Chapter 5 No.5

Dear People,-We had a fine send-off from Christiania. The landlord of the Scandinavie sent up to know if we would do him the honor to drive down to the steamer in his private carriage. Katrina delivered the message with exultant eyes.

"You see," she said, "he likes to show dat he do not every day get such in de house." We sent word back that we should consider ourselves most honored; and so when we went downstairs, there stood a fine landau open, with bouquets lying on the seats, and a driver in livery; and the landlord himself in the doorway, and the landlord's wife, who had sent us the bouquets, Katrina said, peering from behind the curtains. When she saw Katrina pointing her out, she threw the curtains back and appeared full in view, smiling and waving her hand; we lifted up our bouquets, and waved them to her, and smiled our thanks. Katrina sprang up, with my cloak on her arm, to the coachman's seat. "I tink I go down too," she exclaimed, "I see you all safe;" and so we drove off, with as much smiling and bowing and "fare-welling" as if we had been cousins and aunts of everybody in the Scandinavie. How we did hate to leave our great corner rooms, with five windows in them, the fifth window being across the corner, which is not a right-angled corner, but like a huge bay-window! This utilization of the corner is a very noticeable feature in the streets of Christiania. In the greater part of the best houses the corner is cut off in this way; the door into the room being across the opposite corner (also cut off), thus making a six-sided room. The improvement in the street-fronts of handsome blocks of buildings made by this shape instead of the usual rectangular corner is greater than would be supposed, and the rooms made in this fashion are delightfully bright, airy, and out of the common.

I did not quite fancy sailing in a steamer named "Balder,"-one gets superstitious in Norway,-but I think we had flowers enough on board to have saved us if Loki herself had wished us ill. Nothing in all Norway is more striking than the Norwegian's love of flowers. It is no exaggeration to say that one does not see a house without flowers in the window. In the better houses every window in the front, even up to the little four-paned window in the gable, has its row of flower-pots; and even in the very poorest hovels there will be at least one window flower-filled. This general love and culture of flowers makes it the most natural thing in the world for the Norwegian, when he travels, to be carrying along something in the shape of a plant. He is either taking it home or carrying it as a gift to some one he is going to visit. I have not yet been on a steamboat where I did not see at least a dozen potted plants, of one sort or another, being carefully carried along, as hand luggage, by men or women; and as for bouquets, they are almost as common as hats and bonnets. Of the potted plants, five out of seven will be green myrtles, and usually the narrow leaf. There is a reason for this,-the Norwegian bride, of the better class, wears always a chaplet of green myrtle, and has her white veil trimmed with little knots of it from top to bottom. The chaplet is made in front somewhat after the shape of the high gilded crowns worn by the peasant brides; but at the back it is simply a narrow wreath confining the veil. After I knew this, I looked with more interest at the pots of myrtle I met everywhere, journeying about from place to place; and I observed, after this, what I had not before noticed, that every house had at least one pot of myrtle in its windows.

There were a dozen different varieties of carnations in our bouquets. The first thing I saw as we moved off from the wharf was a shabbily dressed little girl with a big bouquet entirely of carnations, in which there must have been many more. In a few minutes a woman, still shabbier than the little girl, came down into the cabin with a great wooden box of the sort that Norwegian women carry everything in, from potatoes up to their church fineries: it is an oval box with a little peak at each end like a squirrel cage; the top, which has a hole in the middle, fits down around these peaks so tight that the box is safely lifted by this handle; and, as I say, everything that a Norwegian woman wants to carry, she puts into her tine (pronounced, "teener"). Some of them are painted in gay colors; others are left plain. Setting down the box, she opened it, and proceeded to sprinkle with water one of the most beautiful wreaths I have ever seen,-white lilies, roses, and green myrtle. I think it came from a wedding; but as she knew no English, and I no Norwegian, I could not find out. Two nights and a day she was going to carry it, however, and she sprinkled it several times a day. An hour later, when I went down into the cabin, there was a row of bouquets filling the table under the looking-glass; five pots of flowers standing on the floor, and in several staterooms whose doors were standing open I saw still more of both bouquets and plants. This is only a common illustration of the universal custom. It is a beautiful one, and in thorough keeping with the affectionate simplicity of the Norwegian character.

Christiania looked beautiful as we sailed away. It lies in the hollow, or rather on the shore rim of the fine amphitheatre of hills which makes the head of the Christiania Fjord. Fjord is a much more picturesque word than bay; and I suppose when a bay travels up into the heart of a country scores of miles, slips under several narrow strips of land one after the other, making lakes between them, it is entitled to be called something more than plain bay; but I wish it had been a word easier to pronounce. I never could say "fjord," when I read the word in America; and all that I have gained on the pronouncing of it by coming to Norway is to become still more distinctly aware that I always pronounce it wrong. I do not think Cadmus ever intended that j should be y, or that one should be called on to pronounce f before it.

