After a short visit with my great aunt in Rönne, I spent a few happy days with my Uncle Johannes and Aunt Ingeborg in the interior of the island. My uncle and aunt drove to town to fetch me, and while Uncle let the fat horses jog along on their homeward way at a pace to suit themselves, I had a good opportunity to see the objects of interest which Tante (the Danish for aunt), pointed out on the beautiful landscape. That place with the black smoke stacks was the great pottery factory; there, where the white walls shone between the trees, one of my cousins used to live; the large, four-armed windmill on the right did not pump water, as I had ignorantly supposed, but ground grist; the handsome, cream-colored villa on the left was the summer home of a wealthy Copenhagen merchant; and so on, until the journey ended.
As we drove into the court at Uncle’s, my cousins, a fair-haired, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed flock, came running out to greet us. These children were so well-trained, and so natural and wholesome that they were a real pleasure to me. But do not conclude from this statement that I am implying a comparison invidious to the American child, or that I hold up Danish children as models of deportment; for I have met some enfants terrible during the last week or two, even among my own kith and kin. I attribute the superiority of these particular cousins to their quiet country rearing.
And that reminds me to speak of the great interest and curiosity with which they regarded me upon my first arrival. While I talked with Uncle, my cousins sat silently by, completely absorbed in watching me; and when he noticed them their father laughed and said, “Yes, my children; this is a genuine, native-born American.” Then he explained that I was the first native American that the children had ever seen. Few aliens except bona fide tourists reach the center of the island—and they merely pass through. It would take an Eskimo or a Patagonian to rouse a similar degree of interest in a country child of the cosmopolitan Far West.
The manner in which I mutilated the king’s Danish was also a source of much interest to them; for I suppose that they had never before heard broken Danish. They were too polite to show amusement; even at my most grotesque blunders not a smile crossed their faces; they were simply alert and fascinated—and silent. But when it occurred to them to try upon me the English which they had learned in the grades, we were promptly upon a very sociable footing; they took turns practicing their English vocabularies on me, and were delighted to find that the formulae had worked—that their school-learned language was comprehensible to me.
To the children of the neighbors I was also a whole menagerie of interest. They referred to me as “de fremmede dame” (the foreign lady), and whenever I opened my mouth to speak they waited around with bated breath to see what liberties I should take with their native tongue.
Old-fashioned Danish farms are quite different from anything which we have in America; therefore, you might like to know about Barquist, my uncle’s place. On the afternoon of my arrival I went all over it with Uncle as a cicerone, and with Astrid, the smaller of the twins, clinging to my hand and practising her English whenever the opportunity offered. Such a farm as Barquist is called a “gaard” (or court), because of the fact that all of the buildings are arranged in rectangular fashion about the stone-paved interior. The long dwelling house forms one side of the quadrangle; the sides are made up of machine shops and wagon sheds and store houses for hay and grain; and at the other end are the stables in which the live stock are kept. Roofed-over driveways separate the house from the other buildings. When the gates to the court are shut, the quadrangle forms a complete inclosure, and, consequently, furnishes much protection from stormy weather. The back doors of the dwelling house open into the court, in the middle of which stands the pump; and the front ones open into a large flower garden, which, you see, is outside of the quadrangle.
Brick and plaster form the building material for the walls, and all of the roofs are covered with thatch of rye straw, which must, of course, be quite frequently renewed. As you may imagine, the thatched roofs lend a very picturesque air to the quadrangle, especially when there is a stork’s nest in one corner. But straw roofs are going out of use because of the danger of fire from lightning; tiles are being substituted, and slate, and plain, prosaic shingles.
Surrounding the buildings on every side were fields of barley and rye, golden unto the harvest. Dotted with silky red poppies and deep blue cornflowers as they were, these grainfields presented a charming picture. Uncle admitted the beauty of nature’s color scheme, but added, “To us farmers, the poppies and cornflowers are weeds; they choke out the grain.”
The interior of the house was a comfort, for it did not have the “cluttered up,” junk-shop appearance produced in some American homes by over-furnishing. There was plenty of room to walk around without stumbling over, or knocking off, anything. The guest room, in which I slept, was so large that I felt out of doors in it. And the furniture was of corresponding proportions; the clothes-press could tuck away the whole wardrobe of an ordinary family; and the bed was even nearer kin to that in which Hans Christian Andersen’s true princess slept than the one in my hotel room in Copenhagen. Cross my heart, Cynthia, there were nearly a dozen feather ticks of various sizes on that bed. Taught by my Copenhagen experience, I promptly dumped most of them on the floor, where they remained until morning, when I replaced them and gave them a poke or two, to produce a slept-on appearance, lest my aunt by any chance be led to suspect that I was not partial to Danish beds.