The Cat-head Door, as we called it, because of the lions’ heads wrought upon it, long since ceased to play other part than to frighten us children. It was nearest the altar, and, with that curious incongruity that in the popular superstition assigned to Satan an abode in the church when it was forsaken at night, we boys had been told how we could bring him out by walking thrice around the building and calling each time through the key-hole of that door, “Come out!” The third time he would appear. I do not think any of us believed it; but many a dark night--it was only at such times that speech was to be had with his Satanic Majesty--I have made one of a party to test the power of the spell. We made the circuit of the Domkirke bravely enough twice, albeit we lagged a little on the second lap; but invariably when we approached the Cat-head Door on the third, a wild panic would seize us, and we ran as if the devil were after us in very truth. Silly? Of course it was. But in Ribe it was bred in the bone. Barely within the door that held us in such terror, haven of refuge though it had once been, was the accursed candlestick, with its blasphemous ban upon whoever should presume to move what some purse-proud burgher had hung there to celebrate his own littleness, persuading himself and his time, perhaps, that it was also to the glory of God. In such fashion had he succeeded that stories of how disaster had befallen when impious hands were stretched forth to touch it were whispered yet in my school days. The sexton had fallen from the ladder, the architect had died suddenly, etc. Silly, certainly. But with every spade-thrust in the earth disclosing forgotten cemeteries, buried cloister walls, and secret burrows; with the watchmen at night droning forth their chants of five hundred years ago in the dark shadows of the Domkirke; with the deep voice of its bell counting the hours, the bell that hung in the great tower when men went to war clad in iron--and little else they did in that country in those days; with the very street names proclaiming the past on every hand: Black Friar Street, Gray Friar Street, Priest Street, Bishop Street, Monk Street, Cloister Street, Castle Street, Grave Street--mere names now, it is true, but eloquent of things long dead--why, the wonder was, not that we were still so little, but rather that we had grown so big in our world ghosts. [Illustration: THE OLD CLOISTER-CHURCH.] To one they had put up a marble tablet since I was a boy. There it was, set in the wall of the old house: Here lived the tailor Laurids Splid, whose poor wife, Maren, on November the 9th, 1641, was burned for witchcraft on the gallows hill.