The Making of an American | Page 4

More than mountains in their majesty; more, infinitely more, than the
city of teeming millions with all its wealth and might, they seem to me
to typify human freedom and the struggle for it. Thence came the
vikings that roved the seas, serving no man as master; and through the
dark ages of feudalism no lord long bent the neck of those stout
yeomen to the yoke. Germany, forgetting honor, treaties, and history, is
trying to do it now in Slesvig, south of the Nibs, and she will as surely
fail. The day of long-delayed justice, when dynasties by the grace of
God shall have been replaced by government by right of the people,
will find them unconquered still.
Alas! I am afraid that thirty years in the land of my children's birth have
left me as much of a Dane as ever. I no sooner climb the castle hill than

I am fighting tooth and nail the hereditary foes of my people whom it
was built high to bar. Yet, would you have it otherwise? What sort of a
husband is the man going to make who begins by pitching his old
mother out of the door to make room for his wife? And what sort of a
wife would she be to ask or to stand it?
But I was speaking of the tenement by the moat. It was a ramshackle,
two-story affair with shiftless tenants and ragged children. Looking
back now, I think likely it was the contrast of its desolation with the
green hill and the fields I loved, of its darkness and human misery and
inefficiency with the valiant fighting men of my boyish dreams, that so
impressed me. I believe it because it is so now. Over against the
tenement that we fight in our cities ever rises in my mind the fields, the
woods, God's open sky, as accuser and witness that His temple is being
so defiled, man so dwarfed in body and soul.
[Illustration: The View the Stork got of the Old Town]
I know that Rag Hall displeased me very much. I presume there must
have been something of an inquiring Yankee twist to my make-up, for
the boys called me "Jacob the delver," mainly because of my constant
bothering with the sewerage of our house, which was of the most
primitive kind. An open gutter that was full of rats led under the house
to the likewise open gutter of the street. That was all there was of it,
and very bad it was; but it had always been so, and as, consequently, it
could not be otherwise, my energies spent themselves in unending
warfare with those rats, whose nests choked the gutter. I could hardly
have been over twelve or thirteen when Rag Hall challenged my
resentment. My methods in dealing with it had at least the merit of
directness, if they added nothing to the sum of human knowledge or
happiness. I had received a "mark," which was a coin like our silver
quarter, on Christmas Eve, and I hied myself to Rag Hall at once to
divide it with the poorest family there, on the express condition that
they should tidy up things, especially those children, and generally
change their way of living. The man took the money--I have a vague
recollection of seeing a stunned look on his face--and, I believe,
brought it back to our house to see if it was all right, thereby giving me

great offence. But he did the best for himself that way, for so Rag Hall
came under the notice of my mother too. And there really was some
whitewashing done, and the children were cleaned up for a season. So
that the eight skilling were, if not wisely, yet well invested, after all.
[Illustration: The Domkirke]
[Illustration: Within the Domkirke.]
No doubt Christmas had something to do with it. Poverty and misery
always seem to jar more at the time when the whole world makes merry.
We took an entire week off to keep Christmas in. Till after New Year's
Day no one thought of anything else. The "Holy Eve" was the greatest
of the year. Then the Domkirke shone with a thousand wax candles that
made the gloom in the deep recesses behind the granite pillars seem
deeper still, and brought out the picture of the Virgin Mary and her
child, long hidden under the whitewash of the Reformation, and so
preserved to our day by the very means taken to destroy it. The people
sang the dear old hymns about the child cradled in the manger, and
mother's tears fell in her hymn-book. Dear old mother! She had a house
full, and little enough to manage with; but never one went hungry or
unhelped from her door. I