The good old Rector stands flanked by his staff in the picture, in full dress, as beseems his dignity. My father is on his right, the only one who wears a cap. Herr Kinch, behind the Rector, was an antiquarian of no mean repute, and wrote the history of the Old Town,[18] making a notable contribution to Danish annals thereby. The venerable face that peers out beside him is that of Dr. Helms, whose interest in and writings about the Domkirke, through a long lifetime, finally bore fruit in the thorough restoration that has been just completed. We boys held the candle for him sometimes when he was poking in the dark corners for signs of the long past. Once he found what he was not looking for. It was while he was delving in the foundations of the Maria tower, which had been torn down a century or two before, being unsafe. They had covered up the foundations and shut them out of sight. But there must have been a crack somewhere, for when the good doctor broke into the dark space, thousands of bats broke out. The air was literally filled with the creepy things. The Old Town was at all times full of bats, and this was evidently one of their secret hiding-places. There were dead bats, too, by the cart load. The other face in the doorway, that of Adjunct Koch, the same who in after years became Dean of the Domkirke, I can never see without thinking of the hour of my great triumph. He and Herr Trugaard were my history teachers. History as taught in the schools of those days was largely made up of interminable files of kings, with the years of their reign, nothing else, to be memorized that way. This I could not do, or would not; the result was the same,--a bad examination. But these two had discovered something. When the Great Examen came round again, instead of bringing up the tedious kings, they asked me to tell about the Hundred Days of Napoleon after Elba. Napoleon had not been dead forty years then, and there were people everywhere who had fought in his wars. We had one in our school, an old sergeant who drilled us in gymnastics. He had been through the campaign that ended at Waterloo, and was never tired of telling how it froze so hard in the winter of 1814 that they cut the wine for the army rations with axes, and of the fighting he had seen, of course. Poor fellow! He looked too long upon the wine when it was red, and marched to his death in the river one winter’s night singing a war-song, thinking perhaps he was at Borodino. They found him standing dead in the mud, upright, as a man and a soldier should, with his face to the foe who he imagined held the other shore.