The Christiania Fjord has nothing of grandeur about it, like the wilder fjords on the west coast of Norway. It is smiling and gracious, with beautifully rounded and interlocking hills,-intervals of pine woods, with green meadows and fields, pretty villages and hamlets, farm-houses and country-seats, and islands unnumbered, which deceive the eye continually, seeming to be themselves the shore. We left Christiania at two o'clock; at that hour the light on a Norway summer day is like high noon in other parts of the world,-in fact, it's noon till four o'clock in the afternoon, and then it is afternoon till ten, and then a good, long, very light twilight to go to bed by at eleven or twelve, and if you want to get up again at three o'clock in the morning you can wake without any trouble, for it is broad daylight: all of which is funny for once or twice, or perhaps for ten times, but not for very long.

It was not till four or five o'clock that we began to see the full beauty of the fjord; then the sun had gone far enough over to cast a shadow,-soften all the forest tops on the west side, and cast shadows on the east side. The little oases of bright green farm-lands, with their clusters of houses, seemed to sink deeper and deeper into their dark pine-tree settings,-the fjord grew wider and wider, and was as smooth as a lake: now and then we drew up by a little village and half stopped,-it seemed no more than that,-and somebody would climb on or off the steamer by little cockles of boats that bobbed alongside. Sometimes we came to a full stop, and lay several minutes at a wharf, loading or unloading bags of grain. I think we took on just as many as we took off,-like a game of bean-bags between the villages. The sailors carried them off and on their backs, one set standing still in their places to lift the bags up on their comrades' backs; they lifted with a will, and then folded their arms and waited till the bag-carriers came back to be loaded up again. If I could have spoken Norwegian, I should have asked whether those sets of men took turn and turn about, or whether one set always lifted up the loads and the others lugged them,-probably the latter. That's the way it is in life; but I never saw a more striking example of it than in the picture these sailors made standing with folded arms doing nothing, waiting till their fellows came back again to be loaded down like beasts of burden. It was at "Moss" we saw this,-a pretty name for a little town with a handful of gay-colored houses, red, yellow, and white, set in green fields and woods. Women came on board here with trays of apples and pears to sell,-little wizened pears red high up on one side, like some old spinsters' cheeks in New England. Children came too, with cherries tied up in bunches of about ten to a bunch; they looked dear, but it was only a few hundredths of a quarter of a dollar that they cost. Since I have found out that a kroner is only about twenty-seven cents, and that it takes one hundred ore to make a kroner, all the things that cost only a few ore seem to me so ridiculously cheap as not to be worth talking about. These children with the cherries were all barefoot, and they were so shy that they curled and mauled their little brown toes all the time they were selling their cherries, just as children one shade less shy twist and untwist their fingers.

We left Moss by a short cut, not overland exactly, but next door to it,-through land. The first thing we knew we were sailing through a bridge right into the town, in a narrow canal,-we could have thrown an apple into the windows of some of the houses as we glided by; then in a few moments out we were again into the broad open fjord.

At six o'clock we went down to our first Danish supper. The "Balder" is a Danish boat, and sailed by a Danish captain, and conducted on Danish methods; and they pleased us greatly. The ordinary Norwegian supper is a mongrel meal of nobody knows how many kinds of sausage, raw ham, raw smoked salmon, sardines, and all varieties of cheese. The Danish we found much better, having the addition of hot fish, and cutlets, and the delicious Danish butter. One good result of Denmark's lying low, she gets splendid pasturage for her cows, and makes a delicious butter, which brings the highest prices in the English and other markets.

When we came up from supper we found ourselves in a vast open sea; dim shores to be seen in the east and west,-in the east pink and gray, in the west dark with woods. The setting sun was sinking behind them, and its yellow light etched every tree-top on the clear sky. Here and there a sail gleamed in the sun, or stood out white in the farther horizon. A pink halo slowly spread around the whole outer circumference of the water; and while we were looking at this, all of a sudden we were not in an open sea at all, but in among islands again, and slowly coming to a stop between two stretches of lovely shore,-big solid green fields like America's on one side, and a low promontory of mossy rocks on the other. A handful of houses, with one large and conspicuous one in the centre, stood between the green fields and the shore. A sign was printed on this house in big letters; and as I was trying to spell it out, a polite Norwegian at my elbow said, "Shoddy factory! We make shoddy there; we call it so after the English," bowing flatteringly as if it were a compliment to the English. Kradsuld is Norwegian for shoddy, and sounds worlds more respectable, I am sure.

