It spanned the stormy Atlantic and the cold North Sea
and set me down in sight of the little village of straw-thatched
farm-houses where I played in the long ago, right by the dam in
the lazy brook where buttercups and forget-me-nots nodded ever over
the pool, and the pewit built its nest in spring. Just beyond, the
brook issued forth from the meadows to make a detour around the
sunken walls of the old manse and lose itself in the moor that
stretched toward the western hills. Lustrup! Oh, yes! I pushed my
giant into a chair so that I might have a look at him.
[Illustration: Ribe, in my Childhood. Seen from Elisabeth's garden]
He was just like the landscape of his native plain; big and calm
and honest. Nothing there to hide; couldn't if it tried. And, like
his village, he smelled of the barn-yard. He was a driver, he told
me, earning wages. But he had his evenings to himself; and so he
had come to find, through me, a school where he might go and learn
English. Just so! It was Lustrup all over. I remembered as though
it were yesterday the time I went up to have a look at the dam
I hadn't seen for thirty years, and the sun-fish and the pewit
so anxiously solicitous for her young, and found the brook turned
aside and the western earth-wall of the manse, which it skirted,
all gone; and the story the big farmer, Jess Jepsen's father, told
me with such quiet pride, standing there, of how because of trouble
made by the Germans at the "line" a mile away the cattle business
had run down and down until the farm didn't pay; how he and "the
boy" unaided, working patiently year by year with spade and shovel,
had dug down the nine acres of dry upland, moved the wall into
the bottoms and turned the brook, making green meadow of the sandy
barren, and saving the farm.
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