The Making of an American | Page 3

That any girl, with curls or without, should be worth a good marble, or
a regimental button with a sound eye, that could be strung, was rank
foolishness to me until that day on the bridge.

And now I shall have to recross it after all, to tell who and what we
were, that we may start fair. I shall have to go slow, too, for back of
that day everything seems very indistinct and strange. A few things
stand out more clearly than the rest. The day, for instance, when I was
first dragged off to school by an avenging housemaid and thrust
howling into an empty hogshead by the ogre of a schoolmarm, who,
when she had put the lid on, gnashed her yellow teeth at the bunghole
and told me that so bad boys were dealt with in school. At recess she
had me up to the pig-pen in the yard as a further warning. The pig had a
slit in the ear. It was for being lazy, she explained, and showed me the
shears. Boys were no better than pigs. Some were worse; then--a jab at
the air with the scissors told the rest. Poor father! He was a
schoolmaster, too; how much sorrow it might have spared him had he
known of this! But we were too scared to tell, I suppose. He had set his
heart upon my taking up his calling, and I hated the school from the
day I first saw it. Small wonder. The only study he succeeded in
interesting me in was English, because Charles Dickens's paper, All the
Year Round, came to the house with stories ever so much more alluring
than the tedious grammar. He was of the old dispensation, wedded to
the old ways. But the short cut I took to knowledge in that branch I
think opened his eyes to some things ahead of his time. Their day had
not yet come. He lived to see it dawn and was glad. I know how he felt
about it. I myself have lived down the day of the hogshead in the
child-life of New York. Some of the schools our women made an end
of a few years ago weren't much better. To help clean them out was like
getting square with the ogre that plagued my childhood.
I mind, too, my first collision with the tenement. There was just one,
and it stood over against the castle hill, separated from it only by the
dry moat. We called it Rag Hall, and I guess it deserved the name. Ribe
was a very old town. Five hundred years ago or so it had been the seat
of the fighting kings, when Denmark was a power to be reckoned with.
There they were handy when trouble broke out with the German barons
to the south. But the times changed, and of all its greatness there
remained to Ribe only its famed cathedral, with eight centuries upon its
hoary head, and its Latin School. Of the castle of the Valdemars there
was left only this green hill with solemn sheep browsing upon it and

ba-a-a-ing into the sunset. In the moats, where once ships sailed in from
the sea, great billowy masses of reeds ever bent and swayed under the
west wind that swept over the meadows. They grew much taller than
our heads, and we boys loved to play in them, to track the tiger or the
grizzly to its lair, not without creeping shudders at the peril that might
lie in ambush at the next turn; or, hidden deep down among them, we
lay and watched the white clouds go overhead and listened to the reeds
whispering of the great days and deeds that were.
[Illustration: Ribe, from the Castle Hill.]
The castle hill was the only high ground about the town. It was said in
some book of travel that one might see twenty-four miles in any
direction from Ribe, lying flat on one's back; but that was drawing the
long bow. Flat the landscape was, undeniably. From the top of the
castle hill we could see the sun setting upon the sea, and the islands
lying high in fine weather, as if floating in the air, the Nibs winding its
silvery way through the green fields. Not a tree, hardly a house,
hindered the view. It was grass, all grass, for miles, to the sand dunes
and the beach. Strangers went into ecstasy over the little woodland
patch down by the Long Bridge, and very sweet and pretty it was; but
to me, who was born there, the wide view to the sea, the green
meadows, with the lonesome flight of the shore-birds and the curlew's
call in the night-watches, were dearer far, with all their melancholy.