That night there was a great to-do in the old town. The target company had its annual shoot, and the target company included all of the solid citizens of the town. The "king," who had made the best score, was escorted with a band to the hotel on the square opposite the Dom, and made a speech from a window, adorned with the green sash of his office, and flanked by ten tallow dips by way of illumination. And the people cheered. Yes! it was petty and provincial and all that. But it was pleasant and neighborly, and oh! how good for a tired man.
When I was rested, I journeyed through the islands to find old friends, and found them. The heartiness of the welcome that met me everywhere! No need of their telling me they were glad to see me. It shone out of their faces and all over them. I shall always remember that journey: the people in the cars that were forever lunching and urging me to join in, though we had never met before. Were we not fellow-travellers? How, then, could we be strangers? And when they learned I was from New York, the inquiries after Hans or Fritz, somewhere in Nebraska or Dakota. Had I ever met them? and, if I did, would I tell them I had seen father, mother, or brother, and that they were well? And would I come and stay with them a day or two? It was with very genuine regret that I had mostly to refuse. My vacation could not last forever. As it was, I packed it full enough to last me for many summers. Of all sorts of things, too. Shall I ever forget that ride on the stage up the shore-road from Elsinore, which I made outside with the driver, a slow-going farmer who had conscientious scruples, so it seemed, against passing any vehicle on the road and preferred to take the dust of them all, until we looked like a pair of dusty millers up there on the box. To my protests he turned an incredulous ear, remarking only that there was always some one ahead, which was a fact. When at last we drew near our destination he found himself a passenger short. After some puzzled inquiry of the rest he came back and, mounting to his seat beside me, said quietly: "One of them fell out on his head, they say, down the road. I had him to deliver at the inn, but it can't be blamed on me, can it?"
He was not the only philosopher in that company. Inside rode two passengers, one apparently an official, sheriff, or something, the other a doctor, who debated all the way the propriety of uniforming the physician in attendance upon executions. The sheriff evidently considered such a step an invasion of his official privilege. "Why," cried the doctor, "it is almost impossible now to tell the difference between the doctor and the delinquent." "Ah, well," sighed the other, placidly settling back in his seat. "Just let them once take the wrong man, then we shall see."
Through forest and field, over hill and vale, by the still waters where far islands lay shimmering upon the summer sea like floating fairy-lands, into the deep, gloomy moor went my way. The moor was ever most to my liking. I was born on the edge of it, and once its majesty has sunk into a human soul, that soul is forever after attuned to it. How little we have the making of ourselves. And how much greater the need that we should make of that little the most. All my days I have been preaching against heredity as the arch-enemy of hope and effort, and here is mine, holding me fast. When I see, rising out of the dark moor, the lonely cairn that sheltered the bones of my fathers before the White Christ preached peace to their land, a great yearning comes over me. There I want to lay mine. There I want to sleep, under the heather where the bees hum drowsily in the purple broom at noonday and white shadows walk in the night. Mist from the marshes they are, but the people think them wraiths. Half heathen yet, am I? Yes, if to yearn for the soil whence you sprang is to be a heathen, heathen am I, not half, but whole, and will be all my days.
But not so. He is the heathen who loves not his native land. Thor long since lost his grip on the sons of the vikings. Over the battlefield he drives his chariot yet, and his hammer strikes fire as of old. The British remember it from Nelson's raid on Copenhagen; the Germans felt it in 1849, and again when in the fight for very life the little country held its own a whole winter against two great powers on rapine bent; felt it at Helgoland where its sailors scattered their navies and drove them from the sea, beaten. Yet never did the White Christ work greater transformation in a people, once so fierce, now so gentle unless when fighting for its firesides. Forest and field teem with legends that tell of it; tell of the battle between the old and the new, and the victory of peace. Every hilltop bears witness to it.
[Illustration: Holy Andrew's Cross ]
Here by the wayside stands a wooden cross. All the country-side knows the story of "Holy Andrew," the priest whose piety wrought miracles far and near. Once upon a time, runs the legend, he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and was left behind by his companions because he would not sail, be wind and tide ever so fair, without first going to mass to pray for a safe journey. When, his devotions ended, he went to the dock, he saw only the sail of the departing craft sinking below the horizon. Overcome by grief and loneliness, he stood watching it, thinking of friends at home whom he might never again see, when a horseman reined in his steed and bade him mount with him; he would see him on his way. Andrew did, and fell asleep in the stranger's arms. When he awoke he lay on this hill, where the cross has stood ever since, heard the cattle low and saw the spire of his church in the village where the vesper bells were ringing. Many months went by before his fellow-pilgrims reached home. Holy Andrew lived six hundred years ago. A masterful man was he, beside a holy one, who bluntly told the king the truth when he needed it, and knew how to ward the faith and the church committed to his keeping. By such were the old rovers weaned from their wild life. What a mark he left upon his day is shown yet by the tradition that disaster impends if the cross is allowed to fall into decay. Once when it was neglected, the cattle-plague broke out in the parish and ceased, says the story, not until it was restored, when right away there was an end.
Holy Andrew's church still stands over yonder. Not that one with the twin towers. That has another story to tell, one that was believed to be half or wholly legend, too, until a recent restoration of it brought to light under the whitewash of the reformation mural paintings which furnished the lacking proof that it was all true. It was in the days of Holy Andrew that the pious knight, Sir Asker Ryg, going to the war, told the lady Inge to build a new church. The folk-song tells what was the matter with the old one "with wall of clay, straw-thatched and grim":—
The wall it was mouldy and foul and green,
And rent with a crack full deep;
Time gnaweth ever with sharper tooth,
Leaves little to mend, I ween.
Nothing was left to mend in the church of Fjenneslev, so she must build a new. "It is not fitting," says the knight in the song, "to pray to God in such a broken wrack. The wind blows in and the rain drips":—