ll. Every
man has his own way, and Soren has his; but the horse must not be
judged by the halter. Taking one thing with another, I have lived more
agreeably with him than with the man whom they called the most noble
and gallant of the King's subjects. I have had the Stadtholder
Gyldenlowe, the King's half-brother, for my husband; and afterwards
I took Palle Dyre. One is as good as another, each in his own way, and
I in mine. That was a long gossip, but now you know all about me."

And with those words she left the room.

It was Marie Grubbe! so strangely had fate played with her. She
did not live to see many anniversaries of the festival of the Three
Kings; Holberg has recorded that she died in June, 1716; but he has
not written down, for he did not know, that a number of great black
birds circled over the ferry-house, when Mother Soren, as she was
called, was lying there a corpse. They did not scream, as if they knew
that at a burial silence should be observed. So soon as she lay in the
earth, the birds disappeared; but on the same evening in Jutland, at
the old manor house, an enormous number of crows and choughs were
seen; they all cried as loud as they could, as if they had some
announcement to make. Perhaps they talked of him who, as a little boy,
had taken away their eggs and their young; of the peasant's son, who
had to wear an iron garter, and of the noble young lady, who ended
by being a ferryman's wife.

"Brave! brave!" they cried.

And the whole family cried, "Brave! brave!" when the old house was
pulled down.

"They are still crying, and yet there's nothing to cry about,"
said the clerk, when he told the story. "The family is extinct, the
house has been pulled down, and where it stood is now the stately
poultry-house, with gilded weathercocks, and the old Poultry Meg.
She rejoices greatly in her beautiful dwelling. If she had not come
here," the old clerk added, "she would have had to go into the
work-house."

The pigeons cooed over her, the turkey-cocks gobbled, and the
ducks quacked.

"Nobody knew her," they said; "she belongs to no family. It's pure
charity that she is here at all. She has neither a drake father nor
a hen mother, and has no descendants."

She came of a great family, for all that; but she did not know it,
and the old clerk did not know it, though he had so much written down;
but one of the old crows knew about it, and told about it. She had
heard from her own mother and grand