OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER
The Accursed Candlestick.
To us it will always be “our beautiful summer,” I expect, and, indeed, I fancy it will be so remembered throughout the Danish land.[20] For the seasons there had suffered a sad decline since my boyhood days. Then the sun shone always in summer, the autumn days were ever mellow as the ripened nuts we shook from the hazel bushes, and in winter we skated from Christmas until the March winds woke the slumbering spring. At least so it seems to me now. They tell me that this generation of boys has almost forgotten the art of skating; that they do not know how to cut the figure 8, or the name of the girl they like best, in the ice, because there is no ice more than half the time; that in summer they have to hurry so between showers that all the fun is gone out of the haying. And as for the autumn, I am not likely to forget one that found me stranded there, sick and desolate just as the century was closing; the long, wakeful nights I lay listening to the storm shaking my window and whistling through the cracks as if it were mocking my helplessness, with four thousand miles of tempestuous sea between me and home. I sailed them all in those night-watches, with never a rift in the pitiless gray skies, till I saw at last a coast lying golden in the sunset, and knew it from the way my heart leaped within me for the Blessed Isles where home was. It was then I learned that I, too, belonged here where my children were born.
But this summer was one long holiday without a cloud. The sun set in yellow glory on that June day when we landed, hours after children should be in bed and asleep; but how could one ask it in reason, with the day, as it seemed, only half over? And it rose in undimmed splendor on the September morn that saw us wave tearful good-bys and sail away, past Hamlet’s Castle and Elsinore, and leave our fairyland behind. We rode in on the hay wagons, we saw the sheaves of golden grain stacked and housed. We watched day by day the stalks of Indian corn by the fountain in the King’s Square grow ears as big as any in Kansas fields. They were flaunting great shocks of shining silk when we went away, to the admiration of the good people of Copenhagen, who were never tired of looking at the strange plant; and I, with the memories of Long Island strong upon me, was deep in a plot to teach that gardener how to make “hot corn,” since ripen they would not, those ears, when my wife came along and wrecked that dinner and my reputation with one swoop by declaring that “they were not that kind, but common chicken corn.” I never knew until then that there was any difference. But, sweet corn or chicken-feed, dinner or no dinner, it was truly a beautiful summer. All Denmark will bear me out in that.
We had gone, we old folk, to see once more the fields where we played when we were children, and to us there was in it the sadness of the long ago. To the young it was a joyous picnic; and many a time their laughter in the quiet streets, where ghosts walked in broad daylight to our sight at every turn, made us stop and listen wistfully. For in the Old Town nothing was changed. The stork stood one-legged upon the peak of the red-tiled roof, holding majestically aloof from the ways of men; and in the doorway the swallow hatched her young as of old. There was the broken pane in the transom I knew so well, to let her in, the right of way for which she paid in coin of sweetest song. I know they laughed at me for calling it song; but then they had not been away a lifetime. No mocking-bird or nightingale sings to my heart as does the house-swallow’s cheery note. In it are summer and sunshine, and the blossoming lilacs, and the whisper of the breeze in the trees, the children calling to each other at their play. It is as the time I had sat through an hour of Christina Nilsson, missing something—I knew not what—in all the wealth of music, when all at once came “’Way down upon the Suwanee River,” and melted the icicles away. It is many years since, but the mist comes into my eyes at the thought of it. That is how the swallow sings to me in the streets of old Ribe.
A Strange Figure in Kilts.
Down in the river the white swans arched their necks as in the days that were, and the clatter of the mill-wheels by the dam came up with drowsy hum, heavy with the burden of the centuries. For Ribe was an old city when Christian bishops first preached peace to the savage North. In the wall of its great cathedral there is a stone that once bore the image of the earliest among them who fell before pagan arrows in the very meadow where we had our boyish games. The storms of many winters have nearly worn it away; but what reverent loyalty vainly sought to preserve, the bigotry of a day that thought itself wise as well as pious ignorantly achieved in commemoration of human hate. When they came to knock away the whitewash of the Reformation, put on to hide what sand and soap and acids could not efface (there are clear marks of their having been used to destroy the pictures of apostles and saints painted in Catholic days on the great granite pillars), there came to light, in one of the arches pointing toward the place of Bishop Leofdag’s martyrdom, a strange figure in kilts with fists upraised in threat and curse, which presently was seen to be a heathen raging against the new day that dared rear a temple to the Christians’ God upon the very site of the ancient sacrifices. The whitewash had kept it from decay. The recollection of it came over me with a rush of gratitude that the world is growing better and broader and all the time farther into the light, when, the other day, I sat in the beautiful chapel of the Leland Stanford University that was built “to the glory of God” and to no sect or set of mortals. Some one had told the organist that I was there, and upon the waves of soft music that floated out into the twilight hour there came snatches of a Danish hymn I had not heard since childhood until twenty-five hundred men and women sang it in the old church the day we rededicated it, and this time “to the glory of God,” with no wish to make reservation. Ay! let the heathen rage, within the sanctuary and without. It stands there despite them, witness that the light drives out darkness, love conquers hate.
