While the canal digger and marl seeker were at work, there had been neighborhood meetings and talks at which Captain Dalgas did the talking.  When he spoke the heath boer listened, for he had learned to look upon him as one of them.  He wore no gold lace.  A plain man in every-day gray tweeds, with his trousers tucked into his boots, he spoke to plain people of things that concerned them vitally, and in a way they could understand.  So when he told them that the heath had once been forest-clad, at least a large part of it, and pointed them to the proofs, and that the woods could be made to grow again to give them timber and shelter and crops, they gave heed.  It was worth trying at any rate.  The shelter was the immediate thing.  They began planting hedges about their homesteads; not always wisely, for it is not every tree that will grow in the heath.  The wind whipped and wore them, the ahl cramped their roots, and they died.  The ahl is the rusty-red crust that forms under the heather in the course of the ages where the desert rules.  Sometimes it is a loose sandstone formation; sometimes it carries as much as twenty per cent of iron that is absorbed from the upper layers of the sand.  In any case, it must be broken through; no tree root can do it.  The ahl, the poverty of the sand, and the wind, together make the “evil genius” of the heath that had won until then in the century-old fight with man.  But this time he had backing, and was not minded to give up.  The Heath Society was there to counsel, to aid.  And soon the hedges took hold, and gardens grew in their shelter.  There is hardly a farm in all west Jutland to-day that has not one, even if the moor waits just beyond the gate.

Out in the desert the Society had made a beginning with plantations of Norway spruce.  They took root, but the heather soon overwhelmed the young plants.  Not without a fight would this enemy let go its grip upon the land.  It had smothered the hardy Scotch pine in days past, and now the spruce was in peril.  Searching high and low for something that would grow fast and grow green, Dalgas and his associates planted dwarf pine with the spruce.  Strangely, it not only grew itself, but proved to be a real nurse for the other.  The spruce took a fresh start, and they grew vigorously together—­for a while.  Then the pine outstripped its nursling, and threatened to smother it.  The spruce was the more valuable; the other was at best little more than a shrub.  The croaker raised his voice:  the black heath had turned green, but it was still heath, of no value to any one, then or ever.

He had not reckoned with Dalgas.  The captain of engineers could use the axe as well as the spade.  He cut the dwarf pine out wherever the spruce had got its grip, and gave it light and air.  And it grew big and beautiful.  The Heath Society has now over nineteen hundred plantations that cover nearly a hundred thousand acres, and the State and private individuals, inspired by the example it set, have planted almost as large an area.  The ghost of the heath has been laid for all time.