Denmark -- Social life and customs; Ribe (Denmark)
This was the man we turned out in a body to honor. The men who had
horses and could ride received him as an escort, miles up the road.
All the countryside was there to see and to cheer; most of the men had
carried muskets in the war, and to the tune of “Den tappre Landsoldat”
they brought him in. The streets were hung with garlands of green, and
little girls in white strewed flowers before the royal procession. I
remember it all as if it were yesterday. In the evening there was a
great time in the Domkirke. The King sat inside the altar-rail in his
blue soldier’s uniform and with a big silver helmet on. Years and
years after, going through the National Museum at Copenhagen, I saw
it hanging there in a glass case, and clear across the room I knew it
at sight. That was the way a king ought to look, and it was the way
King Christian, his successor, did look when I saw him in the same
seat nearly fifty years later. Only he was slender and youthful of
figure despite his eighty odd years. King Frederik was stout. Stout or
slender, he was our boyish ideal of a king.
There was the gala dinner to which our father and mother went and came
home in the small hours of the morning with their pockets full of
bonbons, and with wondrous tales of the show that made our ears tingle
all that winter. And then there was the discovery on the Castle Hill,
made for the occasion expressly. That was the very peak and pinnacle of
it all.
Ever since anybody could remember there had been stories about a secret
passage leading from the Castle Hill under the moat into town--now, it
was said, to the Bishop’s Manse, and then again to the Cloister, or to
the Domkirke itself. It was supposed to be a way they had in the old
fighting days of getting out and taking the enemy in the rear, when
the castle was besieged and they were hard put to it. No one ever knew
the truth of it, and so we all believed it; but now by some fortunate
chance the secret passage was actually found. The mouth of it had
been uncovered, and the King was to see it. It was a tunnel built of
the big brick the monks made, and which we still knew as monk-brick.
Half the Old Town is built of it, that is to say, castle, cloisters,
and churches long since gone live again in the walls of the houses
built since the Reformation. What is quite evidently a part of the
mantelpiece from the castle adorns the entrance to the silversmith’s on
the corner of the street through which King Valdemar rode to his dying
queen, and the searcher of to-day, seeking vainly a trace of his famous
castle where it stood, walks over it, unthinking, when he goes in to
buy a souvenir of his visit. This secret way stirred the town mightily.
It was confirmation of the old rumors, and it was in itself a mystery.
Where was the other end of the hole?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account