Indeed, the history of the Old Town was one long succession of such disasters that had craved lives and wasted treasure without end, yet had never taught the people the lesson their southern neighbors had learned early. “Preserve, O Lord, the dikes and dams in the King’s marshlands; watch over the widows and the fatherless,” read a petition in our old prayer-book. The King’s marshlands went their way when the Germans stole them, but the Old Town stood, and stands still in its undiked plain, heedless alike of warning and experience. One may see all I have written here, by evil chance this very winter, if he cares to go and risk it. When after a storm-flood the waters ebbed out, field and beach were covered with the drift of the Gulf Stream, driven in by the long gale, and amid the snows of the northern winter we boys roasted our potatoes, and an occasional dead bird, over bonfires built of the bleached husks of the cocoa-palm, banana stalks, waterlogged Brazil-nuts, and other wreck of the tropics. [Illustration: FANÖ WOMEN.] It could not well be otherwise than that the sea, which knocked upon our doors so often and so rudely, played a great part in the lives and in the imagination of the people. From the islands I spoke of the whole male population was absent in summer, and often enough the year round. They were sailors, all of them, and a Fanö[2] skipper to-day walks the bridge of many a ship that ties up at its pier in New York or Philadelphia. The women, left in charge of the little farms, did all the chores, including the getting in of such crops as they raised in their sand-dunes and tending to the stock. The Old Town, too, left stranded by the sanding in of the mouth of the river, nevertheless furnished its full quota to the merchant marine of more lands than Denmark. The sea gave it lime to build its houses with, and the lime that was burned of sea-shells held what it was laid to bind. It gave the fisherman a living, and the housewife cleaner and cheaper carpets than our day knows of. Clear pine floors, scrubbed spotlessly clean and with the white sea-sand swept in “tongues” over them, had a homelike something about them which no forty-dollar rug harbors.