Footnotes:
[1] The full story may be read in the “History of Hudson County,” where my friend, Rev. R. Andersen, of the Danish church in Brooklyn, an indefatigable delver, unearthed this chip of the old block.
[2] Fanö and Manö are the two islands just outside the Old Town.
[3] About one hundred dollars.
[4] The Madam—Patched before and behind.
[5] The old building was a hospital for centuries after the Reformation drove out the monks, and for a season served as an insane asylum. We children used to steal up to the tarred board fence that enclosed its grounds and, gluing our eyes to a knot hole, shudder deliciously at the sight of the poor wretches. It was eventually turned into an Old Ladies Home, and the name of the “Cloister” was restored to it.
[6] The Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, New York.
[7] The reader who is not afraid of dyspepsia by suggestion may consider the following Christmas bill of fare which obtained among the peasants east of the Old Town: On a large trencher a layer of pork and ribs, on top of that a nest of fat sausages, in which sat a roast duck.
[8] An unromantic variation of this was the belief that the farmer who left his plough out on Christmas would get a drubbing from his wife within a twelvemonth. I hope whoever held to that got what he richly deserved.
[9] The Church of Our Lady was its official title.
[10] My father’s friend, Pastor Fejlberg, who, as a village parson just outside the Old Town, lived the life of the country folk and recorded it with sympathetic understanding, is my authority. I remember him telling a story which only last winter one of his old “boys” recalled to me in California. It was of the village tailor, who, coming home in the small hours of the morning, the worse for many deep potations of the strong mead at the inn, was beset by a ghost that would not let him go. In vain did he try to shake it off at cross-road after cross-road. They all ran like this ✗, and had no power over the children of darkness. The spectre still pursued him, shrieking in ghoulish glee over his failure. Not until he came to two roads that crossed at right angles, forming a true ✚, did he beat it off. There it could not pass, and he got home safe; let us hope, sobered also.
[11] Which reminds me of a lesson in manners I once received from the gudewife of a neighboring farm. It was in the days when the farmer and his hands all ate out of the same dish, each with his own horn spoon, which he afterward licked clean and stuck up under the beam until the next meal. I had never been away from home and had “notions” that made me decline a mellemmad (sandwich) when she brought it to me in her honest hand. She took in the situation, and after serving the other children, handed me my mellemmad with the fire-tongs, all sooty from the chimney.
[12] Meaning islands.
[13] Tvebak is Danish for Zwieback.
[14] The “cleric’s” or “clerk’s ditch” that skirted the monks’ garden in the old days. The garden is still there, and traces of the ditch.
[15] The Ribe House, or Ribe Castle.
[16] Green Street, the street leading to the Green where the castle stood.
[17] Of her three sons, Abel slew his brother Erik for the crown, and was himself slain by a peasant in the highway. His body was buried in a swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his grievous ghost. Christopher, who took the sceptre last, was poisoned by a monk in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the Domkirke; and in the division of the kingdom between the brothers that gave cause for their quarrels, began Denmark’s woes, which in our own day culminated in her dismemberment, when Germany took Slesvig, Abel’s dukedom. Queen Bengerd herself was the worst-hated woman in Danish history, as Dagmar is yet the best-beloved. In death the people’s hatred would not let her rest. When her grave was opened in my boyhood, it was found that the stone slab which covered it had been pried off and a round boulder dropped in the place made for her head. Yet her beautiful black braid was there, and the skull, so delicate in its perfect oval, that those who saw it marvelled greatly.
[18] It is upon his “History of Ribe Town,” in two stout volumes, that I have drawn in these sketches for the ancient records that enliven its pages.
[19] The river was included, I suppose; at all events, it contributed to his revenues. An old law provided that whoever polluted the stream by throwing any uncleanness into it should lose his life. The Thirteenth Century had a curious way of anticipating the things upon which the Twentieth prides itself with much vaunting. We cry out against water pollution; they prohibited it. It is easy to understand that there were no sewers in Ribe.
[20] The summer of 1904, the year of our home-coming.
[21] October 11-12, 1634. The worst flood in Danish history. Over twenty-two thousand persons perished in it, all along the coast. In one village hard by Ribe—Melby—only one young man was left alive.
By JACOB A. RIIS