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Father's reading-lamp shone upon the open Bible when I returned.
He wiped his spectacles and looked up with a patiently questioning
"Well, my boy?" Mother laid her hand upon mine.
"I came home," I said unsteadily, "to give you Elisabeth for a
daughter. She has promised to be my wife."
Mother clung to me and wept. Father turned the leaves of the book
with hands that trembled in spite of himself, and read:--
"Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory
for thy mercy--"
His voice faltered and broke.
The old town turned out, to the last man and woman, and crowded
the Domkirke on that March day, twenty-five years ago when I bore
Her home my bride. From earliest morning the street that led to
"the Castle" had seen a strange procession of poor and aged women
pass, carrying flowers grown in window-gardens in the scant sunlight
of the long Northern winter--"loved up," they say in Danish for
"grown"; in no other way could it be done. They were pensioners
on her mother's bounty, bringing their gifts to the friend who was
going away.


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