lace where Sir Bugge's castle had
stood, and where Jurgen had walked with his foster-parents after the
burial feast, during the four happiest days of his childhood. He
was led by the well-known path, over the meadow to Vosborg; once
more the elders were in bloom and the lofty lime-trees gave forth
sweet fragrance, and it seemed as if it were but yesterday that he had
last seen the spot. In each of the two wings of the castle there was a
staircase which led to a place below the entrance, from whence there
is access to a low, vaulted cellar. In this dungeon Long Martha had
been imprisoned, and from here she was led away to the scaffold. She
had eaten the hearts of five children, and had imagined that if she
could obtain two more she would be able to fly and make herself
invisible. In the middle of the roof of the cellar there was a
little narrow air-hole, but no window. The flowering lime trees
could not breathe refreshing fragrance into that abode, where
everything was dark and mouldy. There was only a rough bench in the
cell; but a good conscience is a soft pillow, and therefore Jurgen
could sleep well.

The thick oaken door was locked, and secured on the outside by
an iron bar; but the goblin of superstition can creep through a
keyhole into a baron's castle just as easily as it can into a
fisherman's cottage, and why should he not creep in here, where Jurgen
sat thinking of Long Martha and her wicked deeds? Her last thoughts on
the night before her execution had filled this place, and the magic
that tradition asserted to have been practised here, in Sir
Svanwedel's time, came into Jurgen's mind, and made him shudder; but a
sunbeam, a refreshing thought from without, penetrated his heart
even here--it was the remembrance of the flowering elder and the sweet
smelling lime-trees.

He was not left there long. They took him away to the town of
Ringkjobing, where he was imprisoned with equal severity.

Those times were not like ours. The common people were treated
harshly; and it was just after the days when farms were converted into
knights' estates, when coachmen and servants were often made
magistrates, and had power to sentence a poor man, for a small
offence, to lose his property and to corporeal punishment. Judges of
this kind were still to be found; and in Jutland, so far from the
capital, and from the enlightened, well-meaning, head of the
Government, the law was still very loosely administered sometimes--the
sm