The King saw, but declined the honor of being the explorer. He suggested first one then another of his suite with less avoirdupois. But they all had excuses. In fact, a small boy might barely have done it; further, the hole led downward and was black and ill-smelling. So it remained unexplored. It stood open for some time, an object of awe and many speculative creeps to us boys; then it was covered up. I regret to have to add, as destroying a long-cherished illusion that had a glamour about it which it is hateful to dispel, that when diggings were made in the Castle Hill last summer, under competent leadership, our secret passage was discovered to be an old sewer that led no farther than the dry moat. It was just as well none of the King’s courtiers went down. Those close-fisted farmer neighbors of ours were sometimes very well-to-do; but a hard fight with a lean soil had taught them the value of money earned, perhaps overmuch. In the Old Town, as I have said, there were no very rich people, but the poor were not poor either in the sense in which one thinks of poverty in a great city. They had always enough to eat and were comfortably housed. There were no beggars, unless you would count as such the travelling “Burschen,” mechanics making the rounds of Denmark and Germany under their guild plan, working where they could and asking alms when they had nothing, the which we freely gave. It was an understood thing that that was not charity in any sense, but a kind of lift to a traveller on his way. So he was getting experience in his work, whatever it might be, by seeing the ways of other communities, and by and by would return to his own, better regarded as man and mechanic for having “travelled” in his years. It was, of course, the old mediæval system of which we saw the last. There is very little left of it to-day, I imagine. I said that there were no beggars in the Old Town. There are indeed few in Denmark, where prosperity is very evenly distributed. It was, nevertheless, there I encountered the slyest little beggar it was ever my fortune to come across. It was in one of the cemeteries of Copenhagen, where we had been to look up a friend’s grave, that we came upon a little girl, a child of ten, who was fashioning a little mound in the dust and putting a monument over it, a piece of a broken slate. She looked up as we stopped beside her, noticing our serious faces and no doubt checking us off at once as being there on business, not mere chance visitors. “Here lies my cat,” she said. “It was red.” “Oh!” We were interested at once. “And what did it die of?” “The weasel killed it--sucked its blood.” We walked right into the trap--“And is there to be a writing?” “Yes,” sadly; “‘Good-by, little Svip;’ but I have no money to buy a slate pencil with.” She accepted our penny with the gravity of an undertaker as she cast a swift glance down the walk where two women in deep mourning were coming. Then she went on making her grave.