Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/523

 the fisherman’s hut on the sand-hills, where he had passed his early days. Here, on the heath, were riches unknown to him before; for flowers and blackberries and wild strawberries, so large and sweet, were to be found in such profusion, that sometimes they were crushed beneath the step of the passers by and the heath would be coloured with their red juice. Here was a Hun’s grave, yonder was another. Then columns of smoke rose in the still air, which they told him came from a heath-fire; how brightly it blazed in the dark evening! The fourth day arrived, on which the funeral festivities were to close, and they were to go back from the land sand-hills to the sand-hills by the sea.

“Ours are the right ones,” said the old fisherman, Jurgen’s foster-father; “these have no strength.”

And on the way home they talked of the origin of these inland sand-hills, and related how they came there. Certainly it was a very clever way to account for them. This is the explanation they gave:—

“A corpse had been found on the coast, which the peasants buried in the churchyard. From that moment the sand began to fly about, and the sea broke in with violence. A wise man in the parish advised them to open the grave, and see if the buried man was not lying sucking his thumb; for if so, he must be a sailor, and the sea would not rest until it had got him back. So they opened the grave, and really found him with his thumb in his mouth. Then they laid him on a cart, and harnessed two oxen to it, and the oxen ran off with the cart, as if they had been stung by an adder, and carried the seaman over heath and moorland to the ocean. Then the sand ceased to fly inland; but the hills still remained.”

All this Jurgen treasured up in his memory of the happiest days of his childhood—the days of the burial feast. How delightful it must be to travel into strange places, and see strange people! And before he had reached his fourteenth year, he had to travel into distant lands. While still a child, he went out in a ship as a sailor-boy; and his experiences of the world were, bad weather, raging seas, malicious and hard-hearted men. There where cold nights and bad living; but the hardest to endure were blows. He felt his noble Spanish blood boil within him, and angry words would rise to his lips; but he gulped them down; it was better, although he compared his feelings to those of the eel when it is flayed, cut up, and put into the frying-pan.

“I shall get over it,” said a voice within him.

At one time he saw the Spanish coast, the native land of his parents, and even visited the town in which they had lived in happiness and prosperity; but he knew nothing of his origin or his relations, and they knew just as little about him. The poor sailor-boy was not allowed to land; but on the last day that the ship remained in harbour he managed to get ashore. There were several purchases to be made, and he was sent to bring them on board. Jurgen, in his shabby clothes, which looked as if they had been washed in the ditch and dried in the chimney—he, an inhabitant of the sand-dunes, stood for the first time in a great city. How lofty the houses appeared, and how full the streets were of people, some