One day a box of rare flower bulbs drifted ashore after a shipwreck. Some were taken out and made into soup, with the idea that they might be good to eat; others were just left to rot in the sand and never fulfilled their destiny, never unfolded the glorious beauty of form and color that lay hidden within them. Would such be the case with Jörgen? Life was soon over for the flower bulbs, but he still had many years to live and struggle.
It never occurred either to him or his foster parents that their lives were lonely and monotonous; days went by, and there was plenty to do and hear and see. The ocean itself was a great book of lessons; every day it seemed to turn over a new page, storm or calm. A shipwreck was an exciting event. The visit to the church was a festive event. Twice a year the fisherman's hut had a visitor, and a very welcome one. This was the eel seller from Fjaltring, up near Bovbjerg, who was the brother of Jörgen's foster mother. He came with a red wagon full of eels; it was shut up like a box, and had blue and white tulips painted on it. It was drawn by two black oxen, and Jörgen was permitted to drive them.
The eel man had a good head on him. He was a jolly guest; he always brought a little keg of schnapps, and everyone had a drink of it, sometimes from a coffee cup, if there were not enough glasses. Even Jörgen, little as he was, had a thimbleful; that was so he could digest the fat eels, said the eel man. Then he would tell them his old story, and whenever he heard people laugh at it, he always repeated it at once, to the very same people, as all talkative folks do. And as Jörgen used phrases from this story throughout his youth and later in life, we had better listen to it.
"The eels played out in the river, and Mother Eel said to her daughters, when they had begged for permission to explore a little way up the stream, 'Don't go too far! The wicked man with his spear will come and catch you all!' But they did go too far, and of the eight of them only three returned to their mother and wailed out their story, 'We had only gone a little distance beyond the door when the ugly man with the spear came and stabbed our five sisters to death!'
" 'They'll come back,' said the eel mother.
" 'No,' said the daughters. 'For he skinned them and cut them into bits and fried them.'
" 'They'll surely come back,' said the eel mother.
" 'Yes, but he ate them!'
" 'Still they'll come back,' said the eel mother.
" 'But he drank schnapps afterwards!' said the daughters.
" 'Oh, my! Oh my!' howled the eel mother. 'Then they'll never return! For schnapps drowns eels!'
"And for that very reason people should always take a little schnapps after eating them," finished the eel spearer.
And this story ran like a thread of gold tinsel - his most humorous recollection - through the web of Jörgen's life. He too wanted to go past the threshold, "a little way up the river," or rather out into the wide world in a ship; but his foster mother objected, just as Mother Eel had objected, "There are so many wicked men with spears." He longed to go a little past the sand dunes into the heath. And at last he did for four pleasant days, the brightest of his whole childhood; and he saw all of Jutland's happy, homelike beauty and sunshine. He went to a party; it was a funeral party.
A wealthy relative of the fisherman had died; his farm was far inland, "to the east, a bit northerly," as the saying goes. Jörgen's foster parents had to go, and they took him with them. They passed from the dunes over heath and swamp to the green pastures where the Skjaerum River hollows out its bed - that brook full of eels, where lived Mother Eel and her daughters whom the wicked people speared and cut in pieces. And hadn't men often acted just as cruelly toward their fellow men? The good knight, Sir Bugge, whose name lives in the old song, was murdered by wicked men; and, though he himself was called "good," he is said to have come very close to slaying the architect who built his castle, with its tower and thick walls, on the slope where the brook Skjaerum falls into the Nissum Fiord, just where Jörgen now stood with his foster parents. The ramparts and the red crumbling fragments of the walls could still be seen.