'It's early to anchor, and I hate towns,' said Davies, as one section
of a lumbering pontoon bridge opened to give us passage. But I was
firm on the need for a walk, and got my way on condition that I
bought stores as well, and returned in time to admit of further
advance to a 'quiet anchorage'. Never did I step on the solid earth
with stranger feelings, partly due to relief from confinement, partly
to that sense of independence in travelling, which, for those who go
down to the sea in small ships, can make the foulest coal-port in
Northumbria seem attractive. And here I had fascinating Sonderburg,
with its broad-eaved houses of carved woodwork, each fresh with
cleansing, yet reverend with age; its fair-haired Viking-like men,
and rosy, plain-faced women, with their bullet foreheads and large
mouths; Sonderburg still Danish to the core under its Teuton veneer.
Crossing the bridge I climbed the Dybbol--dotted with memorials of
that heroic defence--and thence could see the wee form and gossamer
rigging of the Dulcibella on the silver ribbon of the Sound. and was
reminded by the sight that there were stores to be bought. So I
hurried down again to the old quarter and bargained over eggs and
bread with a dear old lady, pink as a _débutante,_ made a patriotic
pretence of not understanding German, amid called in her strapping
son, whose few words of English, being chiefly nautical slang picked
up on a British trawler, were peculiarly useless for the purpose.
Davies had tea ready when I came aboard again, and, drinking it on
deck, we proceeded up the sheltered Sound, which, in spite of its
imposing name, was no bigger than an inland river, only the hosts of
rainbow jelly-fish reminding us that we were threading a highway of
ocean. There is no rise and fall of tide in these regions to
disfigure the shore with mud. Here was a shelving gravel bank; there
a bed of whispering rushes; there again young birch trees growing to
the very brink, each wearing a stocking of bright moss and setting