138 STRAY -AW AYS 



tourist delights to traverse the lakes. It advanced 

 with hideous strides of its spider legs and splay feet, 

 and the backs of the human motors that worked 

 side by side humped in regular alternation as they 

 stooped with the turn of the handle. How infinitely 

 preferable to walk on the shore, to ride a donkey — 

 anything, rather than sit, like that tourist party, 

 behind those endlessly bowing backs and see toil 

 without skill repaid by mere progress and the ugly 

 trample of the wheels through the water. It plodded 

 on to the sunset, and we followed through the jungle 

 by the river's edge, till, beyond the bridge of Silke- 

 borg, we reached the farther lake, and there found so 

 noble a pageant of sky and so perfect a sheet of 

 reflection that we could not but watch its fading, 

 whereby my cousin was led into desperate competi- 

 tion with Indian ink and a four-inch sketch-book 

 against the slow dissolution of glory. Even the 

 squat bathing-house, perched on straggling legs, had 

 its hour of sentiment, of dark, quaint individuality, 

 while the afterglow burned behind it, and the ripple 

 moved tenderly through its blunt reflection. 



There was no second opinion about the beauty of 

 Silkeborg. There was no question either about the 

 Dania table d'hote, eaten in vast solitude at a table 

 laid for forty. The soup, the partridge, the coffee, 

 are its best-remembered features ; second only to its 

 excellence is the fact that the cost was one -and - 

 sixpence each. We went to bed in the conviction 

 that Denmark, and notably Silkeborg, is a place in 

 which to live often and die seldom. 



But it was not the place to sleep. Before I had 

 finally lost consciousness of wooden shoes clattering 

 about the paved square, before the contest with the 

 feather-bed beneath which I lay had given place to 

 exhaustion, a flame of lightning and a crash of thunder 



