Page:Stories from Hans Andersen with illustrations by Edmund Dulac.djvu/258

THE WIND'S TALE into their ears to try and deaden the cries, which after all were not worth listening to.

'So they took up their abode in the plastered cottage on Smidstrup Heath, and I tore off over marshes and meadows, through naked hedges and bare woods, to the open seas and other lands. Whew! whew! away, away! and that for many years.'

What happened to Waldemar Daa? What happened to his daughters? This is what the wind relates.

'The last of them I saw, yes, for the last time, was Anna Dorothea, the pale hyacinth. She was old and bent now; it was half a century later. She lived the longest, she had gone through everything.

'Across the heath, near the town of Viborg, stood the Dean's new, handsome mansion, built of red stone with toothed gables. The smoke curled thickly out of the chimneys. The gentle lady and her fair daughters sat in the bay window looking into the garden at the drooping thorns and out to the brown heath beyond. What were they looking at there? They were looking at a stork's nest on a tumble-down cottage; the roof was covered, as far as there was any roof to cover, with moss and house-leek; but the stork's nest made the best covering. It was the only part to which anything was done, for the stork kept it in repair.

'This house was only fit to be looked at, not to be touched. I had to mind what I was about,' said the wind. 'The cottage 244