The Wife of the Middle-miller.
It is the way, I guess, of the Old Town. Last year, when I was within a day’s journey of it, travelling toward Denmark, news reached me that an old friend had gone to her long home. Mrs. Hansen was the wife of the “middle-miller,” for there were three on the three branches of the river. It was at her door I bade good-by to my mother when I went into the great world, and it was she who comforted her, Mother told me in after years, with the assurance that “Jacob will come back President of the new country, see if he doesn’t.” Nor did she ever forget the wanderer, but always hailed his return with gladness. Her boy rode with me in that post-chaise. He was going in to serve the King as a soldier. We had sat on the school bench together and fought together, to the loss of much learning, I fear, and to the loss of caste, too, with our teacher. But it befell that, when we met again under his mother’s roof, when our hair that was brown had grown grizzled and gray, she saw us both distinguished by old King Christian as the two of our class who had made it proud. And she smiled a calm “I told you so.” But that is another story, and we shall come to it.
Venus.
The people of the Old Town were like itself, simple and honest and good. None of them ever plumed themselves with stolen feathers. There was a bell-ringer at the Domkirke whom we boys dubbed Venus because of her exceeding ugliness. She was certainly the most hideous and withal the most good-natured girl I ever met. She accepted the name meekly as a part of her office, something pertaining to the job, and her smile reached from ear to ear when we hailed her by it in the street. Then there was a change. Her employer died, and she lost her place. When next we met her and called her Venus, she protested soberly:
“I ain’t Venus no more now, for I ain’t by the kirk.”
She ought logically to have descended from her ecclesiastical position to civil employment as the town bell-woman, but I am not sure she did. All public advertising was done in the Old Town through the medium of either the bell-woman or the drummer-man, the two official town-criers. There was a newspaper, to be sure,—indeed, it had been there for a hundred years and more, “privileged by the King,”—but I think it came out only every other day. At all events, all matters of real human interest were promulgated through these two functionaries. They divided their duties fairly. She did the crying of fish and meat in the market, and such like, or if any one had lost anything. He, having been once a soldier, did the honors on ceremonial occasions, as when a fat steer, or a horse, was to be killed at the butcher’s, good horse-meat being neither unwelcome on the poor man’s table, nor unpalatable either. Then he led the procession through the town, proclaiming between rolls of his drum the virtues of the victim that stalked after, adorned with ribbons and flowers. The steer never took any interest in the proceedings. Perhaps a bovine tradition told it what was coming. But the horse took it all as a compliment, and walked in the procession with pride, as if he were a person of consequence.
“Did the honors on ceremonial occasions.”
Of characters the Old Town had had a full supply ever since the days when Anders Sörensen Vedel, who was a cleric attached to the Domkirke, translated Saxo Grammaticus with the Hamlet Saga into Danish from the original Latin. Being in straits for paper on which to print it, he called upon the Danish women through his friend, Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, to send their linen to the paper-mill lest the great work be lost to posterity. Vedel was a pious as well as a famous man, and it was his custom, in order to impress his children with the bitterness of the Passion, to call them into his study on Good Friday and scourge them soundly. The scourge had no longer any pertinent relation to Good Friday in our day, though it was busy enough the year round. It helped us on our way to knowledge, or was supposed to, in the school, where “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was still an article of unquestioned faith. There was an evil tradition that a king in the early part of the century had once, on a visit, expressed wonder at the number of great and learned men that had come from it, and that the Rector had told him: “We have a little birch forest near, your Majesty. It helps, it helps!” It certainly labored faithfully. As to the results—but probably it is a subject without interest to my young readers, and since their elders have lost faith in it I shall let it alone, and be glad to.