The roof of this shoddy factory had four dormer windows in it, with their tiled roofs running up full width to the ridge-pole, which gave the roof the drollest expression of being laid in box-plaits. I wish somebody would make a series of photographs of roofs in Norway and Denmark. They are the most picturesque part of the scenery; and as for their "sky-line," it is the very poetry of etching. I thought I had seen the perfection of the beauty of irregularity in the sky-line in Edinburgh; but Edinburgh roofs are monotonous and straight in comparison with the huddling of corners and angles in Scandinavian gables and ridges and chimneys and attics. Add to this freaky and fantastic and shifting shape the beauty of color and of fine regularity of small curves in the red tile, and you have got as it were a mid-air world of beauty by itself. As I was studying out the points where these box-plaited dormer windows set into their roof, the same polite Norwegian voice said to a friend by his side, "I have read it over twenty-five ones." He pronounced the word read as for the present indicative, which made his adverbs of time at the end still droller. Really one of the great pleasures of foreign travel is the English one hears spoken; and it is a pleasure for which we no doubt render a full equivalent in turn when we try speaking in any tongue except our own. But it is hard to conceive of any intelligible English French or German being so droll as German or French English can be and yet be perfectly intelligible. Polite creatures that they all are, never to smile when we speak their language!

As the sun sank, the rosy horizon-halo gathered itself up and floated about in pink fleeces; the sky turned pale green, like the sky before dawn. Latitude plays strange pranks with sunsets and sunrises. Norway, I think, must be the only place in the world where you could mistake one for the other; but it is literally true that in Norway it would be very easy to do so if you happened not to know which end of the day it was.

When we went down into our staterooms sorrow awaited us. To the eye the staterooms had been most alluring. One and all, we had exclaimed that never had we seen so fine staterooms in a Norwegian steamboat. All the time we were undressing we eyed with complacency the two fine red sofas, on one of which we were to sleep. Strangely enough, no one of us observed the shape of the sofa, or thought to try the consistency of it. Our experiences, therefore, were nearly simultaneous, and unanimous to a degree, as we discovered afterwards on comparing notes. The first thing we did on lying down on our bed was to roll off it. Then we got up and on again, and tried to get farther back on it. As it was only about the width of a good-sized pocket-handkerchief, and rounded up in the middle, this proved to be impossible. Then we got up and tried to pull it out from the wall. Vain! It was upholstered to the board as immovable as the stack-pipe of the boat. Then we tried once more to adjust ourselves to it. Presently we discovered that it was not only narrow and rounding, but harder than it would have seemed possible that anything in shape of tufted upholstered velvet could be. We began to ache in spots; the ache spread: we ached all over; we could neither toss, twist, nor turn on the summit of this narrow tumulus. Misery set in; indignation and restlessness followed; seasickness, in addition, seemed for once a trifle. The most indefatigable member of the party, being also the most fatigued, succeeded at last in procuring a half-dozen small square pillows,-one shade less hard than the sofa, she thought when she first lay down on them, but long before morning she began to wonder whether they were not even harder. Such a night lingers long in one's memory; it was a closing chapter to our experience of Norwegian beds,-a fitting climax, if anything so small could be properly called a climax. How it has ever come about that the Norwegian notion of a bed should be so restricted, I am at a loss to imagine. They are simply child's cribs,-no more; as short as narrow, and in many instances so narrow that it is impossible to turn over quickly in them without danger. I have again and again been suddenly waked, finding myself just going over the edge. The making of them is as queer as the size. A sort of bulkhead small mattress is slipped in under the head, lifting it up at an angle admirably suited to an asthmatic patient who can't breathe lying down, or to a small boy who likes to coast down-hill in his bed of a morning. The single pillow is placed on this; the short, narrow sheet flung loosely over it; blanket, ditto; coverlet, ditto-it may or may not be straight or smooth. The whole expression of the bed is as if it had been just hastily smoothed up temporarily till there should be time enough to make it. In perfect good faith I sent for a chambermaid one night, in the early days of my Norway journey, and made signs to her that I would like to have my bed made, when the poor thing had already made it to the very best of her ability, and entirely in keeping with the customs of her country.

It is very needless to say that we all were up early the next morning; and there was something ludicrous enough in the tone in which each inquired eagerly of each, "Did you ever know such beds?" At ten we were anchored off the little town of Frederikssund; and here the boat lay five mortal hours, doing nothing but unloading and taking on bags of bran.

