The Wind Tells about Valdemar Daae and His Daughters

On, on! Year after year!"

What happened to Valdemar Daae; what happened to his daughters? The Wind will tell us:

"The last time I went to see them I found only Anna Dorothea, the pale hyacinth. She was then old and bent; it was half a hundred years later. She had lived the longest; she knew the whole story.

"Across the heath, near the town of Viborg, there stood the dean's beautiful new house, with red stones and pointed gables and chimneys always smoking busily. The gentle lady and her beautiful daughters sat on the balcony and looked out over the hanging buckthorn in the garden, out to the brown heath; what did they look at there? They looked at the stork's nest on that dilapidated cottage out there. Houseleek and moss made up most of the roof, if one could call it a roof; the stork's nest covered the greater part of it, and that alone was in good condition, for the stork kept it that way.

"It was a house to look at but not to touch," said the Wind. "I had to pass by it very gently. The hut was left there only for the sake of the stork's nest, for it was a certainly no credit to the heath. The dean didn't want to drive the stork away, so the poor old woman who had lived in the hut had permission to stay there and shelter herself as well as he could. For that she owed thanks to the queer Egyptian bird; or was it because, so many years ago, she had pleaded for the nest of his wild black brother in Borreby Wood? Then she, the poor woman, was a happy child, a delicate, pale hyacinth in the garden of her ancestral home. She remembered it now; Anna Dorothea forgot nothing.

" 'Oh!' she sighed - yes, humans can sigh almost like the Wind himself does among the reeds and rushes. 'Oh! - there were no bells to ring at your funeral, Valdemar Daae! No groups of poor schoolboys sang psalms when Borreby's former master was laid to rest! Oh, but everything comes to an end - misery as well as happiness! It grieved my father worst of all that my sister Ide should become the wife of a peasant, a miserable peasant whom he could have punished by making him ride a hard plank.