The Old Town - free ebook by Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis

THE OLD TOWN

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THE OLD AND THE NEW

How small this world of ours is, and how close we are, all unknowing, to one another! I had set out to write the story of the Old Town with no thought that it touched the land across the seas and its people in any closer way than through these pages, and through the abiding affection of a few of its children who, like myself, have wandered far from home. And while I wrote there fell into my hands the account of a sale of some building lots half a dozen years ago, in Jersey City, part of a proper

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CHAPTER I

The other day, when I was busy in my garden, I heard the whir of swift wings and saw a flight of birds coming from the hills in the east. Something in the way in which they flew stirred me with a sudden thrill, and I stood up, feeling forty years younger all at once. “Blackbirds,” said Mike, looking aloft, but I knew better. I watched them wistfully, with eager hope, and when they were over me and I saw their orange bills, I knew that I had not been mistaken. They were starlings, beloved friends

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CHAPTER II

If war and war’s alarms creep into the story of the Old Town on every page, despite the fact that its name to me is peace, the reason is not far to seek. I was not yet a month old when my mother had to fly from home with me in her arms, on the outbreak of war. A report ran through the land that the “slaves,” that is, the prisoners in the Holstein state prison, had been freed by the Germans and were swarming north, the vanguard of an army that looted and laid waste where it went. The women with l

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CHAPTER III

Our house was in Black Friars’ Street, right around the corner from Peer Down’s Slip in the picture. The Slip was a short cut to school for us boys, and we skipped through it lightly enough, morning, noon, and evening. Mother never passed it, but always went the other way. It stood for the great sorrow of her life, for at the foot of it, where the river ran swiftly, my younger brother was drowned while at play. Theodore was ten. Though my mother had a house full, I do not believe she ever got ov

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CHAPTER IV

I do not know how the forty years I have been away have dealt with “Jule-nissen,” the Christmas elf of my childhood. He was pretty old then, gray and bent, and there were signs that his time was nearly over. So it may be that they have laid him away. I shall find out when I go over there next time. When I was a boy we never sat down to our Christmas Eve dinner until a bowl of rice and milk had been taken up to the attic, where he lived with the marten and its young, and kept an eye upon the hous

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CHAPTER V

The stork came in April, with delivery from the vile tyranny of March. Talk of March violets! to us the month meant cod-liver oil. It was our steady dessert all through it. Good for the system, they said. Perhaps it was. I think it encouraged duplicity. The rule was that when we had grown to like it so that we licked the spoon after it, we might quit. You wouldn’t believe how quickly we came to adore it. However, when our need was greatest, the stork came, and with it balmy spring and our freedo

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CHAPTER VI

The Old Town was set in a meadow, grass to the right of it, grass to the left of it, stretching away toward the horizon until in the south and east it came up against the black moor, and toward the sunset a little way met the sands of the western sea. What sport was there for boys in such a country? My own boys asked me that question with something of impatience on a walk through the fields, for they had been sizing up the lads of their own age on baseball and found them no good. They threw the

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CHAPTER VII

To the West of the Old Town, with only the dry moat and a fringe of gardens between, stood the green Castle Hill. Green it was and had been in the memory of the oldest. The road-makers of three generations before had taken what the house-builder had left of the ruins that alone remained of Denmark’s once great historic stronghold. There its fighting kings guarded the land against the enemy to the south; thence its armies had marched to victory or defeat in many a fight with the turbulent German

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CHAPTER VIII

The big pear tree that hung over our way to school is gone, but the hawthorn hedge remains. When our young feet trod those toppy pavements, the tree smoothed the thorny path to learning in a way all its own. The late summer season when the sun shone so temptingly on the round red pears, and the old woman over whose garden wall they grew counted her profits at a skilling for two, fell in with our time for practising marksmanship, just as the spring brought its marbles and September its nutting tr

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OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER

To us it will always be “our beautiful summer,” I expect, and, indeed, I fancy it will be so remembered throughout the Danish land. 20 For the seasons there had suffered a sad decline since my boyhood days. Then the sun shone always in summer, the autumn days were ever mellow as the ripened nuts we shook from the hazel bushes, and in winter we skated from Christmas until the March winds woke the slumbering spring. At least so it seems to me now. They tell me that this generation of boys has almo