Another big steamer was lying alongside, doing the same thing. This was our first glimpse of Denmark. Very flat it looked,-just out of water, and no more,-like Holland. The sailors who were carrying the bags of bran wore queer pointed hoods on their heads, with long, tail-like pieces coming down behind, which made them look like elves,-at least it did for the first hour; after that they no longer looked queer. If we had gone on shore, we could have seen the Royal Estate of Iaegerspriis, which has belonged to kings of Denmark ever since the year 1300, and has a fine park, and a house decorated by sculptures by Wiedewelt,-a Danish sculptor of the last century,-and an old sepulchre which dates back to the stone age, and, best of all, a great old oak, called the King's Oak, which is the largest in Denmark, and dates back farther than anybody will know till it dies. A tree is the only living thing which can keep the secret of its own age, is it not? Nobody can tell within a hundred or two of years anything about it so long as the tree can hold its head up. The circumference of this tree is said to be forty-two feet four feet from the ground,-a pretty respectable tree, considering the size of Denmark itself. Now we begin to see where the old Vikings got the oak to build their ships. They carried it up from Denmark, which must have been in those days a great forest of beech and oak to have kept so many till now. It is only a few miles from Frederikssund, also, to Havelse, which is celebrated for its "kitchen middings,"-the arch?ological name for kitchen refuse which got buried up hundreds of years ago. Even potato parings become highly important if you keep them long enough! They will at least establish the fact that somebody ate potatoes at that date; and all things hang together so in this queer world that there is no telling how much any one fact may prove or disprove. For myself, I don't care so much for what they ate in those days as for what they wore,-next to what they did in the way of fighting and making love. I saw the other day, in Christiania, a whole trayful of things which were taken from a burial mound opened in Norway last spring. A Viking had been buried there in his ship. The hull was entire, and I have stood in it; but not even the old blackened hull, nor the oars, stirred me so much as the ornaments he and his horses had worn,-the bosses of the shields, and queer little carved bits of iron and silver which had held the harnesses together; one exquisitely wrought horse's head, only about two inches long, which must have been a beautiful ornament wherever it was placed. If there had been a fish-bone found left from his last dinner or from the funeral feast which the relations had at his wake, I should not have cared half so much for it. But tastes differ.

An afternoon more of sailing and another awful night on the red velvet ridges, and we came to Copenhagen itself, at five of the morning. At four we had thought it must be near,-long strips of green shore, with trees and houses,-so flat that it looked narrow, and seemed to unroll like a ribbon as we sailed by; but when we slipped into the harbor we saw the difference,-wharves and crowds of masts and warehouses, just like any other city, and the same tiresome farce of making believe examine your luggage. I should respect customs and custom-houses more if they did as they say they will do. As it is, to smuggle seems to me the easiest thing in the world as well as the most alluring. I have never smuggled because I have never had the means necessary to do it; but I could have smuggled thousands of dollars worth of goods, if I had had them, through every custom-house I have ever seen. A commissionnaire with a shining beaver hat stood on the shore to meet us, we having been passed on with "recommendations" from the kindly people of the Scandinavie in Christiania to the King of Denmark Hotel people in Copenhagen. Nothing is so comfortable in travelling as to be waited for by your landlord. The difference between arriving unlooked for and arriving as an expected customer is about like the difference between arriving at the house of a friend and arriving at that of an enemy. The commissionaire had that pathetic air of having seen better days which is so universal in his class. One would think that the last vocation in the world which a "decayed" gentleman would choose would be that of showing other gentlemen their way about cities; it is only to be explained by the same morbid liking to be tantalized which makes hungry beggars stand by the hour with their noses against the outside of the panes of a pastry-cook's window,-which they all do, if they can! Spite of our flaming "recommendations," which had preceded us from our last employer, the landlord of the Scandinavie, satisfactory rooms were not awaiting us. Sara Bernhardt was in town, and every hotel was crowded with people who had come for a night or two to see and hear her. It is wonderful how much room a person of her sort can take up in a city; and if they add, as she does, the aroma of a distinct and avowed disreputability, they take up twice as much room! Since her visit to England I wonder she does not add to her open avowal of disregard of all the laws and moralities which decent people hold in esteem, "By permission of the Queen," or "To the Royal Family."

