his great mental faculties had been lost; only hard
days, pain, and disappointment had been his lot. He was like a rare
plant torn from its native soil, and thrown upon the sand, to wither
there. And was the image, fashioned in God's likeness, to have no
better destination? Was it to be merely the sport of chance? No. The
all-loving God would certainly repay him in the life to come, for
what he had suffered and lost here. "The Lord is good to all; and His
mercy is over all His works." These words from the Psalms of David,
the old pious wife of the merchant repeated in patience and hope, and
the prayer of her heart was that Juergen might soon be summoned to
enter into the life eternal.

In the churchyard where the sand blows across the walls, Clara lay
buried. It seemed as if Juergen knew nothing of this--it did not come
within the compass of his thoughts, which comprised only fragments of
a past time. Every Sunday he went with the old people to church, and
sat silent there with vacant gaze. One day, while the Psalms were
being sung, he uttered a deep sigh, and his eyes gleamed: they were
fixed upon the altar, upon the place where he had knelt with his
friend who was dead. He uttered her name, and became pale as death,
and tears rolled over his cheeks.

They led him out of the church; and he said to the bystanders that he
was well, and had never been ill: he, the heavily afflicted, the waif
cast forth upon the world, remembered nothing of his sufferings. And
the Lord our Creator is wise and full of loving-kindness--who can
doubt it?

In Spain, where the warm breezes blow over the Moorish cupola, among
the orange trees and laurels, where song and the sound of castagnettes
are always heard, sat in the sumptuous house a childish old man, the
richest merchant in the place, while children marched in procession
through the streets, with waving flags and lighted tapers. How much of
his wealth would the old man not have given to be able to press his
children to his heart! his daughter, or her child, that had perhaps
never seen the light in this world, far less a Paradise.

"Poor child!"

Yes, poor child--a child still, and yet more than thirty years old;
for to that age Juergen had attained in Old Skjagen.

The drifting sand had covered the graves in the churchyard quite up to
the walls of the church; but yet the dead must be buried among their
relations and loved ones who had gone before them. Merchant Broenne and
his