A Story from the Sand Dunes

But that never happened to Jörgen.

Among his neighbors on the sand dunes was boy named Morten. He and Jörgen had become good friends, and now they shipped out together on a vessel bound for Norway. Afterwards, they went to Holland together. They had never quarreled, but when one is hot-blooded by nature, one can easily start something; and that Jörgen did one day, over nothing. They were sitting together, behind the cabin door, eating off the same clay dish, when Jörgen, who held his pocket knife in his hand, raised it toward Morten with a threatening gesture, his cheeks deadly pale and his eyes blazing with fury. But Morten only said, "So you're the sort who uses a knife!" At those words Jörgen's hand was lowered; he said no word, but finished his dinner and went off to work Morten and said, "Hit me in the face! I deserve it. There's something in me that's always boiling over."

"Oh, forget it," said Morten, and they became better friends than ever.

When they had returned home to the sand dunes, and people heard the story of this quarrel, they said that Jörgen was like a pot that easily boiled over, but that he was an honest pot, anyway.

"But he's no Jutlander. No one can call him a Jutland pot," was Morten's witty answer.

They were both young and healthy, well built, and with strong limbs. Jörgen was the more active.

Up in Norway the peasants go into the mountains and take their cattle there to find pasture. On the western coast of Jutland, the fisherman build huts among the sand dunes. They build them with planks from shipwrecks, and cover them over with heath and turf; here the fishermen live and sleep during the early spring. Each fisherman has a girl as a servant - she is called his aesepige; she supplies the bait for the hooks, must be ready on the wharf with warm ale to refresh him, and cooks his food when he returns to his hut, tired and hungry. The girls carry the fish up from the boat, cut it up, and, in short, have plenty to do.

Jörgen, his foster father, a few other fishermen, and their girls had a hut together; Morten lived in the next hut.