Matches were yet of the future. We carried tinder-boxes
to strike fire with. People shook their heads at the telegraph.
The day of the stage-coach was not yet past. Steamboat and railroad
had not come within forty miles of the town, and only one steam
factory--a cotton mill that was owned by Elizabeth's father. At
the time of the beginning of my story, he, having made much money
during the early years of the American war through foresight in
having supplied himself with cotton, was building another and larger,
and I helped to put it up. Of progress and enterprise he held an
absolute monopoly in Ribe, and though he employed more than half
of its working force, it is not far from the truth that he was
unpopular on that account. It could not be well otherwise in a town
whose militia company yet drilled with flint-lock muskets. Those
we had in the school for the use of the big boys--dreadful old
blunderbusses of the pre-Napoleonic era--were of the same pattern.
I remember the fright that seized our worthy rector when the German
army was approaching in the winter of 1863, and the haste they
made to pack them all up in a box and send them out to be sunk
in the deep, lest they fall into the hands of the enemy; and the
consternation that sat upon their faces when they saw the Prussian
needle-guns.
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