With all this record of fight and fire and flood, the Old Town was the reverse of strenuous. Its prevailing note was of sweetness and rest. The west wind that cut like a knife in November was soft in June as the touch of a woman’s hand. The grass was never as green in meadow; the wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank were never so sweet; nor ever did bird sing in forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate in my childhood’s home, as it soared toward the sky. The streets in the Old Town were narrow and crooked, and in their cobble-stone pavements the rain stood in pools that tempted unwary feet. But there were lights in the windows for glad home-comers. Neighbor knew neighbor and shared his grief and his joys. No one was rich, as wealth is counted nowadays; but then no one was allowed to want for the daily bread. “Good day and God help” was the everyday salutation to a man at work; “God bless,” if he were eating. They were ways of speech, it is true, but they were typical of the good feeling that was over and above all the sign of the Old Town and its people. CHAPTER II [Illustration: SEAL OF THE OLD TOWN IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.] If war and war’s alarms creep into the story of the Old Town on every page, despite the fact that its name to me is peace, the reason is not far to seek. I was not yet a month old when my mother had to fly from home with me in her arms, on the outbreak of war. A report ran through the land that the “slaves,” that is, the prisoners in the Holstein state prison, had been freed by the Germans and were swarming north, the vanguard of an army that looted and laid waste where it went. The women with little children were hurriedly sent away, and the Old Town prepared to give battle to the invaders. Barricades were built and manned; the council requisitioned two hundred pounds of powder from the next town, to be carried in as he could by the village express, who made his trips on foot, and they dug up an old cannon that had done duty as a hitching post a hundred years or more, to impress it into the municipal defence. The unencumbered women moulded bullets and boiled water and pitch in the houses overlooking the route of the enemy’s supposed advance. The parishes roundabout sent squads of peasants to the defence armed with battle-axes and spears. They will show you those weapons yet in the Town Hall. They keep the record there, too, of the council at which peace prevailed, on the showing of military experts that it would cost two hundred daler[3] to dam the river and flood the fields to stop an army. That was voted to be too steep a price to pay for being sacked, perhaps, in the end, as a captured town. But it is not the whole story, I am sure. Better sense must have dawned, I imagine, at the sight of those armaments. That they would have died on the barricades to the last man in defence of their homes I know, for I knew them. How carefully and deliberately they planned is shown by