The trees that hang over the wall of the Slip grew in the garden of our neighbor, Quedens, and our house abutted on it. We were his tenants. Herr Quedens was one of the solid merchants of the town. He was an old man as far back as I can remember, little, dried-up; but in the kind face with its mock seriousness that was in a perpetual struggle with the shrewd twinkle in eyes which saw ever the good in man and sought the way of helping it, the soul of the Old Town seems mirrored to me. If any one was in trouble or need, his path led straight to the Quedens’ back door. Mr. Quedens himself would have barred the front door, that was in full sight of the town, with a severity which somehow without words managed to convey the message that at the other, in the narrow street around the corner where no one was looking, there was a pitying soul that had balm for all wounds. And so there was; for there Mrs. Quedens was in charge. Dear old friends! Sweet dreams be yours in your long sleep. The world seems poorer, the Old Town empty, without your gentle presence. It must be that even the Sunday service in the Domkirke is unreal without those good gray heads. His voice rose long and quavering from his seat on the men’s side, always a bar behind the congregation; but he sang on undisturbed, finishing the hymn in his own good time and in his own way, which was not the way of earthly harmony; but in the angels’ choir it rises clear and sweet, I know. It was ever heavy upon my conscience that once, and only once, Mrs. Quedens expressed a desire to box my ears soundly. That was when my love-making had disconcerted the Old Town and fatally broken its peace. But even then she refrained; and in his office Herr Quedens looked up a little later and pinched my arm with his quizzical look. “We must be patient, patient,” he said, and somehow I felt that there was one who understood. It happened that Father and he had birthday together, and the eighteenth of March was the great feast-day of both our houses. I think that the fact that Grover Cleveland was also born on that day helped on the great liking I had for the ex-President in his later years. On that day we gathered, old and young, around the board in the Quedens home and had a great time. Father invariably had a song which he had written for the occasion with special reference to the events of the year; as invariably to the great surprise of Mr. Quedens, who knew all about it, but never ceased to wonder loudly at these poetic achievements. No one was forgotten; there was a verse for every member of the family--theirs; not ours, it was too large, we should never have gotten through the dinner. As it was, the night-watchman’s midnight verse usually came in and finished it, and we heard the tramp of his heavy boots at the gate as Mrs. Quedens disappeared from the table to see that he was not forgotten.