“In the winter time, when the fields were covered with snow, drift-ice
filled the Belt, and I screwed it up to the shore,” said the wind. “Then came
ravens and crows, all as black as they could be, in large flocks. They
perched themselves upon the deserted, dead, lonely ship, that lay high up on
the beach; and they cried and lamented, with their hoarse voices, about the
wood that was gone, the many precious birds' nests that were laid waste, the
old ones rendered homeless, the little ones rendered homeless; and all for
the sake of a great lumbering thing, a gigantic vessel, that never was to float
upon the deep.
“I whirled the snow in the snow storms, and raised the snow-drifts. The
snow lay like a sea high around the vessel. I let it hear my voice, and know
what a tempest can say. I knew if I exerted myself it would get some of the
knowledge other ships have.
“And winter passed-winter and summer; they come and go as I come and
go; the snow melts, the apple blossom blooms, the leaves fall-all is change,
change, and with mankind among the rest.
“But the daughters were still young-little Idé a rose, beautiful to look at,
as the shipbuilder had seen her. Often did I play with her long brown hair,
when, under the apple tree in the garden, she was standing lost in thought,
and did not observe that I was showering down the blossoms upon her head.
Then she would start, and gaze at the red sun, and the golden clouds around
it, through the space among the dark foliage of the trees.
“Her sister Johanné resembled a lily-fair, slender, and erect; and, like her
mother, she was stately and haughty. It was a great pleasure to her to
wander up and down the grand saloon where hung the portraits of her
ancestors. The high-born dames were painted in silks and velvets, with little
hats looped up with pearls on their braided locks-they were beautiful ladies.
Their lords were depicted in steel armour, or in costly mantles trimmed with
squirrels' fur, and wearing blue ruffs; the sword was buckled round the
thigh, and not round the loins. Johanné's own portrait would hang at some
future day on that wall, and what would her noble husband be like? Yes, she
