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“Look at the alchymic glass! It glows in the crucible, red-hot, and pure and heavy! He lifted it with a trembling hand, and cried with a trembling voice, ‘Gold! gold!’

“He was quite dizzy–I could have blown him down,” said the Wind; “but I only fanned the glowing coals, and accompanied him through the door to where his daughters sat shivering. His coat was powdered with ashes, and there were ashes in his beard and in his tangled hair. He stood straight up, and held his costly treasure on high, in the brittle glass. ‘Found, found!–Gold, gold!’ he shouted, and again held aloft the glass to let it flash in the sunshine; but his hand trembled, and the alchymic glass fell clattering to the ground, and broke into a thousand pieces; and the last bubble of his happiness had burst! Hu-uh-ush! rushing away!–and I rushed away from the gold-maker’s house.

“Late in autumn, when the days are short, and the mist comes and strews cold drops upon the berries and leafless branches, I came back in fresh spirits, rushed through the air, swept the sky clear, and snapped the dry twigs–which is certainly no great labour, but yet it must be done. Then there was another kind of sweeping clean at Waldemar Daa’s, in the mansion of Borreby. His enemy, Owe Rainel, of Basnaes, was there with the mortgage of the house and everything it contained in his pocket. I drummed against the broken window-panes, beat against the old rotten doors, and whistled through cracks and rifts–huh-sh! Mr. Owe Rainel did not like staying there. Ida and Anna Dorothea wept bitterly; Joanna stood pale and proud, and bit her thumb till it bled–but what could that avail? Owe Rainel offered to allow Waldemar Daa to remain in the mansion till the end of his life, but no thanks were given him for his offer. I listened to hear what occurred. I saw the ruined gentleman lift his head and throw it back prouder than ever, and I rushed against the house and the old lime trees with such force, that one of the thickest branches broke, one that was not decayed; and the branch remained lying at the entrance as a broom when any one wanted to sweep the place out: and a grand sweeping out there was–I thought it would be so.

“It was hard on that day to preserve one’s composure; but their will was as hard as their fortune.

“There was nothing they could call their own except the clothes they wore: yes, there was one thing more–the alchymist’s glass, a new one that had lately been bought, and filled with what had been gathered up from the ground of the treasure which promised so much but never kept its promise. Waldemar Daa hid the glass in his bosom, and taking his stick in his hand, the once rich gentleman passed with his daughters out of the house of Borreby. I blew cold upon his heated cheeks, I stroked his grey beard and his long white hair, and I sang as well as I could,–‘Huh-sh! gone away! gone away!’ And that was the end of the wealth and splendour.

“Ida walked on one side of the old man, and Anna Dorothea on the other. Joanna turned round at the entrance–why? Fortune would not turn because she did so. She looked at the old walls of what had once been the castle of Marsk Stig, and perhaps she thought of his daughters:

‘The eldest gave the youngest her hand.
And forth they went to the far-off land.’

Was she thinking of this old song? Here were three of them, and their father was with them too. They walked along the road on which they had once driven in their splendid carriage–they walked forth as beggars, with their father, and wandered out into the open field, and into a mud hut, which they rented for a dollar and a half a year–into their new house with the empty rooms and empty vessels. Crows and magpies fluttered above them, and cried, as if in contempt, ‘Craw! craw! out of the nest! craw! craw!’ as they had done in the wood at Borreby when the trees were felled.