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.