help wherever the wind blew them; but nowhere could they have
found more earnest care than in the hut of the poor fisherwife; who
had stood but yesterday, with a heavy heart, beside the grave which
covered her child, which would have been five years old that day, if
God had spared it to her.

No one knew who the dead stranger was, or could even form a
conjecture. The pieces of wreck said nothing on the subject.

Into the rich house in Spain no tidings penetrated of the fate of the
daughter and the son-in-law. They had not arrived at their destined
post, and violent storms had raged during the past weeks. At last the
verdict was given, "Foundered at sea--all lost."

But in the sand-hills near Hunsby, in the fisherman's hut, lived a
little scion of the rich Spanish family.

Where Heaven sends food for two, a third can manage to make a meal,
and in the depths of the sea is many a dish of fish for the hungry.

And they called the boy Juergen.

"It must certainly be a Jewish child," the people said, "it looks so
swarthy."

"It might be an Italian or a Spaniard," observed the clergyman.

But to the fisherwoman these three nations seemed all the same, and
she consoled herself with the idea that the child was baptized as a
Christian.

The boy throve. The noble blood in his veins was warm, and he became
strong on his homely fare. He grew apace in the humble house, and the
Danish dialect spoken by the West Jutes became his language. The
pomegranate seed from Spanish soil became a hardy plant on the coast
of West Jutland. Such may be a man's fate! To this home he clung with
the roots of his whole being. He was to have experience of cold and
hunger, and the misfortunes and hardships that surrounded the humble;
but he tasted also of the poor man's joys.

Childhood has sunny heights for all, whose memory gleams through the
whole after life. The boy had many opportunities for pleasure and
play. The whole coast, for miles and miles, was full of playthings;
for it was a mosaic of pebbles, red as coral, yellow as amber, and
others again white and rounded like birds' eggs; and all smoothed and
prepared by the sea. Even the bleached fish skeletons, the water
plants dried by the wind, seaweed, white, gleaming, and long
linen-like bands, waving among the stones, all these seemed made to
give pleasure and amusement to the eye and the thoughts; and the boy
had an intelligent mind--many and great faculties lay dormant in him.
How