Apparently they understand yachts at Copenhagen, as they do in Holland. At the outer harrier of the harbor we were not even requested to stop. A cheerful and beneficent functionary cried out for our name, our captain’s name, our tonnage, and our immediate origin, and, his curiosity being sated, waved us onward. The great bridge bisected itself for us with singular promptitude. Nevertheless, the gold-buttoned man in charge thereof from his high perch signaled to us that our burgee was too small. We therefore, having nothing else handy to placate him, ran up a blue ensign to the masthead; but it looked so excessively odd there, so acutely contrary to the English etiquette of yachts, that we at once hauled it down again. No further complaint was made.

We were now in the haven, and over the funnels of many ships we could see the city. It was all copper domes and roofs; and we saw that it was a proud city, and a city where exposed copper turns to a beautiful green instead of to black, as in London. Splendid copper domes are the chief symptom of Copenhagen. After all the monotonous, tiny provincialism of the peninsula and of the islands, it was sensational to find a vast capital at the far end of the farthest island. We thought we were coming to the end of the world, and we came to a complete and dazzling city that surpassed, for example, Brussels in its imposingness. We turned westward out of the main channel into the heart of the town, and in a moment were tied up to a smack, and the red-and-green bourse was leaning over us; the rattle and ringing and stamping of horses, lorries, tram-cars, and taxi-cabs deafened us on three sides; and a bridge trembling with traffic barred our way.

Towers and spires rose beyond the bridge; crowds stood to gaze at us; steamers and warehouses filled the prospect to the north; and under our bows the petrol-engined gondolas of Copenhagen, each holding a dozen passengers or so, continually shot. We were in the midst of a terrific din, but we cared not. We had arrived, and we had arrived in a grand town; we knew that at the first glance.

In something less than half an hour one of us had gone forth and returned with grave tidings: “This is a most exciting city. I’ve already seen lots of beautiful women, some with lovely tow-colored hair.” The charm of distant Esbjerg was at last renewed. I went forth myself, into a very clean, fresh-looking city, with simple and lively inhabitants. In a trice I had gazed at the Thorvaldsen Museum (which I had no intention of entering, Thorvaldsen being for me on about the same artistic plane as the inexcusable Ary Scheffer of Dordrecht), the Christianborg Palace, which had an austere and kingly air, the very modern and admirable town hall, the old railway station, which has been transformed into the largest kinema in the world, the floating fish shops and fish restaurants (made out of old smacks and schooners), the narrow, thronged shopping streets, the celebrated Tivoli establishment, and the yacht-like steamers that from a quay, which might almost be called the gate to Sweden, in the very middle of the town, are constantly setting sail for Scandinavia. From Copenhagen you go to Sweden as thoughtlessly as in New York you go from Forty-second to Sixty-ninth Street, or in London from the Bank to Chelsea, and with less discipline. If the steamer has cast off, and the captain sees you hurrying up the street, he stops his engines and waits for you, and you are dragged on board by a sailer; whereupon the liner departs, unless the captain happens to see somebody else hurrying up the street.

An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen was enough to convince my feet that it was not a city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped back to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a carriage. He knew no more of the city than I did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak a single word of Danish; but I felt sure that he would return with an equipage. What I desired was an equipage with a driver who could speak either English, French, or Dutch. He did return with an equipage, and it was overpowering. Rather like a second-hand state carriage, it was drawn by two large gray horses, perhaps out of a circus, and driven by a liveried being who was alleged to speak French. I shuddered at the probable cost of this prodigious conveyance, but pretended I did not care. The ligure named was just seven dollars a day. We monopolized the carriage during our sojourn, and the days were long; but the coachman never complained. Possibly because he had no language in which to complain. We learned in a moment that his ability to speak French was entirely mythical. Then some one said that a misunderstanding had occurred at the livery-stables, and that German was the foreign language he spoke, But he did not speak German either, nor anything else. He was just another of those strange creatures met in the course of travel who are born, who mature, and who die without speaking or comprehending any language whatever.

From the height of his spacious and sedate vehicle we gazed down upon the rushing population of Copenhagen—beautiful women, with lovely tow-colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The driver only made one mistake, but it was a bad one. We wanted tea, and we asked him to go to a teagarden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went. He took us up an interminable boulevard, with a special strip for cyclists. Thousands upon thousands of cyclists, all fair, passed and repassed us. He went on and on. One of the horses fell lame, but it made no difference. We could not stop him. And repetitions of the word for tea in French and German had no effect save to make him smile. We constantly descried what seemed in the distance to be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens. We saw an incomprehensible colony of doll’s houses—well-kept suburban huts exteriorly resembling houses—in a doll’s garden. We could not conceive the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not a tea-garden. Presently the carriage was stopped by a man demanding money. He wore no uniform, but conveyed to us that he was an official of the town of Hillerup, and that strange carriages had to pay forty-eight ore in order to traverse Hillerup.

It seemed a lot of money; but as it only amounted to sixpence, we paid. The man may have been a highwayman. We looked at the map for Hillerup, and found it miles away from Copenhagen.

We were now in serious need of tea, and helpless. The driver drove on. He conducted us through half a dozen seaside resorts on the quite unjustly celebrated “Danish Riviera”; he came actually to the end of the tram-line, and then he curved inland into a forest (more to pay). We were now angry and still helpless. The forest had no end, and the roads in it no direction. Desperate, we signaled to him to turn back. He would not. He informed us on his lingers that he would be arriving in twenty minutes or so. When he did arrive, we solved the mystery. He had confused the word for tea with the word for deer, and had brought us to a well-known country resort called the Deer Park. A few miserable tourists were in fact drinking cold, bad tea on a windy terrace overlooking a distant horizon, far beyond which lay Copenhagen. We swallowed the tea, the driver swallowed beer, and we started hack. We had no overcoats, and the Baltic evening was cold. Trams overtook us flying at a tremendous pace into Copenhagen, and we were behind a lame horse. In the dusk we reached once more the desirable city, whose women never seemed more fair to us than they did then. This adventure taught us that the yachtsman must be prepared for any adventure, even the wildest.