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A STORY FROM THE SAND-DUNES 729
on which occasions coachmen and- servants were often made magintratos, and had it in their .power to sentence a poor man, for a small offence, to lose his property and to corporal punishment. Judges of this kind were still to Ik) found ; and in Jutland, far from the capital and from tho enlightened well-meaning government, the law wan still sometimes vory loosely administered ; and the smallest grievance that Jurgen had was that his ease was protracted.
Cold and cheerless was his abode -and when would this stale of things end ? He had innocently sunk into misfortune and sorrow—that was his fate. He had leisure now to ponder on the difference of fortune on earth, and to wonder why this fate had been allotted to him ; and he felt sure that the question would be answered in the next life—the existence that awaits us when this is over. This faith had grown strong in him in tho poor fisherman's hut ; that which had never shone into his father's mind, in all |
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the richness and s |
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unshine of Spain, was vouchsafed as |
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a light of comfort to him in cold and darkness—a sign of mercy from God, who never deceives.
The spring storms began to blow. Tho rolling and moaning of the North Sea could be heard for miles inland when the wind was lulled,for then it sounded like the rushing of a thousand wagons over a hard road with a mine beneath. Jurgen, in his prison, heard these sounds, and it was a relief to him. Mo melody could have appealed so directly to his heart as did these sounds of the sea—the rolling sea, t he boundless sea, on which a man can be borne across the world )>cforc tho wind, carrying his own houso with him wherever he is driven, just- as the snail carries bis ; one stood always on one's own ground, on the soil of homo, even in a strange land.
How he listened to the deep moaning, and how the thought arose in him—' Free I free ! How happy to be free, oven without shoes and in ragged clothes ! ' Sometimes, when such thoughts crossed his mind, the fiery nature rose within him, and ho boat tho wall with his clenched fists.
Weeks, months, a whole year had gone by, when a vagabond—Niols, tho thiof, called also the horso coupor—was arrested ; and now tho bettor times came, and it was soon what wrong Jurgon had endured. |
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