at a distance. (They have their time-tables as fixed as railway trains, and much more to be depended on.) There is no town in Germany which can compare with Cassel as a home for people wishing to educate children cheaply and well, and not wishing to live in the fashions and ways and close air of cities. It has a picture-gallery second to only one in Germany; it has admirable museums of all sorts; it has a first-rate theatre; good masters in all branches of study are to be had at low rates; living is cheap and comfortable (for Germany). The water is good; the climate also (for Germany); and last, not least, the surrounding country is full of picturesque scenery,—woods, high hills, streams; just such a region as a lover of Nature finds most repaying and enjoyable. In the matter of society, also, Cassel is especially favored, having taken its tone from the days of the Electors, and keeping still much of the old fine breeding of culture and courtesy.

It is a misfortune to want to go from Cassel to Munich in one day. It can be done; but it takes fourteen hours of very hard work,—three changes,—an hour's waiting at one place, and half an hour at another, and the road for the last half of the day so rough that it could honestly be compared to nothing except horseback riding over bowlders at a rapid rate. This is from Gemunden to Munich: if there is any other way of getting there, I think nobody would go by this; so I infer that there is not. You must set off, also, at the unearthly hour of 5 A.M.,—an hour at which all virtues ooze out of one; even honesty out of cabmen, as I found at Cassel, when a man to whom I had paid four marks—more than twice the regular fare—for bringing us a five minutes' distance to the railway station, absolutely had the face to ask three marks more. Never did I so long for a command of the German tongue. I only hope that the docile Brita translated for me literally what I said, as I handed him twelve cents more, with, "I gave one dollar because you had to get up so early in the morning. You know very well that even half that sum is more than the price at ordinary times. I will give you this fifty pfennigs for yourself, and not another pfennig do you get!" I wish that the man that invented the word pfennig had to "do a pour of it for one tousand year," as dear old Dr. Pröhl said of the teapot that would not pour without spilling. I think it is the test-word of the German language. The nearest direction I could give for pronouncing it would be: fill your mouth with hasty-pudding, then say purr-f-f-f-f-f, and then gulp the pudding and choke when you come to the g,—that's a pfennig; and the idea of such a name as that for a contemptible thing of which it takes one hundred to make a quarter of a dollar! They do them up in big nickel pieces too,—heavy, and so large that in the dark you always mistake them for something else. Ten hundredths of a quarter!—you could starve with your purse loaded down with them.

In the station, trudging about as cheerily as if they were at home, was a poor family,—father, mother, and five little children,—evidently about to emigrate. Each carried a big bundle; even the smallest toddler had her parcel tied up in black cloth with a big cord. The mother carried the biggest bundle of all,—a baby done up in a bedquilt, thick as a comforter; the child's head was pinned in tight as its feet,—not one breath of air could reach it.

"Going to America, ma'am," said Brita, "I think they must be. Oh, ma'am, there was five hundred sailed in one ship for America, last summer,—all to be Mormons; and the big fellow that took them, with his gold spectacles, I could have killed him. They'll be wretched enough when they come to find what they've done. Brigham Young's dead, but there must be somebody in his place that's carrying it on the same. They'd not be allowed to stay in Denmark, ma'am,—oh, no, they've got to go out of the country."

All day again we journeyed through the hay harvest,—the same picturesque farm-houses, with their high roofs thatched or dark-tiled, their low walls white or red or pink, marked off into odd-shaped intervals by lattice-work of wood; no fences, no walls; only the coloring to mark divisions of crops. Town after town snugged round its church; the churches looked like hens with their broods gathered close around them, just ready to go under the wings. We had been told that we need not change cars all the way to Munich; so, of course, we had to change three times,—bundled out at short notice, at the last minute, to gather ourselves up as we might. In one of these hurried changes I dropped my stylographic pen. Angry as I get with the thing when I am writing with it, my very heart was wrung with sorrow at its loss. Without much hope of ever seeing it again, I telegraphed for it. The station-master who did the telegraphing was profoundly impressed by Brita's description of the "wonderful instrument" I had lost. "A self-writing pen,"—she called it. I only wish it were! "You shall hear at the next station if it has been found," he said. Sure enough, at the very next station the guard came to the door. "Found and will be sent," he said; and from that on he regarded me with a sort of awe-stricken look whenever he entered the car. I believe he considered me a kind of female necromancer from America! and no wonder, with two self-writing pens in my possession, for luckily I had my No. 2 in my travelling-bag to show as sample of what I had lost.

At Elm we came into a fine hilly region,—hills that had to be tunnelled or climbed over by zigzags; between them were beautiful glimpses of valleys and streams. Brita was nearly beside herself, poor soul! Her "Oh's" became something tragic. "Oh, ma'am, it needs no judge to see that God has been here!" she cried. "We must think on the Building-Master when we see such scenery as this."

As we came out on the broader plains, the coloring of the villages grew colder; unlatticed white walls, and a colder gray to the roofs, the groups of houses no longer looked like crowds of furry creatures nestled close for protection. Some rollicking school girls, with long hair flying, got into our carriage, and chattered, and ate cake, and giggled; the cars rocked us to and fro on our seats as if we were in a saddle on a run-away horse in a Colorado cañon. All the rough roads I have ever been on have been smooth gliding in comparison with this. At nine o'clock, Munich, and a note from the dear old "Fraulein" to say that her house was full, but she had rooms engaged for me near by. The next day I went to see her, and found her the same old inimitable dear as ever,—the eyes and the smile not a day older, and the drollery and the mimicry all there; but, alas! old age has come creeping too close not to hurt in some ways, and an ugly rheumatism prevents her from walking and gives her much pain. I had hoped she could go to Oberammergau with me; but it is out of the question. At night she sent over to me the loveliest basket of roses and forget-me-nots and mignonette, with a card, "Good-night, my dear lady,—I kiss you;" and I am not too proud to confess that I read it with tears in my eyes. The dear, faithful, loving soul!