142 STRAY-AWAYS 



feathers accomplished the brief crossing to the Island 

 of Fyen, and afterwards for two hours passed through 

 its level farms ; a green and quiet country, with low 

 farmhouses lying as if asleep, and white-towered 

 churches set in beech groves. The afternoon darkened 

 across the pastures, and the sunset was dying on a 

 cold and ruffled Baltic, when the train brought us 

 to the side of yet another steamer, and we descended 

 the abhorred staircase with the brass binding into a 

 large cabin with electric lights, and officers in pretty 

 uniforms eating five o'clock dinner, and smart 

 stcAvards, and all that affectation of luxury that 

 mocks the sea-sick eye. The passage from Nyborg 

 to Korsoer is a business of an hour or more, I hardly 

 know. It was a period in which my cousin inces- 

 santly assured me that there was no movement 

 whatever, and I was occupied in trying not to look 

 at an^^thing that swung. Sometimes in winter the 

 Great Belt has been frozen, and the passengers have 

 been taken across on sledges, or have walked (so 

 some one told me) ; and I thought many times of 

 tramping robustly over that field of ice, instead of 

 sitting helpless and dizzy in this swaying prison; of 

 the wild starlight of frost, instead of this tepid 

 atmosphere smelling of chicken. 



Yet another period of train followed, that semi- 

 torpid time of mere existence in the half-light of the 

 carriage lamp that comes at the end of a long journey, 

 wliile thunder and lightning, as of Macbeth's witches, 

 announced to Copenhagen that we were near. Lights 

 and water raced by, and we slid into the terminus 

 possessed of one solitary clue to progress, the fact 

 tliat a cab called itself a droitschke, and that the fare 

 was seventy ore. There was no trouble about the 

 droitschke ; it was secured, our smaller baggage was 

 confided to it, and it then, without a cry, without a 



