We had gone, we old folk, to see once more the fields where we played when we were children, and to us there was in it the sadness of the long ago. To the young it was a joyous picnic; and many a time their laughter in the quiet streets, where ghosts walked in broad daylight to our sight at every turn, made us stop and listen wistfully. For in the Old Town nothing was changed. The stork stood one-legged upon the peak of the red-tiled roof, holding majestically aloof from the ways of men; and in the doorway the swallow hatched her young as of old. There was the broken pane in the transom I knew so well, to let her in, the right of way for which she paid in coin of sweetest song. I know they laughed at me for calling it song; but then they had not been away a lifetime. No mocking-bird or nightingale sings to my heart as does the house-swallow’s cheery note. In it are summer and sunshine, and the blossoming lilacs, and the whisper of the breeze in the trees, the children calling to each other at their play. It is as the time I had sat through an hour of Christina Nilsson, missing something--I knew not what--in all the wealth of music, when all at once came “’Way down upon the Suwanee River,” and melted the icicles away. It is many years since, but the mist comes into my eyes at the thought of it. That is how the swallow sings to me in the streets of old Ribe. [Illustration: A STRANGE FIGURE IN KILTS.] Down in the river the white swans arched their necks as in the days that were, and the clatter of the mill-wheels by the dam came up with drowsy hum, heavy with the burden of the centuries. For Ribe was an old city when Christian bishops first preached peace to the savage North. In the wall of its great cathedral there is a stone that once bore the image of the earliest among them who fell before pagan arrows in the very meadow where we had our boyish games. The storms of many winters have nearly worn it away; but what reverent loyalty vainly sought to preserve, the bigotry of a day that thought itself wise as well as pious ignorantly achieved in commemoration of human hate. When they came to knock away the whitewash of the Reformation, put on to hide what sand and soap and acids could not efface (there are clear marks of their having been used to destroy the pictures of apostles and saints painted in Catholic days on the great granite pillars), there came to light, in one of the arches pointing toward the place of Bishop Leofdag’s martyrdom, a strange figure in kilts with fists upraised in threat and curse, which presently was seen to be a heathen raging against the new day that dared rear a temple to the Christians’ God upon the very site of the ancient sacrifices. The whitewash had kept it from decay. The recollection of it came over me with a rush of gratitude that the world is growing better and broader and all the time farther into the light, when, the other day, I sat in the