The Wind Tells about Valdemar Daae and His Daughters

But he is at peace in the grave now, and you are with him, Ide! Oh, yes, ah, me - I am still here. I am old and poor. Deliver me, kind Christ!'"

Such was the prayer of Anna Dorothea in the miserable mud hut that was allowed to stand only for the sake of the stork.

"The boldest and most resolute of the three sisters I carried off myself," said the Wind. "She cut her clothes like a man's, disguised herself as a poor lad, and went into service as a sailor. She was sparing of speech, cross-looking, but quick at her work, although she couldn't climb the mast. So one night I blew her overboard, before anyone found out she was a woman; and I think that was the right thing to do.

"It was another Easter morning, bright as that morning when Valdemar Daae thought he had found the gold. Among those tumbledown walls beneath the stork's nest I could hear a faint voice chanting a psalm. It was Anna Dorothea's last hymn.

"There was no window with glass, only a hole in the wall; but the sun set itself there like a lump of gold, and as she gazed on its glory her heart broke and her eyes grew fixed. The stork had given her shelter to the day of her death. I sang at her funeral," said the Wind, "as I had sung at her father's; I know where his grave is, and her grave, but no one else knows.

"Now there are new times, changed times. The old highway is lost in the fields, old cemeteries have been made into new roads, and soon the steam engine, with its row of cars, will come to rush over the forgotten graves of unknown ancestors. Whew, whew, whew! On, on!

"And that's the story of Valdemar Daae and his daughters; tell it better, you people, if you think you can," said the Wind, then veered around.

He was gone.