The old town

by Jacob A. Riis

But if one did not run to fishing,—though what healthy boy does not?—there was the heath, and then the forest. Forest sounds big. All there was of it was a patch of woodland some twenty or twenty-five acres in extent, but to us in the mellow autumn days it was an enchanted forest indeed. For under the gnarled oaks, only survivors of the sturdy giants that had once covered the land, as the names of half the villages bore witness, and had filled the seas with the bold vikings’ ships, was a wilderness of hazel bushes that was the special preserve of the Latin School boys on Saturday afternoons, or when we had “month’s leave.” Month’s leave was an afternoon off, which the school might choose itself once a month, if it had been good. Then a committee of the oldest boys went to the Rector with the observation that it was a fine day for play, while the rest of us stood with beating hearts, and if the gout did not pinch him just then, he would say, “Yes! be off,” and with a mighty shout we would run for our botany boxes and crooked sticks, and for the woods, if it was in autumn. The boxes were to hold the nuts; the crooked sticks served a double purpose. They were for walking-staffs on the homeward way, for the forest was three miles away; once there, they were indispensable to hook down the branches with. The hazel bushes grew in the twilight of the woods, much as dogwood grows with us, and were mostly big enough to climb, but the nuts were on the farthest twigs, that could only be reached and stripped by pulling them down. That was fine fun, with enough tumbles to make it exciting, and a very substantial reward if judgment were used in the picking. The supply so laid in often lasted past Christmas, and we had little else. Walnuts were too dear. Chestnuts we did not know at all, not the eatable kind. The other, the horse-chestnut, made fine ammunition when, in autumn, we played “robber and soldier.” The winter storms that drove in wreckage from the Gulf Stream strewed our coast, indeed, with Brazil-nuts, sometimes whole ship loads of them, but they were good only for making bonfires. The sea or something else had cracked them. There was not a kernel in one of them.

It does not seem to me that life could be worth much in the Latin School without those nutting expeditions. And so, when I went there with my own boys, and after wading through the old bog where the stork stalked up and down fishing for frogs, we came to the cool shade of the forest and found it hedged in with cheeky American barbed wire and signs up warning intruders off, my spirit rose in instant rebellion. This was a double disgrace not to be borne. And once back again in the land of freedom I planned to defeat that wretched barbed-wire fence. Not only must it go, but the forest itself must belong to the Latin School, or else the undisputed right to go nutting there forever; and while I had it in mind I thought I saw a way to drive in the edge of democracy by vesting the control of it in the boys, with the proviso that at least once a year they should invite the public school boys to be their guests there. In my day they fought at the drop of a hat; the recollection of the bitter feud between them stirs my blood even now when I think of it. But alas for the best-laid plans of mice and men! I was told, when I moved to the attack, that times had changed; that school was dismissed at two o’clock, not at five, nowadays, and that therefore month’s leave as we knew it had gone out of existence; that Latin School and “plebs” were part of the same system, hence the strife of the old times had ceased; and that anyhow boys rode cycles and made century runs and such things, where we went nutting. Truly, the times do change. I am glad I was a boy then, if I am a back number now.

Picking Rävlinger in the Moor.

Maybe they ride right through the heath on their senseless runs, and don’t stop to pick Rävlinger. If they do, I am done; I have nothing more to say. Rävlinger are the little black berries that grow on the creeping heather in the sterile moor, quite like our blueberries, only there are many more of them. Very likely you would think them sour; we thought them heavenly, and there is enough of the boy left in me to back up that opinion to-day against the riper judgment of the years. We gathered them by the bucketful, paying little heed to the heath farmer’s warning not to touch them after midsummer night, for then the devil had greased his boots with them, and came home with black faces and hands and terrible tales of the “worms”—i.e. snakes—we had encountered in the heath. And, indeed, there are enough of these poisonous reptiles there yet. But, now as then, a fellow can keep out of their way. Some of the dearest recollections of my boyhood are of the long tours I made through this lonesome moor, where a rare shepherd knitting his woollen stocking and a gypsy’s cart are often the only “humans” one meets in a day’s journey. Met, I should have said, perhaps, for in another generation even the moor will be a thing of the past. Already half of the six hundred thousand acres of heath land in the Danish peninsula has been planted with seedling pine, American pine, that has grown up finely, and a great and salutary change has been wrought, no doubt. But if there is to be a day without moor, without heather, without the sweet honey the bees gathered there when the broom was purple, and without Rävlinger, I—well, I am glad I was a boy when I was.

