ous, the furniture
was expensive and artistically carved. She had brought gold and silver
plate with her into the house, and there was German beer in the
cellar. Black fiery horses neighed in the stables. There was a wealthy
look about the house of Borreby at that time, when wealth was still at
home there.

"Four children dwelt there also; three delicate maidens, Ida, Joanna,
and Anna Dorothea: I have never forgotten their names.

"They were rich people, noble people, born in affluence, nurtured in
affluence.

"Huh--sh! roar along!" sang the Wind; and then he continued:

"I did not see here, as in other great noble houses, the high-born
lady sitting among her women in the great hall turning the
spinning-wheel: here she swept the sounding chords of the cithern, and
sang to the sound, but not always old Danish melodies, but songs of a
strange land. It was 'live and let live' here: stranger guests came
from far and near, the music sounded, the goblets clashed, and I was
not able to drown the noise," said the Wind. "Ostentation, and
haughtiness, and splendour, and display, and rule were there, but the
fear of the Lord was not there.

"And it was just on the evening of the first day of May," the Wind
continued. "I came from the west, and had seen how the ships were
being crushed by the waves, with all on board, and flung on the west
coast of Jutland. I had hurried across the heath, and over Jutland's
wood-girt eastern coast, and over the Island of Fuenen, and now I drove
over the Great Belt, groaning and sighing.

"Then I lay down to rest on the shore of Seeland, in the neighbourhood
of the great house of Borreby, where the forest, the splendid oak
forest, still rose.

"The young men-servants of the neighbourhood were collecting branches
and brushwood under the oak trees; the largest and driest they could
find they carried into the village, and piled them up in a heap, and
set them on fire; and men and maids danced, singing in a circle round
the blazing pile.

"I lay quite quiet," continued the Wind; "but I silently touched a
branch, which had been brought by the handsomest of the men-servants,
and the wood blazed up brightly, blazed up higher than all the rest;
and now he was the chosen one, and bore the name the Street-goat, and
might choose his Street-lamb first from among the maids; and there was
mirth and rejoicing, greater than I had ever heard before in the halls
of the rich baronial mansion.

"And the no