While the population in the rest of Denmark is about stationary, in west Jutland it grows apace.  The case of Skaphus farm in the parish of Sunds shows how this happens.  Prior to 1870 this farm of three thousand acres was rated the “biggest and poorest” in Denmark.  Last year it had dwindled to three hundred and fifty acres, but upon its old land thirty-three homesteads had risen that kept between them sixty-two horses and two hundred and fifty-two cows, beside the sheep, and the manor farm was worth twice as much as before.  The town of Herning, sometimes called “the Star of the Heath,” is the seat of Hammerum county, once the baldest and most miserable on the Danish mainland.  In 1841 twenty-one persons lived in Herning.  To-day there are more than six thousand in a town with handsome buildings, gas, electric lighting, and paved streets.  The heath is half a dozen miles away.  And this is not the result of any special or forced industry, but the natural, healthy growth of a centre for an army of industrious men and women winning back the land of their fathers by patient toil.  All through the landscape one sees from the train the black giving way to the green.  Churches rear their white gables; bells that have been silent since the Black Death stalked through the land once more call the people to worship on the old sites.  More churches were built in the reign of “the good King Christian,” who has just been gathered to his fathers, than in all the centuries since the day of the Valdemars.

Bog cultivation is the Heath Society’s youngest child.  The heath is full of peat-bogs that only need the sand, so plentiful on the uplands, to make their soil as good as the best, the muck of the bog being all plant food, and they have a surplus of water to give in exchange.  With hope the keynote of it all, the State has taken up the herculean task of keeping down the moving sands of the North Sea coast.  All along it is a range of dunes that in the fierce storms of that region may change shape and place in a single night.  The “sand flight” at times reached miles inland, and threatened to bury the farmer’s acres past recovery.  Austrian fir and dwarf pine now grow upon the white range, helping alike to keep down the sand and to bar out the blast.

With this exception, the great change has been, is being, wrought by the people themselves.  It was for their good, in the apathy that followed 1864, that it should be so, and Dalgas saw it.  The State aids the man who plants ten acres or more, and assumes the obligation to preserve the forest intact; the Heath Society sells him plants at half-price, and helps him with its advice.  It disposes annually of over thirteen million young trees.  The people do the rest, and back the Society with their support.  The Danish peasant has learned the value of cooeperation since he turned dairy farmer, and associations for irrigation, for tree planting, and garden planting are everywhere.  They even reach across the ocean.  This year a call was issued to sons of the old soil, who have found a new home in America, to join in planting a Danish-American forest in the desert where hill and heather hide a silvery lake in their deep shadows and returning wanderers may rest and dream of the long ago.