[11] Which reminds me of a lesson in manners I once received from the gudewife of a neighboring farm. It was in the days when the farmer and his hands all ate out of the same dish, each with his own horn spoon, which he afterward licked clean and stuck up under the beam until the next meal. I had never been away from home and had “notions” that made me decline a mellemmad (sandwich) when she brought it to me in her honest hand. She took in the situation, and after serving the other children, handed me my mellemmad with the fire-tongs, all sooty from the chimney.
[12] Meaning islands.
[13] Tvebak is Danish for Zwieback.
[14] The “cleric’s” or “clerk’s ditch” that skirted the monks’ garden in the old days. The garden is still there, and traces of the ditch.
[15] The Ribe House, or Ribe Castle.
[16] Green Street, the street leading to the Green where the castle stood.
[17] Of her three sons, Abel slew his brother Erik for the crown, and was himself slain by a peasant in the highway. His body was buried in a swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his grievous ghost. Christopher, who took the sceptre last, was poisoned by a monk in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the Domkirke; and in the division of the kingdom between the brothers that gave cause for their quarrels, began Denmark’s woes, which in our own day culminated in her dismemberment, when Germany took Slesvig, Abel’s dukedom. Queen Bengerd herself was the worst-hated woman in Danish history, as Dagmar is yet the best-beloved. In death the people’s hatred would not let her rest. When her grave was opened in my boyhood, it was found that the stone slab which covered it had been pried off and a round boulder dropped in the place made for her head. Yet her beautiful black braid was there, and the skull, so delicate in its perfect oval, that those who saw it marvelled greatly.
[18] It is upon his “History of Ribe Town,” in two stout volumes, that I have drawn in these sketches for the ancient records that enliven its pages.
[19] The river was included, I suppose; at all events, it contributed to his revenues. An old law provided that whoever polluted the stream by throwing any uncleanness into it should lose his life. The Thirteenth Century had a curious way of anticipating the things upon which the Twentieth prides itself with much vaunting. We cry out against water pollution; they prohibited it. It is easy to understand that there were no sewers in Ribe.
[20] The summer of 1904, the year of our home-coming.