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. More than mountains
in their majesty; more, infinitely more, than the city of teeming
millions with all its wealth and might, they seem to me to typify
human freedom and the struggle for it. Thence came the vikings
that roved the seas, serving no man as master; and through the dark
ages of feudalism no lord long bent the neck of those stout yeomen
to the yoke. Germany, forgetting honor, treaties, and history, is
trying to do it now in Slesvig, south of the Nibs, and she will
as surely fail. The day of long-delayed justice, when dynasties by
the grace of God shall have been replaced by government by right
of the people, will find them unconquered still.

Alas! I am afraid that thirty years in the land of my children's
birth have left me as much of a Dane as ever. I no sooner climb the
castle hill than I am fighting tooth and nail the hereditary foes
of my people whom it was built high to bar. Yet, would you have
it otherwise? What sort of a husband is the man going to make who
begins by pitching his old mother out of the door to make room for
his wife? And what sort of a wife would she be to ask or to stand
it?

But I was speaking of the tenement by the moat. It was a ramshackle,
two-story affair with shiftless tenants and ragged children. Looking
back now, I think likely it was the contrast of its desolation with