half a million inhabitants. And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to the foreign observer, not merely for the pervading beauty and grace of the women, which was remarkable, but also for the evident fact that as a race the Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety, dignity, and simplicity. Their demeanor was a lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to discover how to enjoy themselves freely without being either ridiculous or vulgar or brutish. The twenty thousand represented in chief the unassuming middle class of Copenhagen.

manner.

There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, "nuts," rascals, odalisks, and mere artisans among the lot, but the solid bulk was the middle class, getting value for its money in an agreeable and unexceptionable The memory of those thousands wandering lightly clad in the cold Northern night, under domes and festoons and pillars of electric light, amid the altercations of conflicting orchestras, or dancing in vast, stuffy inclosures, or drinking and laughing and eating hors-d'œuvre under rustling trees, or submitting gracefully to

Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose glazed aisles were two restaurants, or floating on icy lakes, or just beatifically sitting on al-fresco seats in couples-this memory remains important in the yachtsman's experiences of the Baltic.

ARISTOCRACY AND ART

THE harbor-master would not allow us to remain for more than three days in our original berth, which served us very well as a sort of grand stand for viewing the life of Copenhagen. His theory was that we were in the way of honest laboring folk, and that we ought to be up in the "sound," on the northeastern edge of the city, where the yachts lie. We contested his theory, but we went, because it is unwise to quarrel with a bureaucracy of whose language you are ignorant.

The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was opposite a coaling station, and also opposite a ship-building yard, and from the west came a strong odor out of a manufactory of something unpleasant. We could have tolerated the dust, the noise, and the smell, but what we could not tolerate was the heavy rolling, for the north wind was blowing and the anchorage exposed to it. Indeed, the Royal Danish Yacht Club might have chosen more comfortable quarters for itself. We therefore unostentatiously weighed anchor again, and reëntered the town, and hid ourselves among many businesslike tugs in a little creek called the New Haven, whose extremity was conveniently close to

A COPENHAGEN CAFÉ

the Café d'Angleterre. We hoped that the prowling harbor-master would not catch sight of us, and he did not.

The aristocratic and governing quarter of the town lay about us, including the Bredgade, a street full of antiquaries, marble churches, and baroque houses, and the Amalienborg Palace, which is really four separate similar palaces (in an octagcnal place) thrown into one. Here all the prospects and vistas were dignified, magnificent, and proudly exclusive. The eighteenth century had nobly survived, when the populace was honestly regarded. as a horde created by divine providence in order that the ruling classes might practise upon it the art of ruling. There was no Tivoli when those beautiful pavements were made, and as you stand on those pavements and gaze around at the

royal grandiosity, speckless and complete, you can almost imagine that even the French Revolution has not yet occurred. The tiny, colored sentry at the vast, gray gates is still living in the eighteenth century. The architecture is not very distinguished, but it has style. It shames the

Hotel. The Frederiks Church, whose copper dome overtops the other copper domes, is a fair example of the quarter. Without being in the least a masterpiece, it imposes by its sincerity and its sense of its own importance. And the interior is kept as scrupulously as a boudoir. The impeccability of the marble flooring is wondrous, and each of the crimson cushions in the polished pews is like a lady's pillow. Nothing rude can invade this marmoreal fane.

The Rosenborg Palace, not far off, is open to the public, so that all may judge what was the life of sovereigns in a small country, and what probably still is. The royal villas outside Florence are very ugly, but there is a light grace about their furnishing which lifts them far above the heavy, stuffy, tasteless mediocrity of such. homes as the Rosenborg. Badly planned, dark, unhygienic, crammed with the miscellaneous ugliness of generations of royal buying, the Rosenborg is rather a sad sight to people of taste; and the few very lovely things that have slipped in here and there by inadvertence only intensify its mournfulness. The phantoms of stupid courtiers seem to pervade, strictly according to etiquette, its gloomy salons. And yet occasionally, in the disposition of an arm-chair or a screen, one realizes that it must, after all, have been a home, inhabited by human beings worthy of sympathy. It is the most bourgeois home I ever entered. In a glass case, with certain uniforms, were hung the modern overcoat (a little frayed) and the hat of a late monarch. They touched the heart of the sardonic visitor, their exposure was so naïve.

