“Holme week” was the great time of the year for us all. It came late in July, when the hay was all in and we got our fishing-tackle out; for the hay was the great crop thereabouts, and until it had been cut it was not a good thing to be caught by the farmer wading through his meadows. Out toward the sea the river made a great bend, and in it, near its mouth, lay a stretch of marshland where the grass grew exceeding rich and sweet. This was the “Holme,”[12] which in the thirteenth century had been given to the town by the King in return for its building a wall around Ribe the better to defend it. The wall was never built, though they got so far as digging a ditch, but they kept the land, and after the Reformation divided it up among themselves, to their great gain. When now the last of the hay had been cut and stacked, the Old Town went a-picnicking, bag and baggage. Those who could afford it drove out; those who couldn’t walked, or sailed, or rowed out, depending on a lift from the tide to help them back. And all of them had hampers or baskets, filled to the brim. There is no occasion that I know of in Denmark when these are left behind. There, on the meadow that was like a smooth, green-carpeted floor, they sported and ran and tumbled, pelting one another with hay, children and grown-ups together, all day. I never knew who paid for the hay, or if it was just a contribution to the general good-will of the time, but no one ever put a damper on our fun. The climax of it for us boys was always the attack on the Fold, a kind of fort on the meadow into which the cattle were driven in case of flood. The Fold had earth walls and a living hedge, and to roll off that wall with a bloody nose, or better still, to climb over it and give the other fellow one, was enough to make any boy feel like a real hero, especially with the girls looking on and showing great concern. When the sun set over the meadows and we came back from our campaign, tired and sore, supper was spread on the grass beside a comfortable hay-stack, and it was good. There is nothing anywhere half so good to eat when you are hungry as the Danish Smörrebröd, particularly the kind they make in Ribe. Only, I guess, you’ve got to have a boy’s stomach, for you will want to eat it all, and the last time I did--well, never mind! I will lay that up against my American training. It never happened when I was a boy but once; that was when a ship had been wrecked with a cargo of Messina raisins, and the man who had bought it saw us snooping around where he had laid those raisins out to dry on great tarpaulins and told us we might eat as many as we liked. We did, and ouch! let me forget it. I sure thought I was going to die.