248 WALDEMAR DAA AND HIS DAUGHTERS.

“They were rich people, noble people, born in affluence, nur-
tured in affluence. :

“ Hush—sh! roaralong !” sang the Wind; then he continued :

“I did not see here, as in other great noble houses, the high-
born lady sitting among her women in the great hall turning the
spinning-wheel: here she swept the sounding chords of the
cithern, and sang to the sound, but not always the old Danish
melodies, but songs of a strange land. It was ‘live and let live’
here : stranger guests came from far and near, the music sounded,
the goblets clashed, and I was not able to drown the noise,” said
the Wind. “ Ostentation, and haughtiness, and splendour, and
display, and rule were there, but the fear of the Lord was not
there.

“ And it was just on the evening of the first day of May,” the
Wind continued. “ I came from the west, and had seen how the
ships were being crushed by the waves, with all on board, and
flung on the west coast of Jutland. I had hurried across the
heath, and over Jutland’s wood-girt eastern coast, and over the
Island of Fiinen; and now I drove over the Great Belt, groaning
and sighing. :

“Then I lay down to rest on the shore of Seeland, in the neigh-
bourhood of the great house of Borreby, where the forest, the
splendid oak forest, still rose. :

“The young men-servants of the neighbourhood were collect-
ing branches and brushwood under the oak trees ; the largest and
driest they could find they carried into the village, and piled them
up in a heap, and set them on fire ; the men and maids danced,
singing in a circle round the blazing pile.

“T lay quite quiet,” continued the Wind; “but I silently
touched a branch, which had been brought by the handsomest
of the men servants, and the wood blazed up brightly, blazed up
higher than all the rest ; and now he was the chosen one, and
bore the name of Street-goat, and might choose his Street-lamp
first from among the maids; and there was mirth and rejoicing,
greater than I had ever heard before in the halls of the rich baro-
nial mansion. :

“And the noble lady drove towards the baronial mansion, with
her three daughters, in a gilded carriage drawn by six horses.
The daughters were young and fair—three charming blossoms,
rose, lily, and pale hyacinth. The mother wasa proud tulip, and
never acknowledged the salutation of one of the men or maids
who paused in their spot to do her honour: the gracious lady
seemed a flower that was rather stiff in the stalk.

“ Rose, lily, and pale hyacinth ; yes, I saw them all three!
Whose lambkins will they one day become? thought 1; their
Street-goat will be a gallant knight, perhaps a prince. Huh—sh!
hurry along ! hurry along !

“Yes, the carriage rolled on with them, and the peasant people