Even more depressing than this mausoleum of nineteenth-century manners was the museum of art. As a colossal negation of art, this institution ranks with the museum of Lausanne. It is an enormous and ugly building, full of enormous ugliness in painting and sculpture. It contained a fine Rembrandt-"Christ at Emmaus"—and one good modern picture, a

plowing scene by Wilhelmson. We carefully searched the immense rooms for another good modern picture, and found it not. Even the specimens of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Bonnard were mediocre.

The sculpture was simply indescribable. The eye roamed like a bird over the waters of the deluge, and saw absolutely nothing upon which to alight with safety. Utter desolation reigned. The directors of this museum had never, save in the case of Wilhelmson, been guilty of an inadvertence. Their instinct against beauty in any form was unerring. Imagine the stony desert of rooms and corridors and giant staircases on a wet Sunday morning, echoing to the footsteps of the simple holiday crowd engaged patriotically in the admiration of Danish art; imagine ingenu-ous, mackintoshed figures against the vast flanks of stiff and terrific marble Venuses and other gods; imagine the whispering in front of anecdotes in paint; imagine the Inferno of an artist-and you have the art museum, the abode and lurking-place of everlasting tedium.

Quite different is the Glyptothek, a museum whose existence is due to private enterprise and munificence. It is housed in an ugly and ill-planned building, but the contents are beautiful, very well arranged, and admirably exposed. The Glyptothek has an entrancing small picture by Tiepolo, of Antony and Cleopatra meeting, which I was informed must be a study for a larger picture in Venice. It alone should raise the museum to a shrine of pilgrimage, and it is not even mentioned in Baedeker! But the Glyptothek triumphs chiefly by its sculpture. Apart from its classical side, it has a superb collection of Meuniers, which impressed, without greatly pleasing, me; a roomful of Rodin busts which are so honest and lifelike and jolly that when you look at them you want to laugh-you must laugh from joy. And the Carpeaux busts of beautiful women-what a profound and tranquil satisfaction in gazing at them!

Some of the rooms at the Glyptothek are magical in their effect on the sensibility. They would make you forget wife and children, yachts, income tax, and even the Monroe Doctrine. Living Danish women were apposite enough to wander about the sculpture rooms for our delec

was the real sailors' quarter, thoroughly ungentlemanly and downright. The shops on each side of the creek were below the level of the street and even of the water, and every one of them was either a café, with mysterious music beating behind glazed doors, or an emporium of some sort for sailors. Revelries began in the afternoon. You might see a nice neat Danish wife guiding an obstreperously intoxicated Danish sailor down the steps leading to a cigar shop. Not a pleasant. situation for a nice wife! But, then, you reflected that he was a sailor, and that he had doubtless been sober and agreeable

hours were spent in wheedling and conciliating its magneto. After that the boat traveled faster than it had ever traveled. We passed out of Copenhagen into the sound, leaving a noble array of yachts behind, and so up the sound. Soon Copenhagen was naught but a bouquet of copper domes, and its beautiful women became legendary with us, and our memory heightened their beauty. And then the engine developed a "knock." Now, in a small internal-combustion engine a "knock" may be due to bad petrol or to a misplacement of the magneto or to a hundred other schisms in the secret econ

omy of the affair. We slowed to halfspeed and sought eagerly the origin of the "knock," which, however, remained inexplicable. We were engloomed; we were in despair.

We had just decided to stop the engine when it stopped of itself, with a fearful crash of broken metal. One side of the casing was shattered. The skipper's smile was tragical. The manliness of all of us trembled under the severity of the ordeal which fate had administered. To open out the engine-box and glance at the wreck in the depths thereof was heart-rending. We could not closely examine the chaos of steel and brass because it was too hot, but we knew that the irremediable had Occurred in the bowels of the Velsa. We made sail, and crawled back to the sound, and mournfully anchored with our unseen woe among the other yachts.

