place in this humble dwelling, and that it should not even know the happiness of a mother’s kiss; for when the fisherman’s wife laid the child upon the mother’s bosom, it rested on a heart that beat no more—the Spanish lady was dead. The child which should have been nursed amid wealth and luxury, was cast alone upon the world, washed as it were by the sea among the sand-hills to partake of the fate and hardships of the poor. And here again, we are reminded of the old song about the king’s son, in which mention is made of the customs prevalent at that time, when the inhabitants of the sea coasts plundered those who were wrecked and cast ashore. These hard and inhuman customs had disappeared from the shores of Jutland; the inhabitants had ceased from treating the shipwrecked with cruelty, and the ship, which had struck on a rock some little distance south of Nissum Bay, had foundered at the spot on which it struck. Affectionate sympathy existed then, as it does now, in many a bright example. The dying mother and the unfortunate child would have found succour and help wherever they had been cast by the winds; but nowhere would it have been more earnest than in the hut of the poor fisherman’s wife. Only yesterday she had stood with a heavy heart beside the grave in which lay her child, who would have been five years old that day, had God permitted it to live. No one knew who the dead stranger was, nor could any one form the least conjecture.
The pieces of the wreck gave no clue to the matter. For a long time no tidings of the daughter or son-in-law reached the rich house of the Spanish merchant. They had evidently not reached their destination, and violent storms had been raging for many weeks. At last the news officially arrived—“Foundered at sea, and all lost.” But in the sand-hills, near Hunsby, in the fisherman’s hut, there still lived a little scion of that rich Spanish family. “Where heaven sends food for two, a third can manage to find a meal;” and in the depths of the sea is many a dish of fish for those who are hungry. And they called the boy Jurgen.
“It is certainly a Jewish child,” said some; “it has such a dark complexion.”
“For the same reason, it might be Italian or Spanish,” observed the clergyman.
But to the fisherman’s wife these nations seemed all one, and she consoled herself with the thought that the child had been baptized a Christian. The boy throve; the noble bood in his veins was warm, and he became strong on the homely fare. He grew apace in the lowly hut, and the Danish dialect, spoken by the West Jutes, became his language. The strip of pomegranate, transplanted from Spanish soil, became a hardy plant on the coast of West Jutland. So may circumstances change the future of a man’s life.
To this home he clung with a deep-rooted attachment that became part of his being. He was destined to experience cold and hunger, and to share the misfortunes and hardships that surround the poor; but he also tasted of their joys. Childhood has sunny spots for all conditions, which linger on the memory in after-life with radiant brightness. The boy had many sources of
