heaven,
and said a few words, but no one there could understand them.

Another helpless being soon made its appearance, and her new-born babe
was placed in her arms. It ought to have reposed on a stately couch,
with silken curtains, in a splendid house. It ought to have been
welcomed with joy to a life rich in all this world's goods; but our
Lord had ordained that it should be born in a peasant's hut, in a
miserable nook. Not even one kiss did it receive from its mother.

The fisherman's wife laid the infant on its mother's breast, and it
rested near her heart; but that heart had ceased to beat--she was
dead! The child who should have been nurtured amidst happiness and
wealth was cast a stranger into the world--thrown up by the sea among
the sand-hills, to experience heavy days and the fate of the poor. And
again we call to mind the old song:--

"The king's son's eyes with big tears fill:
'Alas! that I came to this robber-hill.
Here nothing awaits me but evil and pain.
Had I haply but come to Herr Bugge's domain,
Neither knight nor squire would have treated me ill.'"

A little to the south of Nissumfiord, on that portion of the shore
which Herr Bugge had formerly called his, the vessel had stranded.
Those rough, inhuman times, when the inhabitants of the west coast
dealt cruelly, it is said, with the shipwrecked, had long passed away;
and now the utmost compassion was felt, and the kindest attention paid
to those whom the engulfing sea had spared. The dying mother and the
forlorn child would have met with every care wherever "the wild wind
had blown;" but nowhere could they have been received with more
cordial kindness than by the poor fishwife who, only the previous
morning, had stood with a heavy heart by the grave wherein reposed her
child, who on that very day would have attained his fifth year if the
Almighty had permitted him to live.

No one knew who the foreign dead woman was, or whence she came. The
broken planks and fragments of the ship told nothing.

In Spain, at that opulent house, there never arrived either letter or
message from the daughter and son-in-law; they had not reached their
destination; fearful storms had raged for some weeks. They waited with
anxiety for months. At last they heard, "Totally lost--every one on
board perished!"

But at Huusby-Klitter, in the fisherman's cottage, there dwelt now a
little urchin.

Where God bestows food for two, there is always someth