'It is so, you see. The storks did not return last spring. There was to be trouble!--there was to be trouble! Ha! here is Pastor Madsen. Else, my beloved Else! here is the good Pastor Madsen. And there, too, is Rector Grönlund. Will he observe us? Else, he is deep in his book. Look!' he cried a little shrilly, pointing with a vehemence that startled me into following the indication of his shadowy glimmering hand directed into the darkness over the sea. 'It is Kolding Latin School--nay, it is Rector Grönlund's parsonage garden. Ah, Rector, you remember me? This is the little Else that your good wife thought the prettiest child in Denmark. And this is Pastor Madsen.' He paused, then muttered in Danish, and fell silent. CHAPTER IX. RESCUED. This is a thing easy to recall, but how am I to convey the reality of it? What is there in ink to put before you that wide scene of starlighted gloom, the dusky shapes of swell for ever running noiselessly at us--no sounds save the occasional creaking of the raft as she was swayed--the motionless, black outlines of Helga and myself overhanging the pallid streak of cot--at intervals a low sob breaking from the girl's heart, and the overwhelming sense of present danger, of hopelessness, made blacker yet by the night? And amid all this the crazy babbling of the dying Dane, now in English and now in his native tongue! It was just upon the stroke of one o'clock in the morning when he died. I had brought my watch to the lamp, when he fetched a sort of groaning breath, of a character that caused me to bend my ear to his lips: and I found that he had ceased to breathe. I continued to listen, and then, to make sure, cast the light of the lamp upon him. 'He has gone!' cried Helga. 'God has taken him,' said I. 'Come to this side, and sit by me!' She did as I asked, and I took her hand. I knew by her respiration that she was weeping, and I held my peace till her grief should have had some vent. I then spoke of her father, represented that his ailments must in all probability have carried him off almost as swiftly ashore; that he had died a peaceful death, with his daughter beside him, and his wife and home present in a vision to his gaze; and said that, so far from grieving, we should count it a mercy that he had been called away thus easily, for who was to imagine what lay before us--what sufferings, which must have killed him certainly later on? 'His heart broke when his barque sank,' said she. 'I heard it in his cry.' This might very well have been too.