They were not in the style, they said. Perhaps they were right. But oh! for a little warmth in our worship now and then, even at the sacrifice of being right in the matter of style. [Illustration: THE EMPEROR’S BIRTHDAY.] It may be that the fact that the Emperor’s birthday came in summer, if my memory serves me right, had something to do with it. The most loyal friend of the Domkirke could not have sat out the services there in winter without discomfort. There was no way of heating it, had not been since the beginning of our century, when the “fire-pan” given to it by a pious burgher in 1473 was taken out and sold for old iron. A legacy went with it that was forever to keep it in coal, so that “the poor and the church-goers” should not suffer from the cold. What became of that, I don’t know. They did many queer things in the days before reverence for the great past, and its memories and landmarks, awoke with the struggle for nationality and for freedom in our own time. Among other things they stripped some of the ancient grave-stones of their beautiful engraved brass plates for the melting pot, when a new bell had to be cast. And down in Holstein, where the sacred banner that fell from heaven to the Danish knights in the Esthland crusade and saved the battle that was all but lost, had been left by the indifference of a later day in hostile hands, they took it at housecleaning time and, esteeming it just a moth-eaten and tattered rag, burned it with other rubbish in the public road. In Ribe, for a hundred years the people put on their overcoats and mufflers and their rubbers when they went to church and sat it out as they could; or else they stayed at home. Even so clothed we sat and shivered, our toes growing numb on the stone floor. When it was over, we limped out and took a quick walk around the Castle Hill to “get up circulation.” The walls of the Domkirke were thick, and it was past Christmas before the winter had quite moved in; but then it stayed well into the summer, refusing to be dislodged by spring until the roses were in bloom. In the great restoration, of which more hereafter, it was at last the upstart factory across the Linden Square, that had once so piqued the conservatism of the Old Town, which, having been by that time abandoned, gave its boiler house to be a heating plant for the church. And so the old and the new met once again, and atonement was made for past misconduct.