"Run, Danes, or Prussians will catch you!
Schleswig-Holstein gläube!"  And, at that
taunt, a dozen soldiers faced-about, and ordered
arms, as if to fire; but an officer hurried back;
the muskets were shouldered again, and the
faint sound of the Danish drum soon died away
in the distance.

"Let us go home," said Captain Bluenose,
with an extra hoarseness in his deep strong
voice; and home we went.  The home whither
I, an English lad of seventeen, and my surly
guide, were wending our way under the load
of rods, and leaping-poles, and creels well
filled with pike and perch, was Fladswäst, a
village lying north of Steerup, and nearer to the
fens and the coast.  If Steerup was chiefly
German (though there were Danish families too,
sitting, with sad hearts, in back rooms, and
trying to shut out the clamour of the enemies
of their country), Fladswast was as Scandinavian
as Harold Harfager.  Quite nine houses
out of ten were inhabited by people of the pure
Danish stock; many of them natives of the
isles, or North Jutland.  But the most thorough
Dane, in heart and soul, that dwelt in Fladswäst,
was certainly my guide, philosopher, and friend,
in all matters of boating, fishing, and fowling,
Captain Bluenose.

This old man's real name was Peter Voss.
He was a Laaland man.  He had served, I
think, as a "powder monkey," but at any rate
as a boy, on board one of the Danish frigates in
the Copenhagen sea-fight of 1807.  An unlucky
shot from some English ship had fired the Dane's
magazine, doing dreadful mischief, and blowing
poor little Peter, as he phrased it, "like a
feather" up the hatchway.  The child was not
maimed nor blinded; but a quantity of the loose
gunpowder was blown into his face, and disfigured
him for life, producing the effect of a ghastly
and indelible tattooing.  Hence, Peter Voss received
the nickname of Bluenose, which stuck
to him to the last.  He had been man-of-
war's-man, smuggler, boatswain of an Indiaman,
a Singapore pilot, mate of an opium clipper,
and what not.  At last he had come back, well
to do, from the far East; had married the heiress
of a small Schleswig farmer, and succeeded in
right of his wife to the farm.  But he had never
quite divorced himself from the blue water on
which his best years had been spent.  He was
still master and owner of a tidy sloop, lying at
Kappel, and made many a profitable cruise, selling
grain and bullocks among the islands, and
bringing back eider-down, salt fish, wool, and
Norway spars.  Hence he was always called
Schipper Blauness, a name which I Anglicised
into Captain Bluenose, much to its owner's
satisfaction.

For the tough old seaman bore no grudge to
the Britons for his own share of the defeat which
"Nelson and the North" inflicted on Prince
Frederick's fleet.  If we English had not seized
the ships, he was wont to say, the French would,
and he was rather proud, than otherwise, of the
manly resistance which had been offered to so
mighty a neighbour.  And he had served on board
an English man-of-war, where he had learned to
speak our tongue very intelligibly, and had a
curious sort of liking for whatever bore the
English name.  Hence, no doubt, his fancy for me,
a pupil, as I was then, of Mr. Blenck, the pastor
of Fladswast, a great classical scholar and
accomplished linguist, as are many persons in North
Europe, whose humble life is passed within
the whitewashed walls of a Lutheran manse.
Mr. Blenck's stipend was small, since though
his glebe was large, he did not farm it as skilfully
as some of the Danish clergy, than whom, in
their old-fashioned way, there are no better
farmers, and he added to it by taking pupils.
Three months before, there had been three English
youths under the pastor's roof.  But the
others had been recalled, as soon as the
revolutionary disturbances broke out throughout
Western Europe, their parents fearing they
might come to harm among the wars and riots
that prevailed.  I, then, was the only pupil left,
and as I had a good deal of leisure, was glad to
make an ally of Captain Bluenose, the best
fowler and fisher in that village of fowlers and
fishers, and to enjoy the sports of the country
under his guidance.  The skipper was well off;
he could indulge himself with a holiday twice a
week, without much detriment to his affairs, and
it was wonderful what havoc among birds and
fish his lines and nets, his guns and decoys,
contrived to make.

At Voss's farm I was always a welcome
guest.  His wife was dead, but he was not alone
in the world, for besides Han Voss, his son, he
had a daughter, Lilien.  Han was about my own
age, a handsome, dreamy-eyed boy, with a sweet
temper and a slow intellect, a direct contrast to
his fierce old father; who was fiery by nature,
though he had a peculiar power of concealing
his emotions beneath an exterior as rigid as
that of a mask.  Lilien was a lovely little
creature of nine or ten, with hair like rippled
gold, the brightest face, the bluest eyes, and the
light step of a fairy.  Indeed, one might have
taken the girl for a fairy, her cleverness and
grace being something surprising at her years;
while there was a delicacy about her appearance
that almost tallied with the description of the
Jutland elves.  Both of old Peter's children
loved him dearly, and a kind father he was to
them, much as Han's lack of the old Norse
shrewdness sometimes tried his temper; but
Lilien was his idol.  He would spend hours in
carving dolls for her with his clasp knife and a
bit of alder wood, and in dressing these dolls
with scraps of bright-coloured rag, after the
fashion of the strange nations he had seen in far-
off climes.  He was never weary of telling her
endless stories of China, and the Malay Archipelago,
and the Spanish Main, to which Lilien,
on her part, would listen with breathless attention.
I won the little lady's favour by relating
to her some of the wonders of English civilisation,
and by describing to her the railways,
the steamers, the crowded shipping in the
Thames, the roar, and rush, and surge of human
life to be witnessed in London.  To all these