last dozen years the life
prisoners in the Horsens penitentiary have been employed in breaking
and reforesting the heath, and their keepers report that the effect
upon them of the hard work in the open has been to notably cheer and
brighten them. The discipline has been excellent. There have been
few attempts at escape, and they have come to nothing through the
vigilance of the other prisoners.

While the population in the rest of Denmark is about stationary, in
west Jutland it grows apace. The case of Skaphus farm in the parish
of Sunds shows how this happens. Prior to 1870 this farm of three
thousand acres was rated the "biggest and poorest" in Denmark. Last
year it had dwindled to three hundred and fifty acres, but upon its
old land thirty-three homesteads had risen that kept between them
sixty-two horses and two hundred and fifty-two cows, beside the
sheep, and the manor farm was worth twice as much as before. The
town of Herning, sometimes called "the Star of the Heath," is the
seat of Hammerum county, once the baldest and most miserable on the
Danish mainland. In 1841 twenty-one persons lived in Herning. To-day
there are more than six thousand in a town with handsome buildings,
gas, electric lighting, and paved streets. The heath is half a dozen
miles away. And this is not the result of any special or forced
industry, but the natural, healthy growth of a centre for an army of
industrious men and women winning back the land of their fathers by
patient toil. All through the landscape one sees from the train the
black giving way to the green. Churches rear their white gables;
bells that have been silent since the Black Death stalked through
the land once more call the people to worship on the old sites. More
churches were built in the reign of "the good King Christian," who
has just been gathered to his fathers, than in all the centuries
since the day of the Valdemars.

Bog cultivation is the Heath Society's youngest child. The heath is
full of peat-bogs that only need the sand, so plentiful on the
uplands, to make their soil as good as the best, the muck of the bog
being all plant food, and they have a surplus of water to give in
exchange. With hope the keynote of it all, the State has taken up
the herculean task of keeping down the moving sands of the North Sea
coast. All along it is a range of dunes that in the fierce storms of
that region may change shape and place in a single night. The "sand
flight" at time