“The weasel killed it—sucked its blood.”
We walked right into the trap—“And is there to be a writing?”
“Yes,” sadly; “‘Good-by, little Svip;’ but I have no money to buy a slate pencil with.”
She accepted our penny with the gravity of an undertaker as she cast a swift glance down the walk where two women in deep mourning were coming. Then she went on making her grave.
“Trenchers of steaming sausage.”
There came a season in the autumn when the Old Town resounded with the squealing of countless pigs. It was killing-time when the fat friend so fondly cherished throughout the year was to make return by furnishing forth the tables of his hosts. We boys heard it with joy, for we knew what was to come after all the woe. Toward evening of the great day trenchers of steaming sausage were carried around among the neighbors who had no pigs, that they also might taste of the good things of the earth. Blood sausage was there, big and round and red, and good to eat, fried with syrup; and liver sausage, pale but appealing; and sausage with rice in and sausage with spices in; and roll sausage, which sometimes I buy in delicatessen shops nowadays; but they must have lost the art of making them, for they don’t taste as they did then. The trencher must have been welcome in Mother’s larder, for with so many mouths to fill we were taught to look upon meat as a relish rather than the mainstay of the meal. Not that we did not have enough. We always had that, but dishes made of flour, of potatoes, of peas and other vegetables, played a greater rôle in the economic cookery of the day and country than nowadays. And we liked it. I defy any one to find a summer dish that compares with “Rödgröd med Flöde,” which was just currant juice and corn-starch with cream. Even the Saturday menu in our house was a favorite: fried herring and Öllebröd. For special occasions the herring were fried “in dressing-gowns,” each in a cornucopia of white paper that gave the dish quite a festive touch. Öllebröd is a dish I despair of making the American mind grasp. It was made of black bread boiled in beer till it made a thick broth, to which each one added cream and sugar to suit his taste. Boiled beer sounds funny, but it was the household beer, non-alcoholic, which was both cheap and good. The other kind we knew as Bavarian beer. Its use was not so common as it has become since.
Still, the Old Town had ever been partial to its beer. When it was in its prime, eight “beer-tasters” were among the town functionaries. They were to see that the supply was up to the standard, with the proper allowance of good hops. In the account of the hanging of the big bell in the church tower—the “storm bell” I spoke of—in 1599, two barrels of beer to the men who hoisted it up and hung it are set down among the expenses. One wonders whether all who took a hand were included. According to one report of that day’s proceedings, there was some doubt about their ability to transport the bell from the foundry to the Domkirke, until the Rector of the Latin School put it up to his boys, who at once took hold and dragged it all the way alone. Whether they came in under the subsequent largesse of beer is not stated, but probably not. Two barrels would not have gone very far then. All this seems queer to us nowadays. It is strange to find that in that century the privileged Town Hall dramshop—the Rathhaus-keller, in fact—achieved a competitor in the Domkirke itself. The chapter of clerics opened one of their own in their cellar under the north end of the chancel, on the plea that they must have wine for churchly functions, of a proper quality, and kept it going for I don’t know how long. Much later than that, in 1683, clergymen were forbidden by law to distil whiskey, but in 1768 “priest and deacon” were expressly confirmed in their right to distil it for their own use. So there was ecclesiastical sanction, and to spare, for all the beer and spirits that were consumed. Clear down to my time, when the Jutland peasant brewed,[10] it was the custom to throw the first three handfuls of malt into the mash “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” And the same man who did that, as the next step shut all the doors of the brewing room, placed a glowing coal on each doorstep, put three coals in the vat with a wisp of straw bound in form of a cross, and finally stirred it all with the iron tongs from the fireplace, to keep evil eyes from spoiling the brew![11] No wonder there were spooks in the Old Town, the werwolf that haunted the graveyard by night, and the hell-horse on its three legs.
Whenever I think of that last and the horror we held it in, it comes to me that our dread of crawling things must be largely a matter of legs, due to our prejudice in favor of the standard two or four. The hell-horse was ever so much more horrible because of its limping about by night on three. We hate a spider, which has six or eight, and loathe the thousand-leg worm with cause. And at the other end, when it comes to the snake, that has no legs at all, we are prompted by an instant impulse to kill it. It is not a religious prejudice at all, no Garden of Eden notion, but an instinctive recoil from the thing that does not conform to the established standard in legs. But whether that be so or not, the hell-horse that so terrorized us, was a decadent beast. He was literally on his last legs in my childhood, and even the Old Town knows him no more, I guess.
The man with his head under his arm was, if anything, worse than the hell-horse, and had an unpleasant habit of making himself at home under your roof. The three-legged beast at least stayed outside. There was a headless man in the old mansion at Sönderskov, where I sometimes spent my summer vacation. You could hear him walk in the midnight hour up and down, up and down the hall, and we boys lay and shivered in bed for fear he would come to our door and knock. I have heard him more than once since I grew up and identified his tread on the oaken stairs with the regular beat of the tower-clock above my head, but still I confess to a creepy feeling when I hear it.