They laid her in the fisherman's humble bed; there was no linen to wrap her in, only a woolen blanket; but at least this was warm and comfortable. She breathed, but she was in a high fever. She had no idea where she was or what had happened; perhaps this was just as well, for all that was dear to her now lay at the bottom of the ocean; they had met the same fate as those sung of in the ballad about "The King of England's Son":
A sorrowful sight it was to all;
The ship was broken into pieces small!
Many bits of the wreck were driven ashore, but the lady alone survived of all the voyagers. Still the wind howled and wailed along the coast.
For a few minutes she seemed to rest, but then came screams of pain and fear. Her beautiful eyes opened, and she spoke a few words, but no one could understand her. At last, after hours of suffering and struggles, there nestled in her arms a tiny, newborn child.
That child was to have rested under silken curtains in a beautiful home, was to have been welcomed to a life full of this world's riches; but our Lord had willed that he should be born in this humble hut; and not so much as one kiss was he to receive from the lips of his mother!
The fisherman's wife placed the baby against its mother's heart, a heart that beat no longer - she was dead. And the child who was to have been brought up in luxury and pleasure had been hurled headlong into life, tossed by the sea among the sand dunes, there to experience the lot of a poor man, and weary and dark days.
And always the old song comes to our mind:
On the King's son's cheek there was a tear
"Pray, Christ, I reach Bovbjerg; then I shan't fear!
If only I had come to Herr Bugge's Strand;
Then no knight nor squire of any band
Would have dared against me lift a hand."
The ship had been wrecked a little to the south of the Nissum Fiord, on the very shore that Herr Bugge had once called his own. The hard, cruel times of the ballad, when the dwellers on the western coast treated castaways so inhumanly, had long passed. The shipwrecked were now treated with love and kindness, as they are in our own time. The dying mother and the unfortunate child would have been treated with the utmost care and tenderness, wherever the storm had driven them; but nowhere could they have received more sincere kindness than in the hut of that poor fisherwoman who, only yesterday, had stood with a sorrowful heart beside the grave of her child who, if God had allowed him to live, would today have completed his fifth year.
No one knew the identity of the dead woman or from where she had come. The broken fragments of the wrecked ship brought no explanation.
No letter or news of the daughter and son-in-law was ever received at the rich merchant's house in Spain. They could not have reached their destination, considering the violent storms that had raged for the last few weeks. For months they waited, before admitting to themselves the sad truth: "All lost! All perished!"
But in the hut of the fisherman near the sand dunes of Hunsby there was now a tiny infant.
Where God provides food for two there is sure to be enough for a third; and near the sea there is always at least a plate of fish for hungry mouths. They christened the little one Jörgen.
"Surely he must be a Jewish child," people said; "his skin is so dark." "He may just as easily be Italian or Spanish," said the clergyman. To the fisherman's wife all three races seemed very much the same, but it was a great comfort to her to know that at least the child was really a baptized Christian.
The boy thrived, his noble blood sustaining warmth and gaining strength from the poor fare, as he grew in that humble hut; the Danish language, as spoken in West Jutland, became his own language. The pomegranate seed from Spain had become a sea-grass plant on Jutland's western coast, and in this home, so foreign to his inheritance, he took root for the rest of his life. He was to experience hunger and cold, a poor man's wants and troubles, but also he was to know a poor man's pleasures.
For everyone childhood has its high lights, and the memories of these sparkle throughout one's whole life. What a full share of play and pleasure he had! All the miles of shore were strewn with playthings for him; it was a mosaic of pebbles, red as coral, yellow as amber, or white and round as birds' eggs, all bright with colors, and smooth and polished by the sea. Even the dried-out skeleton of a fish, the water plants, dried by the wind, or the shiny, white seaweed, long and narrow like strings fluttering among the rocks, were a delight to eye and heart. The boy was a wide-awake child, full of ability. How he could remember all the old stories or songs he had ever heard! And how clever he was with his fingers! He could make sailing ships out of stones and shells or draw pictures that were quite an ornament to the room. He could "carve his thoughts out of a stick," as his foster mother said, when he was still only a little boy, and his voice was so sweet and caught the strain of a melody so quickly! That little heart was attuned to many fine harmonies which might have rung throughout the world if he had been placed in a less narrow home than the fisherman's hut near the North Sea.