To us it will always be “our beautiful summer,” I expect, and, indeed, I fancy it will be so remembered throughout the Danish land.[20] For the seasons there had suffered a sad decline since my boyhood days. Then the sun shone always in summer, the autumn days were ever mellow as the ripened nuts we shook from the hazel bushes, and in winter we skated from Christmas until the March winds woke the slumbering spring. At least so it seems to me now. They tell me that this generation of boys has almost forgotten the art of skating; that they do not know how to cut the figure 8, or the name of the girl they like best, in the ice, because there is no ice more than half the time; that in summer they have to hurry so between showers that all the fun is gone out of the haying. And as for the autumn, I am not likely to forget one that found me stranded there, sick and desolate just as the century was closing; the long, wakeful nights I lay listening to the storm shaking my window and whistling through the cracks as if it were mocking my helplessness, with four thousand miles of tempestuous sea between me and home. I sailed them all in those night-watches, with never a rift in the pitiless gray skies, till I saw at last a coast lying golden in the sunset, and knew it from the way my heart leaped within me for the Blessed Isles where home was. It was then I learned that I, too, belonged here where my children were born. But this summer was one long holiday without a cloud. The sun set in yellow glory on that June day when we landed, hours after children should be in bed and asleep; but how could one ask it in reason, with the day, as it seemed, only half over? And it rose in undimmed splendor on the September morn that saw us wave tearful good-bys and sail away, past Hamlet’s Castle and Elsinore, and leave our fairyland behind. We rode in on the hay wagons, we saw the sheaves of golden grain stacked and housed. We watched day by day the stalks of Indian corn by the fountain in the King’s Square grow ears as big as any in Kansas fields. They were flaunting great shocks of shining silk when we went away, to the admiration of the good people of Copenhagen, who were never tired of looking at the strange plant; and I, with the memories of Long Island strong upon me, was deep in a plot to teach that gardener how to make “hot corn,” since ripen they would not, those ears, when my wife came along and wrecked that dinner and my reputation with one swoop by declaring that “they were not that kind, but common chicken corn.” I never knew until then that there was any difference. But, sweet corn or chicken-feed, dinner or no dinner, it was truly a beautiful summer. All Denmark will bear me out in that.