The engine was duly inspected bit by bit; and it appeared that only the bearing of the forward piston was broken, certainly owing to careless mounting of the engine in the shops. It was an enormous catastrophe, but perhaps not irremediable. Indeed, within a short

that flung books, if not crockery, about the saloon. And the procession of steamers in both directions was constant from five A.M. to midnight. They came from and went to every part of the archipelago and of Sweden and of northern Germany. We gradually understood that at Copenhagen railways are a trifle, and the sea a matter of the highest importance. Nearly all traffic is sea-borne.

We discovered, too, that the immediate shore of the sound, and of the yacht-basin scooped out of it, was a sort of toy sea

time the skipper was calculating that he could get a new bearing made in Copenhagen in twenty-four hours. Anyhow, we had to reconcile ourselves to a second visit to Copenhagen. And Copenhagen, a few hours earlier so sweet a name in our ears, was now hateful to us, a kind of purgatory to which we were condemned for the sins of others.

The making and fitting of the new bearing occupied just seventy hours. During this interminable period we enjoyed the scenery of the sound and grew acquainted with its diverse phenomena. The weather, if wet, was calm, and the surface of the water smooth; but every steamer that passed would set up a roll

side resort for the city. Part of the building in which the Royal Danish Yacht Club is housed was used as a public restaurant, with a fine terrace that commanded the yacht-club landing-stage and all the traffic of the sound. Moreover, it was a good restaurant, except that the waiters seemed to be always eating some titbit on the sly. Here we sat and watched the business and pleasure of the sound. The czar's yacht came to anchor, huge and old-fashioned and ungraceful, with a blue-and-white standard large enough to make a suit of sails for a schooner-the biggest yacht afloat, I think, but not a pleasing object, though better than the antique ship of the Danish king. The

unwieldly ceremoniousness of Russian courts seemed to surround this pompous vessel, and the solitary tragedy of imperial existence was made manifest in her. Ah, the savage and hollow futility of saluting guns! The two English royal yachts, both of which we saw in the neighborhood, were in every way strikingly superior to the Russian.

Impossible to tire of the spectacle offered by that restaurant terrace. At night the steamers would slip down out of Copenhagen one after the other to the ends of the Baltic, and each was a moving parterre of electricity on the darkness. And then we would walk along the nocturnal shore and find it peopled with couples and larger groups, whose bicycles were often stacked in groups, too. And the little yachts in the little yacht-basin were each an illuminated household! A woman would emerge from a cabin and ask a question of a man on the dark bank, and he would flash a lantern-light in her face like a missile, and "Oh!" she would cry. And farther on the great hulk which is the home of the Copenhagen Amateur Sailing Club would be lit with festoons of lamps, and from within it would come the sounds of song and the laughter of two sexes. And then we would yell, "Velsa, ahoy!" and keep on yelling until all the lightly clad couples were drawn out of the chilly night like moths by the strange English signaling. And at last the Velsa would wake up, and the dinghy

would detach itself from her side, and we would go aboard. But not until two o'clock or so would the hilarity and music of the Amateur Sailing Club cease, and merge into a whistling for taxicabs from the stand beyond the restaurant.

Then a few hours' slumber, broken by nightmares of the impossibility of ever quitting Copenhagen, and we would get up and gaze at the sadness of the dismantled engine, and over the water at the yachts dozing and rocking in the dawn. And on a near yacht, out of the maw of a forecastle-hatch left open for air, a halfdressed sailor would appear, and yawn, and stretch his arms, and then begin to use a bucket on the yacht's deck. The day was born. A green tug would hurry northward, splashing; and the first of the morning steamers would arrive from some mystical distant island, a vessel, like most of the rest, of about six hundred tons, red and black funnels, the captain looking down at us from the bridge; a nice handful of passengers, including a few young women in bright hats; everything damp and fresh, and everybody expectant and braced for Copenhagen. A cheerful, ordinary sight! And then our skipper would emerge, and the cook with my morning apple on a white plate. And the skipper would say, "We ought to be able to make a start to-day, sir." And on the third day we did make a start, the engine having been miraculously recreated; and we left Copenhagen, hating it no more.