But this is not telling you about Copenhagen. It was five o'clock when we landed, and before seven I had driven with the commissionnaire to each one of the four first-class hotels in Copenhagen in search of sunny rooms. None to be had! All four of the hotels were fully occupied, as I said, by Sara Bernhardt in some shape or other. So we made the best of the best we could do,-breakfasted, slept, lunched, and at two o'clock were ready to begin to see Copenhagen. At first we were disappointed, as in Christiania, by its modern look. It is a dreadful pity that old cities will burn down and be rebuilt, and that all cities must have such a monotony of repetitions of blocks of houses. By the end of another century there won't be an old city left anywhere in the world. There are acres of blocks of houses in Copenhagen to-day that might have been built anywhere else, and fit in anywhere else just as well as here. When you look at them a little more closely, you see that there are bits of terra-cotta work in friezes and pilasters and brackets here and there, which would not have been done anywhere except in the home of Thorwaldsen. If he had done nothing else for art than to stamp a refined and graceful expression on all the minor architectural decorations of his native city, that would have been worth while. There is not an architectural monstrosity in the city,-not one; and many of the buildings have an excellent tone of quiet, conventional decoration which is pleasing to the eye. The brick-work particularly is well done; and simple variations of design are effectively used. You see often recurring over doorways and windows terra-cotta reproductions of some of Thorwaldsen's popular figures; and they are never marred by anything fantastic or bizarre in cornice or moulding above or around them. Among the most noticeable of the modern blocks are some built for the dwellings of poor people. They are in short streets leading to the Reservoir, and having therefore a good sweep of air through them. They are but two stories and a half high, pale yellow brick, neatly finished; and each house has a tiny dooryard filled with flowers. There are three tenements to a house, each having three rooms. The expression of these rows of gay little yellow houses with red roofs and flower-filled dooryards and windows, and each doorway bearing its two or three signs of trade or artisanry, was enough to do one's heart good. The rents are low, bringing the tenements within easy reach of poor people's purses. Yet there is evidently an obligation-a certain sort of social standard-involved in the neighborhood which will keep it always from squalor or untidiness. I doubt if anybody would dare to live in those rows and not have flowers in his front yard and windows. For myself, I would far rather live in one of these little houses than in either of the four great palaces which make the Royal Square, Amalienborg, and look as much like great penitentiaries as like anything else,-high, bulky, unadorned gray piles, flat and straight walls, and tiresome, dingy windows, and the pavements up to their door-sills. They may be splendid the other side the walls,-probably are; but they are dreary objects to look at as you come home of an evening. The horse-cars are the most unique thing in the modern parts of Copenhagen. How two horses can draw them I don't see: but they do; and if two horses can draw two-story horse-cars, why don't we have them in America, and save such overcrowding? The horse-cars here not only have a double row of seats on top as they have in London, but they have a roof over those seats, which nearly doubles the apparent height. As they come towards you they look like a great square-cornered boat, with a long pilot-house on top. Of course they carry just double the number. Women never ride on the top; but men do not mind going upstairs outside a horse-car and sitting in mid-air above the heads of the crowd; and if two horses really are able to draw so many, it is a gain.

The one splendid sight in Copenhagen is its great dragon spire. This, one could stand and gaze at by the day. It is made of four dragons twisted together, heads down, tails up; heads pointing to the four corners of the earth; tails tapering and twisting, and twisting and tapering, till they taper out into an iron rod, which mounts still higher, with three gilded balls, and three wrought gilded circles on it, and finally ends in a huge gilded open-work weather-cock. This is on an old brick building now used as the Exchange. It was built early in 1600 by Christian IV., who seems to me to have done everything best worth doing that was ever done in Denmark. His monogram () is forever cropping out on all the splendid old things. They are enlarging this Exchange now; and the new red brick and glaring white marble make a very unpleasing contrast to the old part of the building, although every effort has been made to copy the style of it exactly. It is long, and not high, the wall divided into spaces by carved pilasters between every two windows. Each pilaster begins as a man or a woman,-arms cut off at the shoulders, breasts and shoulders looking from a distance grotesquely like four humps. Where the legs should begin, the trunk ends in a great gargoyle,-a lion's head, or a man's, or a bull's,-some grotesque, some beautiful; below this, a conventional tapering support. In the pointed arch of each of the lower windows, also a carved head, no two of them alike, many of them beautiful. It is a grand old building, and one might study it and draw from it by the week. Passing this and crossing an arm of the sea,-which, by the way, you are perpetually doing in Copenhagen to go anywhere, the sea never having fully made up its mind to abandon the situation,-you come to another quaint old building in the suburbs, called Christianshaven. This is Vor Frelser's Church (Our Saviour's Church), built only fifty years later than the Exchange. It is a dark red brick church, with tiny flat dormer windows let in and painted green on a shining tile roof; a square belfry; clock face painted red, black, and blue; above this, a spire, first six-sided and then round, 288 feet high, covered with copper, which is bright green in places, and wound round and round by a glittering gilded staircase, which goes to the very top and ends under a huge gilt ball, under which twelve people can stand. This also is a fine kind of spire to have at hand at sunset; it flames out like a ladder into the sky.

One more old church has a way up, which is worth telling, though you can't see it from the outside. This is another of that same Christian IV.'s buildings,-it was built for an observatory, and used for that for two hundred years, but then joined to a church. The tower is round, 115 feet high, 48 feet in diameter, and made of two hollow cylinders. Between these is the way up, a winding stone road, smooth and broad; and if you'll believe it, in 1716 that rascal Catherine of Russia actually drove up to the top of it in a coach and four, Peter going ahead on horseback. I walked up two of the turns of this stone roadway, and it made me dizzy to think what a clatter the five horses' hoofs must have made, with stone above, below, and around them; and what a place it would have been to have knocked brains out if the horses had been frightened! In this inside cylinder all the University treasures were hidden when the English bombarded the city in 1807, and a very safe place it must have been.

