mespun for a petticoat for
each of the young ones, and they were mighty well pleased.

"I and Ane Kirstine had lived happily together for about four years, as
we do still, and all that time we had seen nothing of that Poorman,
although we had spoken of him now and again. Sometimes we thought he had
perished, and sometimes that they had put him into Viborghouse. Well,
then it was that we were to have our second boy christened, him we
called Soeren, and I went to the parson to get this thing fixed up. As I
came on the marsh to the selfsame place where I saw that Poor-customer
the first time, there was somebody lying at one edge of the bog, on his
back in the heather and with his legs in the ditch. I knew him well
enough. 'Why are you lying here alone?' said I: 'is anything the matter
with you?' 'I think I am dying,' said he, but he gasped so I could
hardly understand him. 'Where are those women,' said I, 'that you used
to have with you? Have they left you to lie here by the road?' He nodded
his head and whispered, 'A drop of water.' 'That I will give you,' said
I, and then I took some of the rainwater that stood in the ditch, in the
hollow of my hat, and held it to his mouth. But that was of no use, for
he could drink no longer, but drew up his legs and opened his mouth
wide, and then the spirit left him. I felt so sorry for him that when I
came to the parson's I begged that his poor ghost might be sheltered in
the churchyard. That he gave me leave to do, and then I fetched him on
my own wagon and nailed a couple of boards together and laid him down
in the northwestern corner, and there he lies."

"Well now, that was it," said Kristen Katballe, "but why do you sit
there so still, Marie Kjoelvroe? Can you neither sing nor tell us
something?" "That is not impossible," said she, and heaved a sigh, and
sang so sadly that one might almost think it had happened to her.

THE HOSIER

"The greatest sorrow of all down here,
Is to lose the one we hold most dear."

Sometimes, when I have wandered far out on the wide heath, where I have
had nothing but the brown heather around me and the blue sky above me;
when I walked far away from mankind and the monuments of its busy doings
here below,--which after all are only molehills to be leveled by time or
by some restless Tamerlane;--when I drifted, light-hearted, free, and
proud, like the Bedouin, whom no house, no narrowly bounded field chains
to the spot, but who o