HOW THE GHOST OF THE HEATH WAS LAID

On the map of Europe the mainland of Denmark looks like a beckoning finger pointing due north and ending in a narrow sand-reef, upon which the waves of the North Sea and of the Kattegat break with unceasing clamor and strife.  The heart of the peninsula, quite one-fourth of its area, was fifty years ago a desert, a barren, melancholy waste, where the only sign of life encountered by the hunter, gunning for heath-fowl and plover, was a rare shepherd tending a few lonesome sheep, and knitting mechanically on his endless stocking.  The two, the lean sheep and the long stocking, together comprised the only industries which the heath afforded and was thought capable of sustaining.  A great change has taken place within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear sight and patient devotion of one strong man, the Gifford Pinchot of Denmark.  The story of that unique achievement reads like the tale of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years’ sleep by the kiss of her lover prince.  The prince who awoke the slumbering heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name.

Not altogether fanciful is the conceit.  Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—­does yet, where enough of it remains.  Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre pall.  Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human habitation in sight some heath boer’s ling-thatched hut, flanked by rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the pitiless west wind.  On the barrows where the vikings sleep their long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between steep banks a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to escape from the universal blight.  Over it all broods the silence of the desert, drowsy with the hum of many bees winging their swift way to the secret feeding-places they know of, where mayflower and anemone hide under the heather, witness that forests grew here in the long ago.  In midsummer, when the purple is on the broom, a strange pageant moves on the dim horizon, a shifting mirage of sea and shore, forest, lake, and islands lying high, with ships and castles and spires of distant churches—­the witchery of the heath that speaks in the tales and superstitions of its simple people.  High in the blue soars the lark, singing its song of home and hope to its nesting mate.  This is the heath which, denying to the hardest toil all but the barest living, has given of its poetry to the Danish tongue some of its sweetest songs.