Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/113

 At last he climbed a hill to the south, whence he again had a wide view of the country. Skibberup lay straight below him with its three bare earth mounds.

He always felt specially attracted by the sight of this village, which, with its clusters of small cottages, its spreading pond, and its many windings and turnings, seemed to him much more idyllic than Veilby, with its brand-new, formal peasant farms which he had before him daily. He was also doubly saddened when he reflected that it was in this very village that the anti-clerical movement had its head-quarters; and when his eye suddenly fell on a low, dilapidated building in the middle of the village, over the thatched roof of which a "Dannebrog's" flag waved, a pang shot through his heart. He guessed that it was the "Meeting House" from which Hansen the weaver carried on his angry battle against the church.

At one end of the village, lying by itself, was a little place with yellow washed outbuildings, which Emanuel at once recognised as the farm to which he had been fetched in the sledge on that winter evening to administer the Holy Communion to the owner's suffering daughter. He had often thought since of that evening and the strangers among whom he had come in such a strange way to inaugurate his priestly