vemonth to pay the tax-gatherer, they had
done well. Last year the single county of Hammerum, of which more
below, sold machine-made underwear to the value of over a million
and a half kroner. The sheep are there, but no longer lean; no more
the ling-thatched hut, but prosperous farms backed by thrifty
groves, with hollyhock and marigold in the dooryards, heaps of gray
marl in the fields, tiny rivulets of water singing the doom of the
heath in the sand; for where it comes the heather moves out. A
resolute, thrifty peasantry looks hopefully forward. Not all of the
heath is conquered yet. Roughly speaking, thirty-three hundred
square miles of heath confronted Dalgas in 1866. Just about a
thousand remain for those who come after to wrestle with; but
already voices are raised pleading that some of it be preserved
untouched for its natural beauty, while yet it is time.

Meanwhile the plow goes over fresh acres every year--once, twice,
then a deeper plowing, this time to break the stony crust, and the
heath is ready for its human mission. From the Society's nurseries
that are scattered through the country come thousands of tiny
trees, and are set out in the furrows, two of the spruce for each
dwarf pine till the nurse has done her work. Then she is turned into
charcoal, into tar, and a score of other things of use. The men who
do the planting in summer find chopping to do in winter in the older
plantations, at good wages. Money is flowing into the moor in the
wake of the water and the marl. Roads are being made, and every day
the mail-carrier comes. In the olden time a stranger straying into
the heath often brought the first news of the world without for
weeks together. Game is coming, too,--roebuck and deer,--in the
young forests. The climate itself is changing; more rain falls in
midsummer, when it is needed. The sand-blast has been checked, the
power of the west wind broken. The shrivelled soil once more takes
up and holds the rains, and the streams will deepen, fish leap in
them as of yore. Groves of beech and oak are springing up in the
shelter of their hardier evergreen kin. "Make the land furry,"
Dalgas said, with prophetic eye beholding great forests taking the
place of sand and heather, and in his lifetime the change was
wrought that is transforming the barren moor into the home-land of
a prosperous people.

To the most unlikely of places, through the very prison doors, his
gospel of hope has made its way. For the