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KING FREDERIK AT HOME

I had never met King Frederik—the Crown Prince he was then—until the summer of 1904, which we spent at Copenhagen. As a boy I had seen him often and pulled off my cap to him, and always in return had received a bow and a friendly smile. But at home, and to speak to, I had not met him till that summer. We were at luncheon at our hotel one day, nothing further from our thoughts than princes and courts, when the portier came in hot haste to announce a royal lackey who wished speech with me. Right b

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An Autobiography

“It is refreshing to find a book so unique and captivating ... one of the brightest, wholesomest, most fascinating books of the season.”— Record-Herald , Chicago. “It fairly bubbles over with happiness, energy, and inspiration.... It is partly the pleasure of watching a desperate, thrilling contest against big odds, with success at the end, that gives this book its keen appeal.”— Boston Herald. “As varied and delightful as any romance.”— Publishers’ Weekly. Cloth, $1.50 net...

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THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM

“Mr. Riis is a man who does not theorize, but who knows. His book is full of pathetic pictures, painful in their truth but beautiful in their meaning. No one who is interested in sociology can afford to miss what he has to say.”— Current Literature. “The book thrills you as much as the most exciting romance and to far better purpose.”— The Boston Herald. Cloth, $2.00 net...

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CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS

“Touches the heart and quickens the sympathies. Very human and pitiful are some of the episodes, and humorous, too, and they are told with simplicity and sincerity.... They bear the unmistakable stamp of fidelity to life.”— Brooklyn Times. “Mr. Riis has gone into the poor districts and made the acquaintance of children in a manner that is not given to every one.... The work will commend itself to the thinking public.”— The Globe Democrat. PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue, Ne

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Highways and Byways of the Mississippi Valley

Crown 8vo, $2.00 net “Mr. Clifton Johnson has a faculty all his own for entering easily and pleasantly into the life of the common people wherever he may go. The valley of the Mississippi as he followed it gave him many opportunities to study phases of American life which belong distinctly in the category of ‘highways and byways.’ The book is eminently readable, while from the pictorial side it has the advantage of scores of Mr. Johnson’s own photographs.”— The Outlook....

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Highways and Byways of the South

$2.00 net “Mr. Johnson gives more illuminative descriptions of homely details in life than any other modern writer.”— Town and Country....

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Highways and Byways of the Pacific Coast

“A more readable book of travel ... is not often published.... As in other volumes of the series, he has described the rurally picturesque and typical and has avoided the urbanly conventional and uninteresting.”— The Dial....

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New England and Its Neighbors

“A story of New England life, liberally sprinkled with tales and legends of early days, each one accompanied by an illustration that illustrates. They are homely folk about whom Mr. Johnson writes, and he writes in a plain and simple style, giving pictures of them as they move about pursuing their daily occupations.”— The Delineator....

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The Picturesque Hudson

Ready September, 1909 PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York Each in Decorated Covers, $2.00 net Tarry at Home Travels By Dr. EDWARD EVERETT HALE With over 200 fine illustrations from interesting prints, photographs, etc., of his own collection Boston: The Place and the People By M. A. DE WOLFE HOWE With over 100 illustrations, including many from pen drawings executed especially for this volume Philadelphia: The Place and the People By AGNES REPPLIER With 83 illustratio

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A WANDERER IN LONDON

With sixteen illustrations in color by Mr. Nelson Dawson, and thirty-six reproductions of great pictures. Cloth, 8vo, $1.75 net; by mail, $1.87 “Mr. Lucas describes London in a style that is always entertaining, surprisingly like Andrew Lang’s, full of unexpected suggestions and points of view, so that one who knows London well will hereafter look on it with changed eyes, and one who has only a bowing acquaintance will feel that he has suddenly become intimate.”— The Nation. “If you would know L

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A WANDERER IN HOLLAND

With twenty illustrations in color by Herbert Marshall, besides many reproductions of the masterpieces of Dutch Painters Cloth, 8vo, $2.00 net “It is not very easy to point out the merits which make this volume immeasurably superior to nine tenths of the books of travel that are offered the public from time to time. Perhaps it is to be traced to the fact that Mr. Lucas is an intellectual loiterer, rather than a keen-eyed reporter, eager to catch a train for the next stopping-place. It is also to

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A WANDERER IN PARIS

Ready October, 1909 PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York...

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