“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 owns, possesses, all he sees,—­who does not dwell, but who goes wherever he pleases; when my far-hovering eye caught a glimpse of a house in the horizon, and was thus disagreeably arrested in its airy flight, sometimes there came (God forgive me this passing thought, it was no more than that) the wish—­would that this dwelling of man were not! there too is trouble and sorrow; there too they quarrel and fight about mine and thine!—­Oh! the happy desert is mine, is thine, is everybody’s, is nobody’s.—­It is said that a forester