e the fancy of Juergen. It seemed to him as if they were
now going to enter fairyland, though everything was still real.

How quiet it was! Far and wide the heath extended around them like a
beautiful carpet. The heather bloomed; the juniper bushes and the
fresh oak saplings stood up like nosegays from the earth. An inviting
place for a frolic, if it were not for the number of poisonous adders
of which the travellers spoke, as they did also of the wolves which
formerly infested the place, from which circumstance the region was
still called the Wolfsborg region. The old man who guided the oxen
related how, in the lifetime of his father, the horses had to sustain
many a hard fight with the wild beasts that were now extinct; and how
he himself, when he went out one morning to bring in the horses, had
found one of them standing with its fore-feet on a wolf it had killed,
after the savage beast had torn and lacerated the legs of the brave
horse.

The journey over the heath and the deep sand was only too quickly
accomplished. They stopped before the house of mourning, where they
found plenty of guests within and without. Waggon after waggon stood
ranged in a row, and horses and oxen went out to crop the scanty
pasture. Great sand-hills, like those at home in the North Sea, rose
behind the house, and extended far and wide. How had they come here,
miles into the interior of the land, and as large and high as those on
the coast? The wind had lifted and carried them hither, and to them
also a history was attached.

Psalms were sung, and a few of the old people shed tears; beyond this,
the guests were cheerful enough, as it appeared to Juergen, and there
was plenty to eat and drink. Eels there were of the fattest, upon
which brandy should be poured to bury them, as the eel breeder said;
and certainly his maxim was here carried out.

Juergen went to and fro in the house. On the third day he felt quite at
home, like as in the fisherman's hut on the sand-hills where he had
passed his early days. Here on the heath there was certainly an
unheard-of wealth, for the flowers and blackberries and bilberries
were to be found in plenty, so large and sweet, that when they were
crushed beneath the tread of the passers by, the heath was coloured
with their red juice.

Here was a Hun's Grave, and yonder another. Columns of smoke rose into
the still air; it was a heath-fire, he was told, that shone so
splendidly in the dark evening.

Now