heard of it
before. Close by her gallopped four snorting steeds, with fire
spurting from their eyes and nostrils; they dragged a red-hot coach,
and within it sat the wicked proprietor who had ruled here a hundred
years ago. The legend said that every night at twelve o'clock he drove
into his castle yard and out again. There! there! He was not pale as
dead men are said to be, but black as a coal. He nodded at Anne
Lisbeth and beckoned to her. "Hold fast! hold fast! then you may ride
again in a nobleman's carriage, and forget your child!"

She gathered herself up, and hastened to the churchyard; but the black
crosses and the black ravens danced before her eyes, and she could not
distinguish one from the other. The ravens croaked, as the raven had
done that she saw in the daytime, but now she understood what they
said. "I am the raven-mother! I am the raven-mother!" each raven
croaked, and Anne Lisbeth now understood that the name also applied
to her; and she fancied she should be transformed into a black bird,
and be obliged to cry what they cried if she did not dig the grave.

[Illustration: ANNE LISBETH FOUND ON THE SEA SHORE.]

And she threw herself on the earth, and with her hands dug a grave in
the hard ground, so that the blood ran from her fingers.

"A grave! dig me a grave!" it still sounded; she was fearful that the
cock might crow, and the first red streak appear in the east, before
she had finished her work, and then she would be lost.

And the cock crowed, and day dawned in the east, and the grave was
only half dug. An icy hand passed over her head and face, and down
towards her heart. "Only half a grave!" a voice wailed, and fled away.
Yes, it fled away over the sea--it was the ocean spectre; and
exhausted and overpowered, Anne Lisbeth sunk to the ground, and her
senses forsook her.

It was bright day when she came to herself, and two men were raising
her up; but she was not lying in the churchyard, but on the sea shore,
where she had dug a deep hole in the sand, and cut her hand against a
broken glass, whose sharp stem was stuck in a little painted block of
wood. Anne Lisbeth was in a fever. Conscience had shuffled the cards
of superstition, and had laid out these cards, and she fancied she had
only half a soul, and that her child had taken the other half down
into the sea. Never would she be able to swing herself aloft to the
mercy of Heaven, till she had recovered this other half, which was now
hel