Now that I am back home I can speak of another surprise that befell, if the little people can be left out the while. They might not understand. It was when I looked my classmates from the Latin School over. There were fifteen of us, and the thirteen took the strait and narrow road. They were good and they prospered. Hans and I were the black sheep who perennially disputed the dunce’s seat on the last bench, and disputed pretty much everything else. It seems that we never found time to learn for fighting, and no doubt the class felt it as a relief when we quit, out of season, Hans to go into business where he belonged, I to learn a trade. And now, after a lifetime, what was my surprise to find that of the whole fifteen the two whom the King had singled out for decoration with his much-coveted cross were--Hans and myself. The thing came to me with a stunning sensation when I saw the ribbon pinned on Hans’s coat that day; and when we were together in his home at tea, it worked out into my consciousness. “Hans,” I said, “did it occur to you--” A motion of his hand stayed me. “Fritz!” he called, sharply, “time you were at your lessons,” and not until the door had closed upon the reluctant retreat of the son of the house did he turn to me with a twinkle in the eye. “Yes,” he said, “it did. We got through somehow, but on your life don’t you let the boy hear. He is in it now.” All things come to an end, and this did too. When the King was gone and Ribe had settled down to talk it over, I had my chance of getting even for sundry little digs at my home across the seas that I had scored up. They will do it; it is in the blood. To the old country, when it is as old as Ribe, we shall remain, I suppose, to the end of time a lot of ex-savages, barely reclaimed from the woods and scalp-locks and such, and in the nature of things not made to last. It was at a social gathering where the one all-absorbing topic was the Domkirke, that the worm turned. The walls would stand now a hundred years, some one said, and shot a pitying glance at me, that said as plainly as speech: “Your whole republic isn’t much older than that, and where will it be in another hundred?” But I had been up in the roof of the church the day before with the boss carpenter to look at the big beams, and something there seemed familiar. To my question he nodded: Yes! he had bought the lot on the sea, a ship load of American timber, pitch-pine, and there it was. So I was not slow to rise to my friend’s bait. “And,” I added, when I had told them, “your walls of old-world stone may stand a hundred years on your own showing; or give them two. But the carpenter told me that, barring accidents, there is no reason why the roof of American timber should not last a thousand and be as good as new.” I think I scored.