tale
of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years' sleep
by the kiss of her lover prince. The prince who awoke the slumbering
heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name.

Not altogether fanciful is the conceit. Barren, black, and desolate,
the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of
field and forest could--does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as
eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre
pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the
blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human
habitation in sight some heath boer's ling-thatched hut, flanked by
rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the
pitiless west wind. On the barrows where the vikings sleep their
long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between steep banks
a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to escape from the
universal blight. Over it all broods the silence of the desert,
drowsy with the hum of many bees winging their swift way to the
secret feeding-places they know of, where mayflower and anemone hide
under the heather, witness that forests grew here in the long ago.
In midsummer, when the purple is on the broom, a strange pageant
moves on the dim horizon, a shifting mirage of sea and shore,
forest, lake, and islands lying high, with ships and castles and
spires of distant churches--the witchery of the heath that speaks in
the tales and superstitions of its simple people. High in the blue
soars the lark, singing its song of home and hope to its nesting
mate. This is the heath which, denying to the hardest toil all but
the barest living, has given of its poetry to the Danish tongue some
of its sweetest songs.

But in this busy world day-dreams must make way for the things that
make the day count, castles in the air to homes upon the soil. The
heath had known such in the dim past. It had not always been a
desert. The numberless cairns that lie scattered over it, sometimes
strung out for miles as if marking the highways of the ancients,
which they doubtless do, sometimes grouped where their villages
stood, bear witness to it. Great battles account for their share,
and some of them were fought in historic times. On Grathe Heath the
young King Valdemar overcame his treacherous rival Svend. Alone and
hunted, the beaten man sought refuge, Saxo tells us, behind a stump,
where he was found and slain by one of the King