the erection of one of the barricades in front of the drug store, where Hoffmann’s Drops would be handy “in case any were taken ill.” It was not faint-heartedness, but cool foresight. When the summons came for the last time, I was a half-grown boy. I remember it, that gray October morning, when a gendarme, all dusty and famished from his long, hard ride, reined in his panting horse at the tavern in the market-place, where the children were just then swarming with their school books. I hear the clatter of the iron-shod hoofs in the quiet streets, the clanging of his sabre as he leaped from the saddle and spoke gravely to the inn-keeper. Far and fast as he had come, riding farther and riding farther; ghostly legions were even then hurrying from the south on his trail to grieve the echoes of the Old Town. I see the sudden awe in the faces as the whispered message went from mouth to mouth, “The King is dead,”--the King whom the people loved as their friend, last of his house, to whose life was linked inseparably the destiny of Denmark. I see the solemn face of our old Rector and hear the quiver in his voice as he bade us go home, there would be no school that day; a great sorrow had come upon the land. I see our little band trooping homeward, all desire to skip or play swallowed up in a vague dread of nameless disaster. I live over again the dark days when, in the hush of all other sounds and cares, we listened by night and by day to the boom of cannon coming nearer and nearer from the Eider, where the little Danish flock was matched in unequal combat against the armies of two mighty empires. Then the flight of broken and scattered regiments, hunted, travel-worn, and desperate, through the town. The bivouac in the Square, with shotted guns pointing southward over the causeway. The smile that will come is followed by a tear as I recall the trembling eagerness, the feverish haste of faithful hands that packed our school arsenal--twenty-five historic muskets of the Napoleonic era--in boxes to be taken out to sea and sunk, lest they become the prey of the enemy. They are rusting there yet. After we had seen the Prussian needle-guns, they were left to their fate. And when the last friend was gone on his way, the long days of suspense, the nightly vigils at the South-gate, where at last we heard the tread of approaching armies which none of us should live to see return; for within our sight Denmark was cut in twain by German bayonets.