But we bore no grudges. I owe them too much for that. The sun shone so brightly upon my mother’s new-made grave, which hands of loving friends had garlanded with flowers against her boy’s home-coming; the grass was so green and the thrush sang so sweetly in the hedge, that the sting went out also of that sorrow and only the promise remained. It is good to have lived, and though its days be mostly gray under northern skies, glad am I that mine were framed in the memories of the Old Town. We sought and found it together, She and I, the house in which I dreamed as a boy, in the street of the Black Friars. The window-pane was still there upon which I wrote “From here I can see Elisabeth’s garden” beyond the river, heaven knows with what stylus to cut so deep. With a dozen little mouths to feed in our home, diamonds were not lying loose there. The trees have grown and shut garden and stream out of sight. But the river divides us no longer, and though the shadows lengthen and the frost is upon our heads, into our hearts it cannot come. Hand in hand, we look trustfully across to that farther shore, to the land of the rising sun where we shall find what we vainly seek here: our youth in the long ago. So we came home. I shall not soon forget the morning when, to the wondering sight of our thousand immigrants, the panorama of the great world city rose out of the deep. They crowded the rail of the steamer as it came slowly up through the Narrows. Clad in their holiday clothes, they stood in quiet groups, gazing silently toward the land, all the fun and the horseplay of the voyage gone out of them. To the jester of the steerage it was but a dull mood, and, thinking to cheer them, he leaped upon a chest and harangued the crowd, telling them in their own language that they were coming to a land where the golden rule read, “Do others or they will do you.” “Cheer up!” he shouted, “and let’s have a song. Who can give us a jolly one?” There was no answer. Till somewhere in the crowd a lone, far-away voice began a verse of an old Norwegian hymn and sang it to the end in a clear alto. There was a little uneasy laugh in the corner by the wheel-house, but as the singer went on, never faltering, here and there a voice fell in, and before he had come to the end of the second verse it swelled in one common strain: “On this our festal day.” Everybody was singing. The jester had disappeared. He was forgotten, as they looked out, men and women, with folded hands toward their Promised Land. I thought of my friend who fears for our democracy, and wished he were there to hear his answer. For it _was_ the answer. Such as these have its hope in keeping. KING FREDERIK AT HOME [Illustration]