178 STRAY -AW AYS 



jaws moved in bovine mastication of stodgy sponge- 

 cake; the topical song by the lady with flaxen hair 

 and a cracked tenor voice was received by them as 

 tranquilly as the sermon of the Herr Pastor last 

 Sunday; they mellowed in the heat and cigarette 

 smoke as peacefully as hams in a chimney. At 

 last, while the crowd thickened, came the event of 

 the evening, Lottie Foy and her serpentine dance. 

 A rhythmic flicker in a night-black stage, a whirling 

 succession of butterflies and flowers, while the lime- 

 lights hissed their shafts of wild colour, and in the 

 obscurity of the auditorium the volleying encores 

 roared along the lines of glimmering, piled-up faces. 

 After it the coarse anti -climax of gaslight, the renewed 

 clamour of waiters and tea-things. The crowd 

 ebbed ; we squeezed through the conversation and 

 tobacco smoke in the corridor, and out into the 

 almost equal chatter and smoke in the Ostergade. 

 Then the godly stillness of the sleeping pension, the 

 mute reproach of the lonely bedroom candle. 



Our last day in Denmark sprang upon us as from 

 an ambush, after the manner of last days, that are 

 expected and feared, yet forgotten. The establish- 

 ment, termed in the French of its proprietress "ie 

 Penksione,^^ was busy with prophecies of evil; the 

 lady with the green fringe enlivened the breakfast- 

 table witli news of the increase of cholera in Ham- 

 burg; the elderly Dane shook her head over the 

 weather, and had a memory stored with depressing 

 anecdotes of the crossing from Korsoer to Kiel. It 

 could scarcely have been worse than the crossing to 

 the Hotel d'Angleterre on that gusty and dripping 

 5th of October. The man at the newspaper-stall 

 inside the great hotel doorway, from whom we had 

 been wont to buy an English paper, had none for us. 

 Winter had fallen upon Denmark, and not before 