Which brings to my mind an adventure of one of my lonely trips in the heath. This one went far, extending over a whole vacation week. I had come at the end of a long summer day to an inn, where they gave me a big box-bed to sleep in; and I had barely got into it when a lot of scratching under me made me aware that a family of rats shared my couch. But I was too sleepy to care; we snuggled up together and did one another no harm in the night. I remember it because of the terror it caused my mother when she heard of it. She had a great dread of rats. It was on that same trip that, coming to the shore, I supped at a fisherman’s hut on smoked dogfish and thought it the finest I had ever tasted. I was a boy and hungry. But I do not know why it should not be good. The dogfish I am thinking of are the small sharks that infest the North Sea coast in great numbers. They ate the flesh and sold the skin for sandpaper in those days. It was scratchy and did very well for that purpose.

The Seem woods, where we went nutting, covered, as I said, but a little patch, but a dozen miles to the eastward there were real forests, in which a boy might get lost; and there were deer in them, which made a picnic there ever so exciting. That had to be engineered by the grown-ups, for it meant impressing practically the entire rolling stock of the town for the day. Then its half-dozen ancient Holsteiners, yellow-wheeled open wagons with seats for eight or a dozen, pulled up early in the Square, where all upper-tendom was waiting with much provender to board them for Gram. Many were the dubious headshakes of those who were left behind as to the promises of the weather. The wind was in the east, and the clouds prophesied rain. They did that regularly, and they kept their promise at least half the time. It was sometimes a bedraggled crowd that made cover at sunset. But if even half the day was fair, it paid well for the trip. The change from the barren, rather stern outlook from the Old Town, where the sea-wind stunted tree and thicket so that it always sloped down to nothing in the west as if some giant scythe had trimmed it so, to the beech woods with their shelter and quiet and their luxury of color and vegetation, was very alluring. While our elders took tea at the forester’s, where the tea-urn was always simmering, expecting company, and duly admired the furniture in the Countess’s drawing-room at the Château, we boys organized a mighty hunt for boar and bear, and sometimes were lucky enough to start a roebuck. Then, indeed, was the hunt a success, and our minds were stocked for many a day to come with stuff for day-dreams.

There was enough of that lying all about, for field and heath were dotted with the cairns that covered the ashes of the bold vikings. Off to the northeast from Gram, buried in a thicket of scrub-oak where once had been deep forest, lay a large boulder, twice as high as a big man, that always seemed to me to span the thousand years between the old days and ours as no dry books could. Stones are not common in that country; this one had come down from Norwegian mountains on an ice-floe in ages long past. But no geological speculation chained our imagination to it. It had a story of its own. Harald Blaatand, grandfather of Knud (Canute) the Great, had chosen it to put over the grave of his mother, Queen Thyra, and was hauling it across the country with an army of oxen and thralls, when word came that his son had risen against him to take the kingdom. He dropped it there to take up arms, and there it had been since. The top of it was split open. The priest in a neighboring parish had tried, a hundred years before, to quarry it for his parsonage, but like King Harald was halted before he had gone far. What was the matter with the parsons in those days, I cannot imagine. When they opened the graves of King Valdemar and Queen Dagmar, of whom I have told elsewhere, they found her tomb a jumble of broken brick and rubbish. A priest attached to the church, to make a nice roomy burial-place for himself, had calmly cut into the resting-place of Denmark’s best-beloved queen, throwing the bones he found there to the scrap-heap. A hundred years and over, the skull of the gentle Dagmar, which some one had picked up, lay about the church and was then carried off by a thief. A gold cross the queen had worn was saved, having “value” in the eyes of the vandals, and in the course of time found its way into the possession of the government and into the museum of antiquities, where it now is, its most precious relic.

Dagmar’s Despoiled Tomb.