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Updated: May 14, 2025
Their homes were four miles apart, although, in one sense, they were a million miles apart by law and the convention which shuts a woman off from the love of men other than her husband; and yet in thought they were as near together always as though they had lain in the same cradle and grown up under the same rooftree.
At last he said, in a deep, husky voice, "Now, if aught of harm befalls thee because of this day's doings, I swear by Saint George that the red cock shall crow over the rooftree of this house, for the hot flames shall lick every crack and cranny thereof. As for these women" here he ground his teeth "it will be an ill day for them!"
How could we turn our backs on the eerie spruce wood, out of which SOMETHING might pop at any moment? How cross those long, shadowy fields between us and our rooftree? How venture through the darkly mysterious bracken hollow? Fortunately, Uncle Alec came along at this crisis and said he thought we'd better come home now, since the fires were nearly out.
The instinct of hospitality, which is held like a sacred thing among Shetlanders, bade him receive with a measure of courtesy whoever chanced to come under his "rooftree," but another instinct, as deeply rooted, and more ready to exhibit itself, was also moving within him. Fortunately no time was given him to choose between two courses.
The birth-rate is high, and the death-rate among babies not what it is in our proud America. Young families often remain under the grandfather's rooftree until another house or two becomes absolutely necessary to accommodate the overflow. If through some natural series of events a young woman has a child without having been married by the priest, no great stir is made over it.
There were stub ends of walls here and there bare, raw snags of walls sticking up and now and then a rooftree tilted pathetically against a ruin, or a pile of dusty masonry that had been a house. A little path ran through this tangle, and under an arched gateway that by a miracle remained standing and down the steps of a dugout. The jingling sound became recognizable.
In this square not a soul appeared, nor was there a sound to be heard save the cooing of some doves upon a rooftree, although I sat there upon a stone coping for the better part of a half hour. Then all at once, out of a green doorway next the conciergerie, poured a throng of children, whose shrill cries and laughter brought me back to the present.
The first house in the city was erected to the roof, and the builders had hung up a great garland, glittering with tinsel, upon the rooftree. "Odin, see!" exclaimed the Queen; and thenceforward the city was called Odensee, which name, since then, has been changed by daily speech to Odense. When people ask the children in Copenhagen whence they have come, they reply, out of the Peblingsöe.
Between the tiles, which sloped steeply on either hand, a faint light filtered in, disclosing the giant rooftree running the length of the house, and at the farther end of the loft the main tie-beam, from which a network of knees and struts rose to the rooftree. Tignonville, who seemed possessed by unnatural energy, stayed only to put off his boots.
But before that old rooftree was laid low, he wrote beneath it, quite offhand, a little poem, 'The Night Before Christmas, that blends with childhood's dreams anew each Christmas Eve a few short verses holding more vitality than all his learning. "If my book ever takes body, my friend, it will be under your roof, where you and yours can vitalize it.
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