ay, therefore the
old shed was left standing, and the poor woman who dwelt in it was
allowed to stay: she had the Egyptian bird to thank for that; or was
it perchance her reward, because she had once interceded for the nest
of its black brother in the forest of Borreby? At that time she, the
poor woman, was a young child, a pale hyacinth in the rich garden. She
remembered all that right well, did Anna Dorothea.

"'Oh! oh!' Yes, people can sigh like the wind moaning in the rushes
and reeds. 'Oh! oh!'" she sighed, "no bells sounded at thy burial,
Waldemar Daa! The poor schoolboys did not even sing a psalm when the
former lord of Borreby was laid in the earth to rest! Oh, everything
has an end, even misery. Sister Ida became the wife of a peasant. That
was the hardest trial that befell our father, that the husband of a
daughter of his should be a miserable serf, whom the proprietor could
mount on the wooden horse for punishment! I suppose he is under the
ground now. And thou, Ida? Alas, alas! it is not ended yet, wretch
that I am! Grant me that I may die, kind Heaven!'

"That was Anna Dorothea's prayer in the wretched hut which was left
standing for the sake of the stork.

"I took pity on the fairest of the sisters," said the Wind. "Her
courage was like that of a man, and in man's clothes she took service
as a sailor on board of a ship. She was sparing of words, and of a
dark countenance, but willing at her work. But she did not know how to
climb; so I blew her overboard before anybody found out that she was a
woman, and according to my thinking that was well done!" said the
Wind.

* * * * *

"On such an Easter morning as that on which Waldemar Daa had fancied
that he had found the red gold, I heard the tones of a psalm under the
stork's nest, among the crumbling walls--it was Anna Dorothea's last
song.

"There was no window, only a hole in the wall. The sun rose up like a
mass of gold, and looked through. What a splendour he diffused! Her
eyes were breaking, and her heart was breaking--but that they would
have done, even if the sun had not shone that morning on Anna
Dorothea.

"The stork covered her hut till her death. I sang at her grave!" said
the Wind. "I sang at her father's grave; I know where his grave is,
and where hers is, and nobody else knows it.

"New times, changed times! The old high-road now runs through
cultivated fields; the new road winds among the trim ditches, a