houses of carved woodwork, each fresh with
cleansing, yet reverend with age; its fair-haired Viking-like men,
and rosy, plain-faced women, with their bullet foreheads and large
mouths; Sonderburg still Danish to the core under its Teuton veneer.
Crossing the bridge I climbed the Dybbol--dotted with memorials of
that heroic defence--and thence could see the wee form and gossamer
rigging of the 'Dulcibella' on the silver ribbon of the Sound, and was
reminded by the sight that there were stores to be bought. So I
hurried down again to the old quarter and bargained over eggs and
bread with a dear old lady, pink as a _debutante,_ made a patriotic
pretence of not understanding German, and called in her strapping
son, whose few words of English, being chiefly nautical slang picked
up on a British trawler, were peculiarly useless for the purpose.
Davies had tea ready when I came aboard again, and, drinking it on
deck, we proceeded up the sheltered Sound, which, in spite of its
imposing name, was no bigger than an inland river, only the hosts of
rainbow jelly-fish reminding us that we were threading a highway of
ocean. There is no rise and fall of tide in these regions to
disfigure the shore with mud. Here was a shelving gravel bank; there
a bed of whispering rushes; there again young birch trees growing to
the very brink, each wearing a stocking of bright moss and setting
its foot firmly in among golden leaves and scarlet fungus.

Davies was preoccupied, but he lighted up when I talked of the Danish
war. 'Germany's a thundering great nation,' he said; 'I wonder if we
shall ever fight her.' A little incident that happened after we
anchored deepened the impression left by this conversation. We crept
at dusk into a shaded back-water, where our keel almost touched the
gravel bed. Opposite us on the Alsen shore there showed, clean-cut
against the sky, the spire of a little monument rising from a leafy
hollow.

'I wonder what that is,' I said. It was scarcely a minute's row in
the dinghy, and when the anchor was down we sculled over to it. A
bank of loam led to gorse and bramble. Pushing aside some branches we
came to a slender Gothic memorial in grey stone, inscribed with
bas-reliefs of battle scenes, showing Prussians forcing a landing in
boats and Danes resisting with savage tenacity. In the failing light
we spelt out an inscription: 'Den bei dem Meeres-Uebergange und der
Eroberung von Alsen am 29. Juni 1864 heldenmuethig gefall