The old town

by Jacob A. Riis

Red-legged storks built their nests on the tiled roofs of the quaint old houses, and swallows reared their young under the broad eaves, protected like their loftier neighbors by the general good-will of the people, and by the superstition that assigned sure misfortune, even if nothing worse than a plague of boils, to whomsoever should lay profane hand upon them. In the silent halls of the old cloister, where the echo of sandalled feet on stone floors seemed always to linger,—steps of good friars long since dust in forgotten graves,—they flew in and out, and though they built two nests for one, since they were given to raising two broods in the brief summer, they did not wear their welcome out. The turnkey patiently put up an extra shelf, for, old as was he, were not the swallows tenants before him?

Ponderous whale-oil lamps swung across the streets in rusty chains that squeaked in every vagrant breeze a dismal accompaniment to the cry of the night watch. In such a setting tinderboxes and quill pens seemed quite the thing. I well remember the distrustful resentment in which old teachers held the “English” (steel) pens. They still clung to the goose-quill, which no one to-day would know how to cut. But the word “penknife” had meaning in those days. Envelopes were a still later discovery. Letters were folded and sealed with wax, and we boys collected seals as the boys of to-day collect stamps; and a good deal more of variety and human interest there was in the collection. I mind the excitement when the first bottle of “Pennsylvania oil” came into our house. I fetched it myself from the grocer’s, bottled like beer at eight skilling a bottle. Very likely they were Lübeck skilling, reminiscent of the middle ages when the Hanse Towns so thoroughly monopolized all trade in the North that their very coinage endured centuries after their League had ceased to be. Other things lasted. Their factors in foreign lands were bachelors, whether from choice or compulsion I do not know, and to this day the Danish word for bachelor is “Pebersvend,” i.e. pepper clerk, spices being a chief ware in their shops. As for the telegraph, people shook their heads at it as a more than dubious American notion, though the undoubted success of the first sewing-machine that had come to town had disposed them to lend a lenient ear to its claims.

Above this little world of men the old Domkirke reared its gray head, a splendid vision of the great things that were. Travellers approaching the town saw it from afar, a majestic pile against whose strong walls the town leaned with its time-worn old houses and crooked streets as if seeking strength and comfort against the assault of the gathering years. Its square red tower was a landmark for skippers far out at sea. The Dom itself was, and always had been, the heart and soul of the Old Town. It was so when the early Christian bishops built it in the twelfth century, for though kings abode in its shadow, they were their advisers and the real masters of the city. It was even more so after the Reformation had clipped the wings of the clergy. With their power went the commerce and the prestige of the Old Town; there remained little but the Domkirke and the Latin School that had been part of it from the beginning, and about these centred its life and all its normal interest. There were those, it is true, who dreamed of a return of the great days by wedding Ribe once more to the sea through a ship canal to deep water, but it was a dream that ended when they built a harbor at Esbjerg, a scant dozen miles away. After that the Old Town slept on, undisturbed by the world without.

“The old Domkirke reared its gray head.”

They were mighty men who built the Domkirke, and went far afield for the stone of which they reared it. There is none in Denmark, so they sent their ships over the North Sea and up the river Rhine for the gray stone of which they built the walls, and in quarries on the Weser they found granite for the great pillars and sandstone for the lighter ones. They wrought in the fashion of their day, but those that came after them and raised the great tower of burned brick had learned another that suited their purpose better; and so while the gentler Roman curve was that of the church, the tower stood forth in the massive strength of the Goth, as it had need, for it was the strong place of the burghers as the castle was the King’s stronghold. Watchmen kept a constant lookout from it in times of war for an approaching enemy, and the great bell hung there, the “storm bell,” that called the people to arms. It had long been dumb in my day, for it was feared that to ring it would imperil the tower. But when the autumn storms bellowed about the gables of the Dom, sometimes we heard at dead of night a deep singing note above the crash of falling tiles, and then we hugged our pillows close and held our breath to listen; for when the bell sang, it was warning that the sea was coming in.

The Old Town stood on a wide plain, the fertile marsh between it and the shore, behind it the barren heath, with no tree or shrub to break the sweep of the pitiless west wind. The very broom on the barrows, beneath which slept the old vikings, it cropped short on the side that looked toward the sea they loved so well. Summer and winter it piped its melancholy lay above their heads. At sundown the sea-fogs, rolling in over the land in a dense gray cloud, wrapped them in their damp embrace. There was no dike to protect the coast, but beyond the shallows lay a string of islands that within historic times had been torn from the mainland, and these stood the brunt of the onset when the North Sea was angry. But when the wind had blown hard from the west for days, as was its wont, and then veered to the north, so that the waters from the great deep were massed in the inlet, then it was we heard the big bell sing in the tower.

The Causeway in a Storm.

Morning broke after such a night, upon a raging ocean where at sunset there had been meadows and dry fields. Far as the eye reached only storm-tossed waves were in sight. The shores were strewn with perch and other fresh-water fish that were driven up on the pavement in shoals by the rushing tides. On the great causeway that stretched north and south, high above the flood level, cattle, hares, grouse, and field-mice huddled together in wretched, shivering groups. With break of day the butchers of the town went out, if going was at all possible, to bleed the drowning cattle that could yet be saved for food. Sometimes the trip had to be made in boats, and even in the streets of the town these were in demand when the “storm-flood” was at its height. I recollect very well seeing the water washing through the ground-story windows of the houses down by the harbor. By ordinary tides we were there five miles from the sea. At such times, when the flood had surprised the cattle yet in the far-outlying pastures, we heard news of disaster. The herders had been slow in gaining the refuges provided for them, and had perished with their herds.