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young man, with that educated sort of countenance which his countrymen, of a similar class, often possess. Yet he cannot learn Danish,-cannot speak a word after living here a year. Captain gives his orders in English. He came running up to us just now, with a beard sweeping his breast, to tell the engineer that we were just going over a little fishing-boat. When the danger was past, I said to the Captain that he should make his engineer learn Danish. "Yes, yes," said he, as he sprung up the paddle-box, "I am going to give him a Danish sweetheart." We hear enough of "languages without a master," but the Captain's method of teaching would put all other vocabularies out of practice.

"I wish," said a poor Swede, who was looking round the world for a wife, "I wish I could get such a vocabulary; and, indeed, I think I could learn English, or any other language, very easily. Yes, oh! very easily, indeed."

But the braw Scotchman shook his head and smiled very pathetically, and said something which signified that the only vocabulary, of the Captain's sort, which he could take, was a Scotch one, and so he feared he should only be learning more of what he knew already.

The opinion which this sensible, though speechless Scot had formed of the people among young whom he mixed, was very pleasing to me; the

more so, perhaps, because speechless folk generally give bad accounts of the foreigners whom they mingle with, and do not understand.

"I will say for them," said he, "that the Danes are as decent, and honest, and good a people as I ever was among. I have scarcely ever seen a man of them tipsy, and never saw one of them fighting; though we cannot manage to speak, I find them always kind and friendly to me, and see them so to one another."

"Their calling you up to speak to me was a proof of their kindness," I cried.

Well," said the plain Scot, "that was just a little part of it; it was not just what many of our own folk would have thought of doing. And, indeed, for the Danish sailors I must say that, so far as I have known them, there is a respectability maintained by them which our own sailors sadly want; for instance, not one of these men will go ashore till they have washed, and changed their working clothes."

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I write this down because I like to hear a foreign workman's opinion of the workmen among whom he lives.

62

CHAPTER VI.

THE chief ground of the good Scotchman's complaints, whom I spoke of in my last, was that there was no English Church for him to attend. "You are a Presbyterian," I said. "No," he replied, "I belonged to the Church of England in Scotland." The answer somehow pleased me. I told him there was an English Church attached, I believed, to the British Embassy at Copenhagen. He said he had inquired there of several English people, seamen and others, who did not know where it was, or if there was such a place. Indeed such ignorance is almost excusable, if they had not, as I have, Murray's Hand-Book to guide them. That

useful work points out the said Church in these words-"In Store Kongen's gade No. 51, there is a shabby little chapel in which service is performed every Sunday according to the rites of the Church of England, by the Chaplain of the Embassy. o'clock."

The service commences at eleven

I had not even seen this notice, however, when I found my way some time ago into the chapel maintained in Copenhagen as the representative of the English Church. Alas! for the impressions which such representations of the religion and the Church of England are calculated to produce, not only here, but almost everywhere on the continent. A cold, cheerless, neglected place; with a floor of bare, uneven flags; a rude painted pulpit and reading-desk, a bare table for the altar, and sundry brown boxes, containing in one a man standing with arms in an angle, the hands holding an open book; in others a few women of decent aspect, probably from the seamen's quarter, but not one of what are termed the higher classes, though, I think, a single table d'hôte at most of the hotels would supply more Great Britons than there were persons then in that chapel. The Embassy was, -I know not where; perhaps out of town.

Certainly in the sight of other nations, our spiritual pomp and expenditure appear in a singularly scanty ratio with that of our temporal. The great nation of England maintains her dignity in the establishments of her Ambassadors and foreign ministers in all respects except that of their religion. Copenhagen is not the only city where our ecclesiastical respectability contrasts rather painfully with our secular representation. In Stockholm there is no Chaplain to the Embassy; no chapel whatever. And what is to become of the few sheep in the wilderness who reside in such places? They are left to their own tender mercies; that is, if they will collect a certain sum annually, government will give them something more to pay the priest who is to minister to them; and even if (which is not always likely, considering that Mammon is the ruler of most men) even if they do this without the influence and guidance of their church, only see what strange sort of conventicles are opened for their worship, in the sight of the people among whom they dwell! Perhaps such a chapel as this; perhaps the use (if in a Roman Catholic land) of some dissenting place of worship; perhaps a hired room. And if that money is not collected, the people who were

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