e sea became calm and shining, the stars of
heaven gleamed brightly, and they were festive evenings that were
spent in the sumptuous cabin.

At length the voyagers began to wish for wind, for a favouring breeze;
but the breeze would not blow, or, if it did arise, it was contrary.
Thus weeks passed away, two full months; and then at last the fair
wind blew--it blew from the south-west. The ship sailed on the high
seas between Scotland and Jutland, and the wind increased just as in
the old song of "The King's Son of England."

"And it blew a storm, and the rain came down,
And they found not land nor shelter,
And forth they threw their anchor of gold,
As the wind blew westward, toward Denmark."

This all happened a long, long while ago. King Christian VII. then sat
on the Danish throne, and he was still a young man. Much has happened
since that time, much has changed or has been changed. Sea and
moorland have been converted into green meadows, heath has become
arable land, and in the shelter of the West Jute huts grow apple trees
and rose bushes, though they certainly require to be sought for, as
they bend beneath the sharp west wind. In Western Jutland one may go
back in thought to the old times, farther back than the days when
Christian VII. bore rule. As it did then, in Jutland, the brown heath
now also extends for miles, with its "Hun's Graves," its aerial
spectacles, and its crossing, sandy, uneven roads; westward, where
large rivulets run into the bays, extend marshes and meadow land,
girdled with lofty sand-hills, which, like a row of Alps, raise their
peaked summits towards the sea, only broken by the high clayey ridges,
from which the waves year by year bite out huge mouthfuls, so that the
impending shores fall down as if by the shock of an earthquake. Thus
it is there to-day, and thus it was many, many years ago, when the
happy pair were sailing in the gorgeous ship.

It was in the last days of September, a Sunday, and sunny weather; the
chiming of the church bells in the bay of Nissum was wafted along like
a chain of sounds. The churches there are erected almost entirely of
hewn boulder stones, each like a piece of rock; the North Sea might
foam over them, and they would not be overthrown. Most of them are
without steeples, and the bells are hung between two beams in the open
air. The service was over, and the congregation thronged out into the
churchyard, where then, as now, not a tree nor