She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her very first trip. She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced Danes, who had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom they chattered in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and incomprehensible. Also she was full of original Danish food, and especially of marvelous and mysterious sandwiches, which, with small quantities of champagne, we ate at intervals in a veranda cafe passably imitated from Atlantic liners. Despite the east wind, which still held, that steamer reached Esbjerg in the twinkling of an eye.

When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. It was in the dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an unknown foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it as great ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant. There was a vast fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid imperceptibly past the mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the multitudinous masts for the mast of the Velsa. Her long Dutch streamer was ever unmistakable. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What the mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have done in more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the distance was simply nothing.

I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes, though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on the quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound to be on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great ship, because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. The Velsa was definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of the Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled us out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of purgatory. He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he consented to be our friend, no serious harm could happen to our universe. And the hotel was excellent, the food was excellent, the cigars were excellent. And the three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting demurely about the long corridor at their nightly tasks, fair, clad in prints, foreign, separated romantically from us by the palisades of language—the three modest chambermaids were all young and beautiful, with astounding complexions.

The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless, I more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the extreme end of the jetty—about a mile each way each time—in the hope of descrying the Velsa’s long, red streamer in the offing. It was Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of the same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger, especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful or even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong, gusty breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.

We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we not gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a degree really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at all they wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been a southern zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but we retained them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound compensations. There were two types of beautiful women, one with straight lips, and the other with the upper lip like the traditional bow. The latter, of course, was the more generously formed, acquiescent and yet pouting, more blonde than the blonde. Both types had the effect of making the foreigner feel that to be a foreigner and a stranger in Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all the daily frequentations and intimacies of the social organism, was a mistake.

In the afternoon we hired an automobile, ostensibly to inspect the peninsula, but in fact partly to see whether similar women prevailed throughout the peninsula, and partly to give the yacht a chance of creeping in during our absence. In our hearts we knew that so long as we stood looking for it it would never arrive. In a few moments, as it seemed, we had crossed the peninsula to Veile, a sympathetic watering-place on its own fjord, and were gazing at the desired Baltic, whereon our yacht ought to have been floating, but was not. It seemed a heavenly sea, as blue as the Mediterranean.

We had driven fast along rather bad and dusty roads, and had passed about ten thousand one-story farmsteads, brick-built, splendidly thatched, and each bearing its date on the walls in large iron figures. These farmsteads, all much alike, showed that some great change, probably for the better, must have transformed Danish agriculture about thirty or forty years ago. But though farmers were driving abroad in two-horse vehicles, and though certain old men strolled to and fro, smoking magnificent pipes at least a foot and a half long, the weight of which had to be supported with the hand, there was little evidence of opulence or even of ease.

The passage of the automobile caused real alarm among male cyclists and other wayfarers, who, in the most absurd, girlish manner, would even leap across ditches to escape the risks of it. The women, curiously, showed much more valor. The dogs were of a reckless audacity. From every farmyard, at the sound of our coming, a fierce dog would rush out to attack us, with no conception of our speed. Impossible to avoid these torpedoes! We killed one instantaneously, and ran over another, which somersaulted, and, aghast, then balanced itself on three legs. Scores of dogs were saved by scores of miracles. Occasionally we came across a wise dog that must have had previous altercations with automobiles, and learned the lesson. By dusk we had thoroughly familiarized ourselves with the flat Danish landscape, whose bare earth is of a rich gray purple; and as we approached Esbjerg again, after a tour of 120 miles, we felt that we knew Jutland by heart, and that the yacht could not fail to be waiting for us in some cranny of the port, ready to take us to other shores. But the yacht had not come.

Then the head waiter grew to be our uncle, our father, our consoler. It is true that he told us stories of ships that had set forth and never been heard of again; but his moral influence was invaluable. He soothed us, fed us, diverted us, interpreted us, and despatched cables for us. We called him “Ober,” a name unsuitable to his diminutive form, his few years, and his chubby face. Yet he was a true Ober. He expressed himself in four languages, and could accomplish everything. In response to all our requests, he would murmur in his exquisitely soft voice, “Oh, yes! oh, yes!” He devised our daily excursions. He sent us to Ribe, the one ancient town that we saw on the peninsula, in the cathedral of which was a young girl who had stepped out of a picture by Memling, and who sold post-cards with the gestures of a virgin saint and the astuteness of a dealer. He sent us to the island of Fano, where the northeaster blows straight from Greenland across a ten-mile bathing-beach peopled by fragile women who saunter in muslin in front of vast hotels beneath a canopy of flags that stand out horizontally in the terrible breeze. He provided us with water-bottles and with plates (for palettes ), so that we could descend to the multicolored port, and there, half sheltered from the wind by a pile of fish-boxes and from the showers by an umbrella, produce wet water-colors of fishing-smacks continually in motion.

Day followed day. We had lived at Esbjerg all our lives. The yacht was lost at sea. The yacht had never existed. The wife of the skipper, or, rather, his widow, had twice cabled that she had no news. But the Ober continued to bear our misfortunes with the most astounding gallantry. And then there came a cable from the skipper, dated from the island of Wangeroog.... Wan-geroog! Wangeroog! What a name for an impossible island! What a name for an island at which to be weatherbound! We knew it not. Baedeker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of it. We found it at last on a map more than a hundred miles to the south. And I had been walking down to the jetty thrice a day to gaze forth for the Velsa’s wein!