Opposite this church is still another of Christian IV.'s good works,-a large brick building put up for the accommodation of poor students at the University. One hundred poor students still have free lodgings in this building, but part of it looks as if its roof would fall in before long.

Along the arms of the sea which stretch into or across the city-for some of them go way through, come out, and join the outer waters again-are rows of high warehouses for grain, some seven and eight stories high. These have two-storied dormer windows, and terraced roofs, and a great beak like a ship's prow projecting from the ridge-pole of the dormer window. From this the grain is lowered and hoisted to and from the ships below. The ships lie crowded in these narrow arms, as in a harbor, and make picturesque lanes of mast-tops through the city. On many of them are hung great strings of flounders drying, festooned on cords, from rope to rope, scores of them on a single sloop. They look better than they smell; you could not spare them out of the picture.

The last thing we saw this afternoon was the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, which has just been put up in the great garden of Rosenborg Castle. This garden is generally called Kongen's Have ("The King's Garden"). It was planned by the good Christian, but contains now very little of his original design. Two splendid avenues of horse-chestnut trees and a couple of old bronze lions are all that is left as he saw it. It is a great place of resort for the middle classes with their children. A yearly tax of two kroners (about fifty cents) permits a family to take its children there every day; and I am sure there must have been two hundred children in sight as I walked up the dark dense shaded avenue of linden trees at the upper end of which sits the beloved Hans Christian, with the sunlight falling on his head. "The children come here every day," said the commissionnaire; "and that is the reason they put him here, so they can see him." He looked as if he also saw them. A more benignant, lifelike, tender look was never wrought in bronze. He sits, half wrapped in a cloak, his left hand holding a book carelessly on his knee, the right hand lifted as if in benediction of the children. The statue is raised a few feet on a plain pedestal, in a large oval bed of flowers: on one side the pedestal is carved the "Child and the Stork;" on the other, the group of ducks, with the "ugly" one in the middle,-pictures that every little child will understand and love to see; on the front is his name and a wreath of the bay he so well earned. Written above is,-

"PUT UP BY THE DANISH PEOPLE;"

and I thought as I stood there that he was more to be envied than Christian IV. with his splendors of art and architecture, or than the whole Danish dynasty, with their priceless treasures and their jewelled orders. And so ended our first day in Copenhagen.

The next morning, Sunday, I drove out to church in the island of Amager, of which that paradoxical compound of truth and falsehood, Murray, says: "It offers absolutely nothing of interest." I always find it very safe to go to places of which that is said. Amager is Copenhagen's vegetable garden. It is an island four miles square, and absolutely flat,-as flat as a piece of pasteboard; in fact, while I was driving on it, it seemed to me to bear the same relation to flatness that the Irishman's gun did to recoiling,-"If it recoiled at all, it recoiled forrards,"-so it was a very safe gun. If Amager is anything more or less than flat, it is bent inwards; for actually when I looked off to the water it seemed to be higher than the land, and the ships looked as if they might any minute come sailing down among the cabbages. Early in the sixteenth century it was filled up by Dutch people; and there they are to this day, wearing the same clothes and raising cabbages just as they did three hundred years ago. To reach Amager from Copenhagen, you cross several arms of the sea and go through one or two suburbs called by different names; but you would never know that you were not driving in Copenhagen all the time until you come out into the greenery of Amager itself. It was good luck to go of a Sunday. All the Dutch dames were out and about in their best, driving in carts and walking, or sitting in their doorways. The women were "sights to behold." The poorer ones wore shirred sunbonnets on their heads, made of calico, coming out like an old poke-bonnet in front, and with full capes which set out at a fly-away angle behind. They seemed to have got the conception of the cape from the arms of their own windmills (of which, by the way, there are several on the island; and their revolving arms add to the island's expression of being insecurely at sea!). Next below the sunbonnet came a gay handkerchief crossed on the breast, over a black gown with tight sleeves; a full bright blue apron, reaching half-way round the waist and coming down to within two inches of the bottom of the overskirt, completed their rig. It was droller than it sounds. Some of them wore three-cornered handkerchiefs pinned outside their poke-bonnets, pinned under their chins, and the point falling over the neck behind. These were sometimes plain colors, sometimes white, embroidered or trimmed with lace. The men looked exactly like any countrymen in England or Scotland or America. If we haven't an international anything else, we have very nearly an international costume for the masculine human creature; and it is as ugly and unpicturesque a thing as malignity itself could devise. The better class of women wore a plain black bonnet, made in the same poke shape as the sunbonnets, but without any cape at all on the back, only a little full crown tucked in, and the fronts coming round very narrow in the back of the neck, and tied there with narrow black ribbons. Don't fancy these were the only strings that held the roof in its place,-not at all. Two very broad strings, of bright blue, or red, or purple, as it might be, came from somewhere high up inside the front, and tied under the chin in a huge bow, so that their faces looked as if they had first been tied up in broad ribbon for the toothache, and then the huge bonnet put on outside of all. Strangely enough, the effect on the faces was not ugly. Old faces were sheltered and softened, double chins and scraggy necks were hid, and younger faces peered out prettily from under the scoop and among the folds of ribbon; and the absolute plainness of the bonnet itself, having no trimming save a straight band across the middle, gave the charm of simplicity to the outline, and vindicated the worth of that most emphatically when set side by side in the church pews with the modern bonnets,-all bunches and bows, and angles and tilts of feathers and flowers and rubbish generally.

