Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/22

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June 25, 1864.]
ONCE A WEEK.
7

then a glimpse of a lowly church peeping out of the trees, and close by it the substantial house of the gutsbesitzer, or squire; as I walked through the villages by the well-built cottages—the walls and porches covered with trailing flowers, the gardens neat and well kept up—I could hardly believe that I was not after all in East Anglia, somewhere on the coast of Norfolk. Almost everything I saw assisted to heighten the illusion. There was the blacksmith’s forge by the road side, with the gossips standing about it; there was the beer-house in the middle of the village, and the little general shop, where everything was to be bought; there were the guide-posts at every crossway, with unmistakeable English names upon them—at least half the villages in Angeln seemed to me to end in “by”—there were the boundary-stones marking the limits of the parishes, and chubby, flaxen-headed children,—non Angli sed Angeli—who bowed and curtseyed to the stranger just as if they had been trained by the parish schoolmistress. The only things that struck me at all strangely were the stone causeways, which commence at the first and finish at the last house of each village, the numbers on the houses—a police regulation— and the remarkable civility of the people. A stranger who strolls through an English village has to run the gauntlet of something more than curiosity; it is quite possible that he will be greeted with a stone or two, and if half-a-dozen fellows are lounging together in front of the beer-house or on the church-yard wall, a few coarse jeers are certain to be bestowed upon him. I met with nothing of the kind in Angeln, and choose to account for the difference by the mixture of races in England. The only impertinence I did experience was familiar enough. From almost every farmyard a couple of dogs rushed out and barked me beyond the bounds. The people looked strong and healthy, the young women were comely and ruddy as English peasant girls. The servant girls of Flensburg, drawn, I suppose, from Angeln, were among the prettiest I have seen out of or even in England. The country is pleasantly undulating and fairly wooded, and the larger part belongs to noble proprietors, as is also the case in Holstein, with the exception of the rich marsh district, Dithmarschen. In the rest of Slesvig the land belongs to peasant proprietors, but these peasant proprietors are really large yeomen, and own farms of three or four hundred acres. The language spoken by the inhabitants of Angeln was one of the most vexed disputes between the Germans and the Danish Government. As far as I could form a judgment, whilst the land-owners are Germans, and speak High-German, the population generally speak in about equal proportions Danish or Low-German.

I have no intention of describing Angeln in any detail, I desire only to state the impression it made upon me, for the benefit of those of my countrymen who, passing by Hamburg next autumn, may diverge from their route for a few days to visit the scene of what I hope may then be called the late war. But there is one spot of which I must make brief mention—Glucksburg, or Lyksborg, the favourite residence of the Late King of Denmark; and I do so the more especially that it is within an easy walk from Flensburg. A very pleasant walk I found it; the road, well kept, as becomes a road to a royal residence, runs through a country which presents the usual features of an Angeln landscape, the distance being about six or seven miles. The palace is built in a small lake of a circular shape, and rises out of the waters at a short distance from the shore. It is entirely surrounded by water; there is no embankment— not even a gallery; steps lead down to a landing place on the main front towards the park, and a bridge connects it on one side with the land, on which are the stables and other outbuildings. The house is a very large one, with no pretension to architectural beauty, but evidently very solidly built. Round the lake, except for the small distance along which the road runs, stretches a beautiful park, open to all, through which the visitor must perforce ramble. A beautiful bright afternoon had succeeded a wet morning, and a more delightful spot than Glucksburg I have seldom seen. All was so quiet and yet so bright. Here fine masses of trees came down into the lake, and there the waters forced their way into the forest, and formed little bays shut in by dense foliage; and the old house which looked into them all, with its three-gable roofs, held together as it were by the round towers which kept guard each at a corner, for all its ugliness had a charming look. It seemed just the place to live a lazy, lounging life, free from all care or trouble, one’s hardest work to float in a canoe across the lake, and there, under the shelter of some giant trees, and lulled by the rippling of the water, sleeping or waking, dream away. Behind the park and on towards the sea were woods in which a sportsman would find, no doubt, plenty of amusement. The village is a long one, and as a royal residence should be clean and well-to-do-looking, with some good houses of much higher pretensions than peasants’ cottages. On the other side of the road is another and smaller lake, connected with the larger one by a stream which turns a mill, and upon this lake stands another large house.