The heath stretched far and wide around themlike a beautiful carpet. The heather was in blossom, and thejuniper-bushes and fresh oak saplings rose like bouquets from theearth. An inviting place for a frolic, if it had not been for thenumber of poisonous adders of which the travellers spoke; they alsomentioned that the place had formerly been infested with wolves, andthat the district was still called Wolfsborg for this reason. Theold man who was driving the oxen told them that in the lifetime of hisfather the horses had many a hard battle with the wild beasts thatwere now exterminated. One morning, when he himself had gone out tobring in the horses, he found one of them standing with its forefeeton a wolf it had killed, but the savage animal had torn andlacerated the brave horse's legs.
  The journey over the heath and the deep sand was only tooquickly at an end. They stopped before the house of mourning, wherethey found plenty of guests within and without. Waggon after waggonstood side by side, while the horses and oxen had been turned out tograze on the scanty pasture. Great sand-hills like those at home bythe North Sea rose behind the house and extended far and wide. How hadthey come here, so many miles inland? They were as large and high asthose on the coast, and the wind had carried them there; there wasalso a legend attached to them.
  Psalms were sung, and a few of the old people shed tears; withthis exception, the guests were cheerful enough, it seemed toJurgen, and there was plenty to eat and drink. There were eels ofthe fattest, requiring brandy to bury them, as the eel-breeder said;and certainly they did not forget to carry out his maxim here.
  Jurgen went in and out the house; and on the third day he feltas much at home as he did in the fisherman's cottage among thesand-hills, where he had passed his early days. Here on the heath wereriches unknown to him until now; for flowers, blackberries, andbilberries were to be found in profusion, so large and sweet that whenthey were crushed beneath the tread of passers-by the heather wasstained with their red juice. Here was a barrow and yonder another.Then columns of smoke rose into the still air; it was a heath fire,they told him- how brightly it blazed in the dark evening!
  The fourth day came, and the funeral festivities were at an end;they were to go back from the land-dunes to the sand-dunes.
  "Ours are better," said the old fisherman, Jurgen's foster-father;"these have no strength."
  And they spoke of the way in which the sand-dunes had come inland,and it seemed very easy to understand. This is how they explained it:
  A dead body had been found on the coast, and the peasants buriedit in the churchyard. From that time the sand began to fly about andthe sea broke in with violence. A wise man in the district advisedthem to open the grave and see if the buried man was not lying suckinghis thumb, for if so he must be a sailor, and the sea would not restuntil it had got him back. The grave was opened, and he really wasfound with his thumb in his mouth. So they laid him upon a cart, andharnessed two oxen to it; and the oxen ran off with the sailor overheath and moor to the ocean, as if they had been stung by an adder.Then the sand ceased to fly inland, but the hills that had beenpiled up still remained.
  All this Jurgen listened to and treasured up in his memory ofthe happiest days of his childhood- the days of the burial feast.
  How delightful it was to see fresh places and to mix withstrangers!