IN THE STATE OP DENMARK 145 



the point of view of a chandelier, and found it mono- 

 tonous ; the droitschke crawled into a large open 

 square, and meandered like a novice on a bicycle 

 round a central lamplit plot of shrubs. We screamed 

 from both windows the awful term " Hovethvagth- 

 gather." We had said it to him already at the 

 station, and believed it to be our address. The 

 cabman uttered what seemed to be a companion 

 imprecation, and pursued an uncertain course past 

 the imposing white fa9ade of a building which bril- 

 liantly proclaimed itself to be the Hotel d'Angleterre. 

 Then, suddenly, a quiet street of ornate houses, and 

 somewhere among the darkest of them, our hotel, 

 the private, the family, and the almost morbidly 

 modest in the matter of illumination. 



It was in many ways a disappointment. It was 

 not so much the airlessness, the dark passages where 

 smells of cooking walked in endless procession, the 

 prevailing sense of a seething kitchen region barely 

 kept in the background, it was pre-eminently the 

 saloon, in which the proprietor, a hairy and sardonic 

 German Jew, invited us to eat our evening meal with 

 an offensive fluency of English. It was indeed no 

 less than the family sitting-room, and, too late, it was 

 borne in upon us that we had, like fools, rushed in 

 where angels would most indubitably fear to tread. 

 The waiter was unexpectedly resolved into the son 

 of the house, and pursued his studies at the table 

 where we sat ; his father, more insidiously, developed 

 into a bore of a quite unsardonic kind. Greasy maps 

 of Copenhagen were imported by him to our table, 

 and spread in acute proximity to the butter, while a 

 finger, that was not shamed in hue by the black 

 bread, travelled across them in nimble exposition 

 of churches and palaces. The finger and the Eng- 

 lish had alike become intolerable, when the Frau 



