ed and
fainting, he sank with his burden, but the succeeding wave threw him
and the young girl up again.

The fishermen had now reached them, and they were taken into the boat.
Blood was streaming over Joergen's face; he looked as if he were dead,
but he still held the girl in so tight a grasp that it was with the
utmost difficulty she could be wrenched from his encircling arm. As
pale as death, and quite insensible, she lay at full length at the
bottom of the boat, which steered towards Skagen.

All possible means were tried to restore Clara to animation, but in
vain--the poor young woman was dead. Long had Joergen been buffeting
the waves with a corpse--exerting his utmost strength and straining
every nerve for a dead body.

Joergen still breathed; he was carried to the nearest house on the
inner side of the sand-hills. A sort of army surgeon who happened to
be at the place, who also acted in the capacities of smith and
huckster, attended him until the next day, when a physician from
Hjoerring, who had been sent for, arrived.

The patient was severely wounded in the head, and suffering from a
brain fever. For a time he uttered fearful shrieks, but on the third
day he sank into a state of drowsiness, and his life seemed to hang
upon a thread: that it might snap, the physician said, was the best
that could be wished for Joergen.

"Let us pray our Lord that he may be taken; he will never more be a
rational man."

But he was not taken; the thread of life would not break, though
memory was swept away, and all the powers and faculties of his mind
were gone. It was a frightful change. A living body was left--a body
that was to regain health and go about again.

Joergen remained in the trader Broenne's house.

"He was brought into this lamentable condition by his efforts to save
our child," said the old man; "he is now our son."

Joergen was called "an idiot;" but that was a term not exactly
applicable to him. He was like a musical instrument, the strings of
which are loose, and can no longer, therefore, be made to sound. Only
once, for a few minutes, they seemed to resume their elasticity, and
they vibrated again. Old melodies were played, and played in time. Old
images seemed to start up before him. They vanished--all glimmering of
reason vanished, and he sat again staring vacantly around, without
thought, without mind. It was to be hoped that he did not suffer
anything. His dark eyes had lost their intelligence