17G STRAY -AW AYS 



in rebuilding it, they prefer to freeze a few attendants 

 annually to chancing another conflagration. It is 

 probably cheaper, and it ensures activity among the 

 attendants, who pace assiduously in the desolate 

 suites of rooms, with faces chilled to a dappled 

 heliotrope. 



In each storey two lines of rooms looked down 

 on a lake, pent in woodland ; the castle rose out of 

 the water like a great ship at anchor; it seemed to 

 drift among the ripples that broke delicately against 

 it. Frederik II planned it in 1562, and it seems a 

 casting away of a singularly royal residence that it 

 should now be merely destined to undermine the 

 constitutions of tourists as they wander, half-appre- 

 ciative and wholly exhausted, through its immensities. 

 The King of Denmark prefers the more homely 

 Fredensborg. It is disappointing that kings should 

 be so wanting in arrogance and so addicted to home- 

 liness ; they should be as unfalteringly regal as court 

 cards, and should sleep on their thrones. 



The ornamentation that culminated in a frenzy 

 of barbaric colour on the ceiling of the Riddersal 

 reappeared in more temperate cream and gold in the 

 chapel, and ghttered coldly in the sumptuous ebony 

 and silver of the altar and pulpit. My cousin w^as in 

 the act of ascending the pulpit stairs, in the belief 

 that they led to the gallery, when a scandalised 

 female verger intervened, and led us, an easy prey, 

 round the blazoned coats of the Knights of the 

 Elephant and the Grand Cross of the Dannebrog, 

 into the royal pew with its elaborate series of sacred 

 pictures, and finally delivered us, weakened, into the 

 hand of her confederates, the sellers of photographs. 

 Starvation and cold had done their work. We 

 crawled forth from the castle, possessors of the 

 points of view that we least wished for, and of none 



