Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/88

 of the Parsonage garden, and beyond this were a couple of the big Veilby plastered farms and the walled-in pond. Then he could follow the wide highway for a couple of miles, winding over the sloping fields, till, far away in the south, it dropped down between the three big, bare earthmounds behind which Skibberup hid itself so cosily that not a chimney pot was to be seen above the crests of the hills. Farther off, there was a glimpse of the lonely church, and along the whole of the eastern horizon the blue shallows of the fiord appeared, and the green and white shores of the opposite coast.

Emanuel had stood here every day, gazing out, and he already knew every house, tree and hill in the landscape. His eyes had dreamily followed—now the peasants, as with their ploughing teams they wandered one day in sleet and another in sunshine over the wet fields; now the boats of the Fiord fishermen cruising between the coasts, with their white or brown sails; now the hurrying vehicles of Skibberup as they rolled home from the town along the winding highroad, becoming smaller and smaller before his eyes at every turn, until like little mice they crept behind the three mole-hills in the distance. In the evening, when the last gleams of the sun had disappeared in the south-west, he saw the lights appearing one by one in the cottages, like stars in the sky.

Then in his loneliness he had put himself in imagination into the easily contented and toil-