Maybe they ride right through the heath on their senseless runs, and don’t stop to pick Rävlinger. If they do, I am done; I have nothing more to say. Rävlinger are the little black berries that grow on the creeping heather in the sterile moor, quite like our blueberries, only there are many more of them. Very likely you would think them sour; we thought them heavenly, and there is enough of the boy left in me to back up that opinion to-day against the riper judgment of the years. We gathered them by the bucketful, paying little heed to the heath farmer’s warning not to touch them after midsummer night, for then the devil had greased his boots with them, and came home with black faces and hands and terrible tales of the “worms”--_i.e._ snakes--we had encountered in the heath. And, indeed, there are enough of these poisonous reptiles there yet. But, now as then, a fellow can keep out of their way. Some of the dearest recollections of my boyhood are of the long tours I made through this lonesome moor, where a rare shepherd knitting his woollen stocking and a gypsy’s cart are often the only “humans” one meets in a day’s journey. Met, I should have said, perhaps, for in another generation even the moor will be a thing of the past. Already half of the six hundred thousand acres of heath land in the Danish peninsula has been planted with seedling pine, American pine, that has grown up finely, and a great and salutary change has been wrought, no doubt. But if there is to be a day without moor, without heather, without the sweet honey the bees gathered there when the broom was purple, and without Rävlinger, I--well, I am glad I was a boy when I was. Which brings to my mind an adventure of one of my lonely trips in the heath. This one went far, extending over a whole vacation week. I had come at the end of a long summer day to an inn, where they gave me a big box-bed to sleep in; and I had barely got into it when a lot of scratching under me made me aware that a family of rats shared my couch. But I was too sleepy to care; we snuggled up together and did one another no harm in the night. I remember it because of the terror it caused my mother when she heard of it. She had a great dread of rats. It was on that same trip that, coming to the shore, I supped at a fisherman’s hut on smoked dogfish and thought it the finest I had ever tasted. I was a boy and hungry. But I do not know why it should not be good. The dogfish I am thinking of are the small sharks that infest the North Sea coast in great numbers. They ate the flesh and sold the skin for sandpaper in those days. It was scratchy and did very well for that purpose.