came the fourth day, and the funeral festivities were to conclude,
and they were to go back from the land-dunes to the sand-dunes.

"Ours are the best," said the old fisherman, Juergen's foster-father;
"these have no strength."

And they spoke of the way in which the sand-dunes had come into the
country, and it seemed all very intelligible. This was the explanation
they gave:

A corpse had been found on the coast, and the peasants had buried it
in the churchyard; and from that time the sand began to fly, and the
sea broke in violently. A wise man in the parish advised them to open
the grave and to look if the buried man was not lying sucking his
thumb; for if so, he was a man of the sea, and the sea would not rest
until it had got him back. So the grave was opened, and he really was
found with his thumb in his mouth. So they laid him upon a cart and
harnessed two oxen before it; and as if stung by an adder, the oxen
ran away with the man of the sea over heath and moorland to the ocean;
and then the sand ceased flying inland, but the hills that had been
heaped up still remained there. All this Juergen heard and treasured in
his memory from the happiest days of his childhood, the days of the
burial feast. How glorious it was to get out into strange regions, and
to see strange people! And he was to go farther still. He was not yet
fourteen years old when he went out in a ship to see what the world
could show him: bad weather, heavy seas, malice, and hard men--these
were his experiences, for he became a ship boy. There were cold
nights, and bad living, and blows to be endured; then he felt as if
his noble Spanish blood boiled within him, and bitter wicked words
seethed up to his lips; but it was better to gulp them down, though he
felt as the eel must feel when it is flayed and cut up, and put into
the frying-pan.

"I shall come again!" said a voice within him. He saw the Spanish
coast, the native land of his parents. He even saw the town where they
had lived in happiness and prosperity; but he knew nothing of his home
or race, and his race knew just as little about him.

The poor ship boy was not allowed to land; but on the last day of
their stay he managed to get ashore. There were several purchases to
be made, and he was to carry them on board.

There stood Juergen in his shabby clothes, which looked as if they had
been washed in the ditch and dried in the chimney: for the first time
he, the inhabitant of the dune