The old town

by Jacob A. Riis

“It’s all right with the trouble, King,” he answered; “but about the expense. That’s worse.”

The King laughed long and loud and squared up, and they parted friends.

This was the man we turned out in a body to honor. The men who had horses and could ride received him as an escort, miles up the road. All the countryside was there to see and to cheer; most of the men had carried muskets in the war, and to the tune of “Den tappre Landsoldat” they brought him in. The streets were hung with garlands of green, and little girls in white strewed flowers before the royal procession. I remember it all as if it were yesterday. In the evening there was a great time in the Domkirke. The King sat inside the altar-rail in his blue soldier’s uniform and with a big silver helmet on. Years and years after, going through the National Museum at Copenhagen, I saw it hanging there in a glass case, and clear across the room I knew it at sight. That was the way a king ought to look, and it was the way King Christian, his successor, did look when I saw him in the same seat nearly fifty years later. Only he was slender and youthful of figure despite his eighty odd years. King Frederik was stout. Stout or slender, he was our boyish ideal of a king.

There was the gala dinner to which our father and mother went and came home in the small hours of the morning with their pockets full of bonbons, and with wondrous tales of the show that made our ears tingle all that winter. And then there was the discovery on the Castle Hill, made for the occasion expressly. That was the very peak and pinnacle of it all.

Ever since anybody could remember there had been stories about a secret passage leading from the Castle Hill under the moat into town—now, it was said, to the Bishop’s Manse, and then again to the Cloister, or to the Domkirke itself. It was supposed to be a way they had in the old fighting days of getting out and taking the enemy in the rear, when the castle was besieged and they were hard put to it. No one ever knew the truth of it, and so we all believed it; but now by some fortunate chance the secret passage was actually found. The mouth of it had been uncovered, and the King was to see it. It was a tunnel built of the big brick the monks made, and which we still knew as monk-brick. Half the Old Town is built of it, that is to say, castle, cloisters, and churches long since gone live again in the walls of the houses built since the Reformation. What is quite evidently a part of the mantelpiece from the castle adorns the entrance to the silversmith’s on the corner of the street through which King Valdemar rode to his dying queen, and the searcher of to-day, seeking vainly a trace of his famous castle where it stood, walks over it, unthinking, when he goes in to buy a souvenir of his visit. This secret way stirred the town mightily. It was confirmation of the old rumors, and it was in itself a mystery. Where was the other end of the hole?

The King saw, but declined the honor of being the explorer. He suggested first one then another of his suite with less avoirdupois. But they all had excuses. In fact, a small boy might barely have done it; further, the hole led downward and was black and ill-smelling. So it remained unexplored. It stood open for some time, an object of awe and many speculative creeps to us boys; then it was covered up. I regret to have to add, as destroying a long-cherished illusion that had a glamour about it which it is hateful to dispel, that when diggings were made in the Castle Hill last summer, under competent leadership, our secret passage was discovered to be an old sewer that led no farther than the dry moat. It was just as well none of the King’s courtiers went down.

Those close-fisted farmer neighbors of ours were sometimes very well-to-do; but a hard fight with a lean soil had taught them the value of money earned, perhaps overmuch. In the Old Town, as I have said, there were no very rich people, but the poor were not poor either in the sense in which one thinks of poverty in a great city. They had always enough to eat and were comfortably housed. There were no beggars, unless you would count as such the travelling “Burschen,” mechanics making the rounds of Denmark and Germany under their guild plan, working where they could and asking alms when they had nothing, the which we freely gave. It was an understood thing that that was not charity in any sense, but a kind of lift to a traveller on his way. So he was getting experience in his work, whatever it might be, by seeing the ways of other communities, and by and by would return to his own, better regarded as man and mechanic for having “travelled” in his years. It was, of course, the old mediæval system of which we saw the last. There is very little left of it to-day, I imagine.

I said that there were no beggars in the Old Town. There are indeed few in Denmark, where prosperity is very evenly distributed. It was, nevertheless, there I encountered the slyest little beggar it was ever my fortune to come across. It was in one of the cemeteries of Copenhagen, where we had been to look up a friend’s grave, that we came upon a little girl, a child of ten, who was fashioning a little mound in the dust and putting a monument over it, a piece of a broken slate. She looked up as we stopped beside her, noticing our serious faces and no doubt checking us off at once as being there on business, not mere chance visitors.

“Here lies my cat,” she said. “It was red.”

“Oh!” We were interested at once. “And what did it die of?”