“Holme week” was the great time of the year for us all. It came late in July, when the hay was all in and we got our fishing-tackle out; for the hay was the great crop thereabouts, and until it had been cut it was not a good thing to be caught by the farmer wading through his meadows. Out toward the sea the river made a great bend, and in it, near its mouth, lay a stretch of marshland where the grass grew exceeding rich and sweet. This was the “Holme,”[12] which in the thirteenth century had been given to the town by the King in return for its building a wall around Ribe the better to defend it. The wall was never built, though they got so far as digging a ditch, but they kept the land, and after the Reformation divided it up among themselves, to their great gain. When now the last of the hay had been cut and stacked, the Old Town went a-picnicking, bag and baggage. Those who could afford it drove out; those who couldn’t walked, or sailed, or rowed out, depending on a lift from the tide to help them back. And all of them had hampers or baskets, filled to the brim. There is no occasion that I know of in Denmark when these are left behind. There, on the meadow that was like a smooth, green-carpeted floor, they sported and ran and tumbled, pelting one another with hay, children and grown-ups together, all day. I never knew who paid for the hay, or if it was just a contribution to the general good-will of the time, but no one ever put a damper on our fun. The climax of it for us boys was always the attack on the Fold, a kind of fort on the meadow into which the cattle were driven in case of flood. The Fold had earth walls and a living hedge, and to roll off that wall with a bloody nose, or better still, to climb over it and give the other fellow one, was enough to make any boy feel like a real hero, especially with the girls looking on and showing great concern.
When the sun set over the meadows and we came back from our campaign, tired and sore, supper was spread on the grass beside a comfortable hay-stack, and it was good. There is nothing anywhere half so good to eat when you are hungry as the Danish Smörrebröd, particularly the kind they make in Ribe. Only, I guess, you’ve got to have a boy’s stomach, for you will want to eat it all, and the last time I did—well, never mind! I will lay that up against my American training. It never happened when I was a boy but once; that was when a ship had been wrecked with a cargo of Messina raisins, and the man who had bought it saw us snooping around where he had laid those raisins out to dry on great tarpaulins and told us we might eat as many as we liked. We did, and ouch! let me forget it. I sure thought I was going to die.
In the gloaming they lit tallow candles set in beer bottles in the dancing tent, and to the tune of an old cracked fiddle everybody had a turn on the sod with everybody else. If there were classes and distinctions in the Old Town, there were none out there. The Bishop’s wife or the Rector’s daughter danced with the shoemaker’s lad and had a good time. The old ferry raft that was pulled from shore to shore with a rope, plied back and forth over the river, carrying great loads of hay one way, and bigger and bigger loads of merry-makers from the town, for those were the midsummer nights when nobody kept account of time. That was the Old Town’s real holiday. It came to an end with the third Sunday, I think it was, in July, after which the cattle were turned in to graze on the Holme and the herdsman was left in sole possession; by no means a sinecure, for soon the North Sea gave warning that at any moment his life and the safety of his charges might be at stake, if they were outstripped in the race with the angry floods.
In Holme Week—The Old Ferry Raft.
But while the sea yet slumbered in summer sunshine we boys had our shore days, and they were fine. Then we arose with the sun and walked the four miles to the beach, which thereabouts is very flat and wide. When the tide is out, there is a stretch of quite half a mile of white sand to deep water. Over this the flood tide comes stealing in so stealthily, yet so swiftly, that it takes a pretty good runner to get to the land without very wet feet or worse, if he is caught far out by the turn of the tide. We would sometimes bring home quite a store of amber from these trips, and then little files would be busy for days making hearts, sabots, and other trinkets for the girl each boy liked best. Hearts were the most popular and also the easiest to fashion. We made those things ourselves, and it was a sort of manual training not to be despised.
“Treading” flounders was a unique kind of fishing that took a whole day from earliest dawn, but sometimes turned up a bigger yield of fish than one could carry home. A perfectly calm day was needed for that, when there was no “wash.” The boys followed the outgoing tide, tramping hard with bare feet in the soft sand and steering by the church on the island out in the sea. When they had gone as far as they wanted, they tramped back by another route, and then put in the long wait till the tide had come in and was ebbing again, building fires, catching crabs, or whatever they felt like. With the next ebb-tide came their harvest. Following their tracks of the morning, they would find, wherever they had made them deep enough, a little pool left by the receding waters, and in each pool one or two, and sometimes three, flounders about the size of my hand, very much like the Catalina sand dabs of the Pacific. These they would unceremoniously heave into a sack they carried between them, and before long it grew heavy with their catch. It seems that the bottom of the North Sea is fairly covered with multitudes of these fish, which served the islanders of that coast as both meat and bread. They dried and toasted them, and served them with their afternoon coffee, and you might look long for a better dish. I think of it often as being quite like Tvebak[13] slightly salted, only better to my youthful taste.
Out along the river mouth was famous hunting for water-fowl. In the migrating season great flocks of duck alighted there, and geese and every other kind of game that flies. I can hear yet the cry of the sickle-billed curlew in those meadows. It prophesied rain, we said, and the promise was usually kept. When I was a big boy, the first telegraph line was built to the Old Town, and that autumn an odd thing happened. Morning after morning dozens of shore-birds were found dead under the wires. We thought first that the electric current had slain them as they roosted on the wires; but as it was apparent that some of them couldn’t roost that way, a better explanation was sought and found. They had been killed flying against the wires. It seems that they were strung just at the height at which they flew. It is clear to me that birds have some power of reasoning, for after a while we found no more dead. Evidently they had learned to fly higher, or lower perhaps.
Once or twice in autumn, on their way south, great flights of kramsfowl, a bird highly esteemed by the cook, roosted in the Plantage, a little grove just outside of town. Just when that would be, no one could tell, but for weeks after the leaves began to turn some of us set our snares,—a willow bough bent in a triangle, with horse-hair loops in each of the uprights, and baited with rowan-berries below. The bird would sit and swing in the triangle, and, bending to get at the berries under its feet, would put its head through one or both of the loops and be strangled. Morning after morning we would sneak out before breakfast to look to our snares and come home empty-handed. Then some brisk morning, when the first touch of frost was in the air, we would drag such loads of the big black birds into town that there would be talk of it for days. Every sick person we knew had a feast, and we felt that we were mighty hunters indeed.
