ead are said to be: no, he was as black as a coal--a burnt-out coal.
He nodded to Anne Lisbeth, and beckoned to her: "Hold on--hold on! So
mayst thou again drive in a nobleman's carriage, and forget thine own
child!"

In still greater terror, and with still greater precipitation than
before, she fled in the direction of the church. She reached the
churchyard; but the dark crosses above the graves, and the dark
ravens, seemed to mingle together before her eyes. The ravens
screeched as they had screeched in the daytime; but she now understood
what they said, and each cried, "I am a raven-mother; I am a
raven-mother!" And Anne Lisbeth thought that they were taunting her.
She fancied that she might, perhaps, be changed into such a dark bird,
and might have to screech like them, if she could not get the grave
demanded of her dug.

And she threw herself down upon the ground, and she dug a grave with
her hands in the hard earth, so that blood sprang from her fingers.

"Bury me--bury me!" resounded still about her. She dreaded the crowing
of the cock, and the first red streak in the east, because, if they
came before her labours were ended, she would be lost. And the cock
crowed, and in the east it began to be light. The grave was but half
dug. An ice-cold hand glided over her head and her face, down to where
her heart was. "Only half a grave!" sighed a voice near her; and
something seemed to vanish away--vanish into the deep sea. It was "the
apparition of the beach." Anne Lisbeth sank, terror-stricken and
benumbed, on the ground. She had lost feeling and consciousness.

It was broad daylight when she came to herself. Two young men lifted
her up. She was lying, not in the churchyard, but down on the shore;
and she had dug there a deep hole in the sand, and cut her fingers
till they bled with a broken glass, the stem of which was stuck into a
piece of wood painted blue. Anne Lisbeth was ill. Conscience had
mingled in Superstition's game, and had imbued her with the idea that
she had only half a soul--that her child had taken the other half away
with him down to the bottom of the sea. Never could she ascend upwards
towards the mercy-seat, until she had again the half soul that was
imprisoned in the depths of the ocean. Anne Lisbeth was taken to her
home, but she never was the same as she had formerly been. Her
thoughts were disordered like tangled yarn; one thread alone was
straight--that was to let "the apparition of the bea