The skipper in his cable asked us to meet him at Friedrichstadt, on the Eider, in Holstein, Germany. The trains were very slow and awkward. The Ober said:

“Why do you not take an automobile? Much quicker.”

“Yes; but the German customs?”

“Everything shall be arranged,” said the Ober.

I said:

“I don’t see myself among the German bureaucracy in a hired car.”

The Ober said calmly:

“I will go with you.”

“All the way?”

“I will go with you all the way. I will arrange everything. I speak German very well. Nothing will go wrong.”

Such a head waiter deserved encouragement. I encouraged him. He put on his best clothes, and came, smoking cigars He took us faultlessly through the German customs at the frontier. He superintended our first meal at a small German hotel. I asked him to join us at table. He bowed and accepted. When the meal was over, he rose and bowed again. It was a good meal. He took us through three tire-bursts amid the horrid wastes of Schleswig-Holstein. He escorted us into Friedrichstadt, and secured rooms for us at the hotel. Then he said he must return. No! no! We could not let him abandon us in the harsh monotony of that excessively tedious provincial town. But he murmured that he must depart. The yacht might not arrive for days yet. I shuddered.

“At any rate,” I said, “before you leave, inquire where the haven is, and take me to it, so that I may know how to find it.”

He complied. It was a small haven; a steamer and several ships were in it. Behind one ship I saw a mast and a red pennant somewhat in the style of the Velsa.

“There,” I said, “my yacht has a mast rather like that.”

I looked again. Utterly impossible that the Velsa could have arrived so quickly; but it was the Velsa. Joy! Almost tears of joy! I led the Ober on board. He said solemnly:

“It is very beautiful.”

So it was.

But our things were at the hotel. We had our rooms engaged at the hotel.

The Ober said:

“I will arrange everything.”

In a quarter of an hour our baggage was on board, and there was no hotel hill. And then the Ober really did depart, with sorrow. Never shall I look on his like again. The next day we voyaged up the Eider, a featureless stream whose life has been destroyed by the Kiel Canal, to its junction with the Kiel Canal, eighty-six dull, placid kilometers. But no matter the dullness; we were afloat and in motion.

We spent about seventy-two hours in the German Empire, and emerged from it, at Kiel, by the canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had several times groaned in the formidable clutch of the Fatherland’s bureaucracy. She had been stopped by telephone at Friedrichstadt for having passed the custom-house at the mouth of the Eider, the said custom-house not being distinguished, as it ought to have been, by the regulation flag. Again we were stopped by telephone at Rendsburg, on the canal, for having dared to ascend the Eider without a pilot. Here the skipper absolutely declined to pay the pilot-fees, and our papers were confiscated, and we were informed that the panjandrum of the harbor would call on us. However, he did not call on us; he returned our papers, and let us go, thus supporting the skipper’s hotly held theory that by the law of nations yachts on rivers are free.

We were obliged to take a pilot for the canal. He was a nice, companionable man, unhealthy, and gently sardonic. He told us that the canal would be remunerative if war-ships paid dues. “Only they don’t,” he added. Confronted with the proposition that the canal was very ugly indeed, he repudiated it. He went up and down the canal forever and ever, and saw nothing but the ships on it and the navigation signals. He said that he had been piloting for twelve years, and had not yet had the same ship twice. And there were 150 pilots on the canal!

We put him ashore and into the arms of his wife at Kiel, in heavy rain and the customary northeaster, and we pushed forward into the comparative freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort, which looked attractive on the chart. But Friedrichsort was too naval for us; it made us feel like spies. We crossed hastily to Moltenort, a little pleasure town. Even here we had not walked a mile on land before we were involved in forts and menacing sign-boards. We retreated. The whole fjord was covered with battle-ships, destroyers, submarines, Hydro-aËroplanes curved in the atmosphere, or skimmed the froth off the waves. The air was noisy with the whizzing of varied screws. It was enormous, terrific, intimidating, especially when at dusk search-lights began to dart among the lights of the innumerable fjord passenger-steamers. We knew that we were deeply involved in the tremendous German system. Still, our blue ensign flew proudly, unchallenged.

The population of Moltenort was not seductive, though a few young men here and there seemed efficient, smart, and decent. The women and girls left us utterly unmoved. The major part of the visitors were content to sit vacantly on the promenade at a spot where a powerful drain, discharging into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the sense. These quiet, tired, submissive persons struck us as being the raw slavish material of the magnificent imperial system, and entirely unconnected with the wondrous brains that organized it and kept it going. The next morning we departed very early, but huge targets were being towed out in advance of us, and we effected our final escape into the free Baltic only by braving a fleet of battleships that fired into the checkered sky. Sometimes their shells glinted high up in the sun, and seemed to be curving along the top edge of an imaginary rainbow. We slowly left them astern, with, as I say, a certain relief. Little, unmilitary Denmark lay ahead.