Cruising up to the Seem Church.
So there was no lack of sport in the Old Town, and I haven’t begun to tell you of it all. In the winter there was the river that was then dammed back and became a great frozen lake five or six miles long. Then we would strap on our skates good and tight for a long trip, and go cruising up from the Kannegrove,[14] the big ditch down by the Cloister, to the Seem church, clear at the further end, and, spreading our jackets out, let the wind use them as sails on the run back. I tell you we came down in a hurry. No time for fancy skating then. But a mighty sharp lookout had to be kept on that trip, for if a skate slid into a crack there was a wrench and a fall, and it was apt to be a bad one. When the snow lay deep, there was such coasting as you do not often find. For though the country was flat as a pancake, the Castle Hill was there with its deep moat. Almost clear up on the other side the rush would fetch you. I haven’t seen a better coasting hill in New England. But, on the other hand, I must own that American boys are “up” on steering to an extent we didn’t dream of. The “leg out” is a Yankee invention, and it is great. We just slid.
CHAPTER VII
Riberhus.
To the West of the Old Town, with only the dry moat and a fringe of gardens between, stood the green Castle Hill. Green it was and had been in the memory of the oldest. The road-makers of three generations before had taken what the house-builder had left of the ruins that alone remained of Denmark’s once great historic stronghold. There its fighting kings guarded the land against the enemy to the south; thence its armies had marched to victory or defeat in many a fight with the turbulent German barons. Thither came the merchant ships of Europe bringing stone from the Rhine for the Domkirke, sweet wines and silken raiment for the ladies of the court, and cloth from Flanders; for to be well dressed in those days a man’s coat must have been cut in Ribe. The river was long since sanded in, in my day, and ships came that way no more. A few lonesome sheep were picketed on the green hill, and when at night the white mist crept in from the sea, blurring and blotting the landscape out, their melancholy bleating alone betrayed the site where once the clash of arms waked ready echoes.
Here dwelt King Valdemar and his gentle queen who live in the Danish folk-song. Of her after seven centuries the ploughman sang yet:
She came without burden, she came with peace,
She came the good peasant to cheer.
The ballad tells of the brief year of bliss the royal lovers lived here, of his wild ride across the heath to her death-bed, and of the daring May party that won back the castle from a traitorous garrison for “King Erik the young.” Last summer they dug in the Castle Hill and found little enough there. But here on my table stands a brick from the stout wall, that long since crossed the ocean with me. It may be that there is magic in the stone to tell of the past, for it was fashioned by monks who knew more than the pater-nosters they told on their beads; or is it that I am of Queen Dagmar’s kin, her god-son, christened as I was in the font she gave to the Domkirke: last night as I sat alone pondering the old songs, the flickering shadows from my study fire touched it, and I dreamed again the story of King Valdemar and Riberhus.[15]