The houses were all comfortable, and some of them very pretty. Low, long, chiefly of a light yellow straw, latticed off by dark lines of wood-work, some of them entirely matted with ivy, like cottages in the English lake district, all of them with either red-tiled or thatched roofs, and the greater part surrounded by hedges. The thatched roofs were delightful. The thatch is held on and fastened down at the ridge-pole by long bits of crooked wood, one on each side, the two crossing and lapping at the ridge-pole and held together there by pins. The effect of a long, low roof set thick with these cross-pieces at the top is almost as if dozens of slender fishes were set there with forked tails up in the air; and when half a dozen sparrows are flitting and alighting on these projecting points of board, the effect is of a still odder trimming. Some of the red-tiled roofs have a set pattern in white painted along the ridge-pole, corners, and eaves. These are very gay; and some of the thatched roofs are grown thick with a dark olive-green moss, which in a cross sunlight is as fine a color as was ever wrought into an old tapestry, and looks more like ancient velvet.

The church in Amager is new, brick, and ugly of exterior. But the inside is good; the wood-work, choir, pulpit, sounding-board, railings, pews, all carved in a simple conventional pattern, and painted dark-olive brown, relieved by claret and green,-in a combination borrowed no doubt from some old wood-work centuries back. In the centre a candelabra, hanging by a red cord, marked off by six gilded balls at intervals; the candelabra itself being simply a great gilded ball, with the simplest possible candle-holders projecting from it. Two high candle-holders inside the railing had each three brass candlesticks in the shape of a bird, with his long tail curled under his feet to stand on,-a fantastic design, but singularly graceful, considering its absurdity. The minister wore a long black gown and high, full ruff, exactly like those we see in the pictures of the divines of the Reformation times. He had a fine and serious face, of oval contour; therefore the ruff suited him. On short necks and below round faces it is simply grotesque, and no more dignified than a turkey-cock's ruffled feathers. He preached with great fervor and warmth of manner; but as I could not understand a word he said, I should have found the sermon long if I had not been very busy in studying the bonnets and faces, and choir of little girls in the gallery. More than half the congregation were in the ordinary modern dress, and would have passed unnoticed anywhere. All the men looked like well-to-do New England farmers, coloring and all; for the blue-eyed, fair-haired type prevails. But the women who had had the sense and sensibility to stick to their own national clothes were as pretty as pictures, as their faces showed above the dark olive-brown pews, framed in their front porches of bonnets,-for that is really what they are like, the faces are so far back in them. Some were lined with bright lavender satin, full-puffed; some with purple; some with blue. The strings never matched the lining, but were of a violent contrast,-light blue in the purple, gay plaid in the lavender, and so on. The aprons were all of the same shade of vivid blue,-as blue as the sky, and darker. They were all shirred down about two inches below the waist; some of them trimmed down the sides at the back with lace or velvet, but none of them on the bottom. One old woman who sat in front of me wore a conical and pointed cap of black velvet and plush, held on her head by broad gray silk strings, tied with a big bow under her chin, covering her ears and cheeks. The cap was shaped like a funnel carried out to a point, which projected far behind her, stiff and rigid; yet it was not an ungraceful thing on the head. These, I am told, are rarely seen now.

