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Riis, Jacob A., 1849-1914

"The Making of an American"


Uninteresting! Say you so? But linger here with me, casting for
pickerel among the water-lilies until the sun sets red and big
over the sea yonder, and you shall see a light upon these meadows
where the grass is as fine silk, that is almost as if it were not
of earth. And as we walk home through the long Northern twilight,
listening to the curlew's distant call; with the browsing sheep
looming large against the horizon upon the green hill where stood
the old kings' castle, and the gray Dom rearing its lofty head over
their graves, teeming with memories of centuries gone and past,
you shall learn to know the poetry of this Danish summer that holds
the hearts of its children with such hoops of steel.
At the south gate the "gossip benches" are filled. The old men
smoke their pipes and doff their caps to "the American" with the
cheery welcome of friends who knew and spanked him with hearty good
will when as "a kid" he absconded with their boats for a surreptitious
expedition up to the lake. Those boats! heavy, flat-bottomed,
propelled with a pole that stuck in the mud and pulled them back
half the time farther than they had gone.


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