On one side of the stone
above his grave is engraved a golden plover, on the other a pair of
heath-larks, and around the foot a garland of heather, in memory of that
intimate life with nature which, through his own great love for it, he
endeared to all his readers.

* * * * *

A PICTURE

From the 'Poems'

I lay on my heathery hills alone;
The storm-winds rushed o'er me in turbulence loud;
My head rested lone on the gray moorland stone;
My eyes wandered skyward from cloud unto cloud.

There wandered my eyes, but my thoughts onward passed,
Far beyond cloud-track or tempest's career;
At times I hummed songs, and the desolate waste
Was the first the sad chimes of my spirit to hear.

Gloomy and gray are the moorlands where rest
My fathers, yet there doth the wild heather bloom,
And amid the old cairns the lark buildeth her nest,
And sings in the desert, o'er hill-top and tomb.

From Hewitt's 'Literature of Northern Europe.'

* * * * *

THE KNITTING-ROOM

It was the eve before Christmas Eve--no, stop! I am lying--it was the
eve before that, come to think of it, that there was a knitting-bee
going on at the schoolmaster's, Kristen Kornstrup's,--you know him?
There were plenty that knew him, for in the winter he was schoolmaster,
and in the summer he was mason, and he was alike clever at both. And he
could do more than that, for he could stop the flow of blood, and
discover stolen goods, and make the wind turn, and read prayers over
felons, and much more too. But at this exorcising he was not so good as
the parson, for he had not been through the black school.

So we had gathered there from the whole town,--oh, well, Lysgaard town
is not so mighty big: there are only six farms and some houses, but then
they were there too from Katballe and Testrup, and I think the lads from
Knakkeborg had drifted over too--but that doesn't matter. We had got it
measured off at last, and all of us had got our yarn over the hook in
the ceiling above the table, and had begun to let the five needles work.
Then the schoolmaster says, "Isn't there one of you that will sing
something or tell something? then it will go so nicely with the work
here." Then she began to speak, Kirsten Pedersdatter from Paps,--for she
is always forward about speaking:--"I could sing you a little ditty if