When the sermon was done, the minister disappeared for a moment, and came back in gorgeous claret velvet and white robes, with a great gilt cross on his back. The candles on the altar were lighted, and the sacrament was administered to a dozen or more kneeling outside the railing. This part of the ceremony seemed to me not very Lutheran; but I suppose that is precisely the thing it was,-Luther-an,-one of the relics he kept when he threw overboard the rest of the superstitions. Before this ceremony the sexton came and unlocked the pew we occupied, and I discovered for the first time that I and the commissionnaire had been all that time locked in. After church the sexton told us that there would be a baptismal service there in an hour,-eleven babies to be baptized. That was something not to be lost; so I drove away for half an hour, went to a farm-house and begged milk, and then, after I had got my inch, asked for my habitual ell,-that is, to see the house. The woman was, like all housekeepers, full of apologies, but showed me her five rooms with good-will,-five in a row, all opening together, the kitchen in the middle, and the front door in the back yard by the hen-coop and water-barrel! The kitchen was like the Norwegian farm-house kitchens,-a bare shed-like place, with a table, and wall-shelves, and a great stone platform with a funnel roof overhead; sunken hollows to make the fire in; no oven, no lids, no arrangement for doing anything except boiling or frying. A huge kettle of boiling porridge was standing over a few blazing sticks. Havremels grod-which is Norwegian, and Danish also, for oatmeal pudding-is half their living. All the bread they have they buy at the baker's.

The other rooms were clean. Every one had in it a two-storied bed curtained with calico, neat corner cupboards, and bureaus. There were prints on the wall, and a splendid brass coffee-pot and urn under pink mosquito netting. But the woman herself had no stockings on her feet, and her wooden shoes stood just outside the door.

When we reached the church again, the babies were all there. A wail as of bleating lambs reached us at the very door. A strange custom in Denmark explained this bleating: the poor babies were in the hands of godmothers, and not their own mothers. The mothers do not go with their babies to the christening; the fathers, godfathers, and godmothers go,-two godmothers and one godfather to each baby. The women and the babies sat together, and rocked and trotted and shook and dandled and screamed, in a perfect Babel of motion and sound. Seven out of those eleven babies were crying at the top of their lungs. The twenty-two godmothers looked as if they would go crazy. Never, no, never, did I see or hear such a scene! The twenty-two fathers and godfathers sat together on the other side of the aisle, stolid and unconcerned. I tried to read in their faces which men owned the babies, but I could not. They all looked alike indifferent to the racket. Presently the sexton marshalled the women with their babies in a row outside the outer railing. He had in his hand a paper with the list of the poor little things' names on it, which he took round, and called the roll, apparently so as to make sure all was right. Then the minister came in, and went the round, saying something over each baby and making the sign of the cross on its head and breast. I thought he was through when he had once been round doing this; but no,-he had to begin back again at the first baby and sprinkle them. Oh, how the poor little things did scream! I think all eleven were crying by this time, and I couldn't stand it; so at the third baby I signed to my commissionnaire that we would go, and we slipped out as quietly as we could. "Will there be much more of the service?" I asked him. "Oh, yes," he said. "He will preach now to the fathers and to the godfathers and godmothers." I doubt if the godmothers knew one word he said. The babies all wore little round woollen hoods, most of them bright blue, with three white buttons in a row on the back. Their dresses were white, but short; and each baby had a long white apron on to make a show with in front. This was as long as a handsome infant's robe would be made anywhere; but it was undisguisedly an apron, open all the way behind, and in the case of these poor little screaming creatures flying in all directions at every kick and writhing struggle. I was glad enough to escape the church; but twenty-two women must have come out gladder still a little later. On the way home I passed a windmill which I could have stayed a day to paint if I had been an artist. It was six-sided; the sails were on red beams; a red balcony all round it, with red beams sloping down as supports, resting on the lower story; the first story was on piles, and the spaces between filled up solid with sticks of wood,-the place where they kept their winter fuel. Next to this came a narrow belt painted light yellow; then a black belt, with windows in it rimmed with white; then the red balcony; then a drab or gray space,-this made of plain boards; then the rest to the top shingled like a roof; in this part one window, with red rims in each side. A long, low warehouse of light yellow stuccoed walls, lined off with dark brown, joined the mill by a covered way; and the mill-owner's house was close on the other side, also with light yellow stuccoed walls and a red-tiled roof, and hedges and vines and an orchard in front. Paint this, somebody; do!

This is the tale of the first two days in Copenhagen. In my next I will tell you about the museums if I come out of them alive; it sounds as if nobody could. One ought to be here at least two weeks to really study the superb collections of one sort and another.

I will close this first section of my notions of Denmark with a brief tribute to the Danish flea. I considered myself proof against fleas. I had wintered them in Rome, had lived familiarly with them in Norway, and my contempt for them was in direct proportion to my familiarity. I defied them by day, and ignored them by night. But the Danish flea is as David to Saul! He is a cross between a bedbug and a wasp. He is the original of the famous idea of the Dragon, symbolized in all the worships of the world. I bow before him in terror, and trust most devoutly he never leaves the shores of Denmark.

Good-by. Bless you all!