d this space; and all the magic came into Juergen's mind which
tradition asserted to have been practised there in the old times, when
Sir Schwanwedel dwelt there. All this passed through Juergen's mind,
and made him shudder; but a sunbeam--a refreshing thought from
without--penetrated his heart even here; it was the remembrance of the
blooming elder and the fragrant lime trees.

He was not left there long. They carried him off to the town of
Ringkjoebing, where his imprisonment was just as hard.

Those times were not like ours. Hard measure was dealt out to the
"common" people; and it was just after the days when farms were
converted into knights' estates, on which occasions coachmen and
servants were often made magistrates, and had it in their power to
sentence a poor man, for a small offence, to lose his property and to
corporal punishment. Judges of this kind were still to be found; and
in Jutland, far from the capital and from the enlightened well-meaning
head of the government, the law was still sometimes very loosely
administered; and the smallest grievance that Juergen had to expect was
that his case would be protracted.

Cold and cheerless was his abode--and when would this state of things
end? He had innocently sunk into misfortune and sorrow--that was his
fate. He had leisure now to ponder on the difference of fortune on
earth, and to wonder why this fate had been allotted to him; and he
felt sure that the question would be answered in the next life--the
existence that awaits us when this is over. This faith had grown
strong in him in the poor fisherman's hut; that which had never shone
into his father's mind, in all the richness and sunshine of Spain, was
vouchsafed as a light of comfort in his poverty and distress--a sign
of mercy from God that never deceives.

The spring storms began to blow. The rolling and moaning of the North
Sea could be heard for miles inland when the wind was lulled; for then
it sounded like the rushing of a thousand waggons over a hard road
with a mine beneath. Juergen, in his prison, heard these sounds, and it
was a relief to him. No melody could have appealed so directly to his
heart as did these sounds of the sea--the rolling sea, the boundless
sea, on which a man can be borne across the world before the wind,
carrying his own house with him wherever he is driven, just as the
snail carries its home even into a strange land.

How he listened to the deep moaning, and how the th