An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen was enough to convince my feet that it was not a city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped back to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a carriage. He knew no more of the city than I did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak a single word of Danish; but I felt sure that he would return with an equipage. What I desired was an equipage with a driver who could speak either English, French, or Dutch. He did return with an equipage, and it was overpowering. Rather like a second-hand state carriage, it was drawn by two large gray horses, perhaps out of a circus, and driven by a liveried being who was alleged to speak French. I shuddered at the probable cost of this prodigious conveyance, but pretended I did not care. The ligure named was just seven dollars a day. We monopolized the carriage during our sojourn, and the days were long; but the coachman never complained. Possibly because he had no language in which to complain. We learned in a moment that his ability to speak French was entirely mythical. Then some one said that a misunderstanding had occurred at the livery-stables, and that German was the foreign language he spoke, But he did not speak German either, nor anything else. He was just another of those strange creatures met in the course of travel who are born, who mature, and who die without speaking or comprehending any language whatever.
From the height of his spacious and sedate vehicle we gazed down upon the rushing population of Copenhagen--beautiful women, with lovely tow-colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The driver only made one mistake, but it was a bad one. We wanted tea, and we asked him to go to a teagarden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went. He took us up an interminable boulevard, with a special strip for cyclists. Thousands upon thousands of cyclists, all fair, passed and repassed us. He went on and on. One of the horses fell lame, but it made no difference. We could not stop him. And repetitions of the word for tea in French and German had no effect save to make him smile. We constantly descried what seemed in the distance to be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens. We saw an incomprehensible colony of doll’s houses--well-kept suburban huts exteriorly resembling houses--in a doll’s garden. We could not conceive the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not a tea-garden. Presently the carriage was stopped by a man demanding money. He wore no uniform, but conveyed to us that he was an official of the town of Hillerup, and that strange carriages had to pay forty-eight ore in order to traverse Hillerup.