which he would himself have had no objection,
I should convey a wrong impression, and yet, in
spite of his ancient lineage and the length of
time for which his estate had belonged to the
Dyrings, he was by no means what a grand
seigneur is popularly supposed to be. A man
more simple, more free from any haughtiness or
pretension, I never saw; and yet he was proud,
in a quiet way quite his own. With a fair
estate—the gift, as tradition and some very
crabbed old charters, in Norse and dog Latin,
averred, of King Harald Blue Tooth—the baron
was yet obliged to pay close attention to every
detail of his property, to keep clear of debt; and,
though a good farmer, and rich in stock and
farm produce, he had been quite correct when he
described himself as poor in money.

The general thrift, plenty, and industry,
which reigned in Denmark, seemed to make it
difficult for wealth to be amassed by agriculture.
There was the soil, and there were the hands to
till it, but markets were few, and prices were
low. To get a living out of the land was
easy. To make money, in a country where
beef ranged from twopence a pound, and where
fine two-year-old colts, like those that galloped
merrily about the pastures of Rothesgaard,
could be bought for less than five pounds,
was the reverse of easy. Exportation was
difficult, and full of risks and expenses.
The corn laws and the lack of steam-ships all
but closed the English market against Danish
grain and Danish bullocks. Sweden took a
little Danish wheat, and North Germany and
Holland purchased to some extent in the marts
of Denmark; but the trade was in the hands of
middlemen, who kept the profits to themselves.
And here was the key to what had puzzled me
in Baron Dyring's character. He was proud,
if not of being a noble, at least of being a Danish,
freeman of the old race, and of a family often
mentioned in Danish annals, and never but with
honour. His forefathers had been personages
of much greater relative importance in the realm
than he. The Dyrings had been the
counsellors and companions of kings, and had filled
high posts in their country's service. And it
vexed the baron that he and his two boys
should be compelled by narrow circumstances to
remain at home, keeping close watch over barn
and hayfield, while a new aristocracy, of German
blood for the most part, absorbed the patronage
of the kingdom.

It was when my long visit at the castle drew,
perforce, to a close, my sprain being cured, and
my leave of absence from the engineering works
expired, that a singular incident occurred, trivial
in itself, but which led to important results.
Against the wall of my room, over the mantelpiece,
there stood a large picture, the portrait of
a defunct Dyring in trunk hose and cuirass: a
poor daub, and so dingy and smoked as to be
hardly distinguishable. For this work of art I
cared little, but above it were fixed a noble
pair of antlers—of the elk, long extinct in
Denmark—and I one day endeavoured, with the aid
of a chair, to reach down these huge horns for
closer inspection. In doing this, I happened to
give a smart jerk to the corner of the picture;
the rotten wood and rusty nails parted company;
and down tumbled the portrait in the midst of
a cloud of dust and lime powder, leaving visible
a small recess in the wall, in which lay a little
cylinder of lead, whose dull glimmer caught
my eye.

Curiosity to know what this might import
caused me to unrol the thin folds of the pliant
metal, and to draw forth a slip of neatly folded
parchment or vellum. This was about twelve
inches by six, was emblazoned with the Dyring
arms beautifully executed in vermilion, the
deer's heads looking as fresh as if it were but
yesterday that the brush had touched them, and
beneath the arms was written, in a crabbed but
very distinct hand, a distich in Danish, which I
translate thus:

    When a Dyring shall drain the Agger fiord's lands,
    Red gold shall not lack in a Dyring's hands.

This was sad doggrel, and unintelligible to
me, though I knew the Agger fiord, that
singular arm of the sea which divided the Dyring
property into two unequal portions, perfectly
well. It was one of those creeks, or salt lakes,
common on the coasts of Denmark, and its
only remarkable feature was the peculiar
narrowness of the channel by which it communicated
with the North Sea. I was unprepared,
however, for the agitation which the baron
evinced when I put the parchment into his
hands, and told him where and how I had found it.

"Yes," he cried, "that couplet must have
been written by my forefather, Admiral Hans
Dyring, son of the lay Prior of Vokenstrue,
whose portrait, most unecclesiastical in costume,
hangs in your chamber. It was in his time that
the Agger fiord was formed, by the irruption
of the sea through a neglected dyke which some
say was pierced, out of spite, by a malicious
boor who had been scourged for theft. At any
rate, the man was hanged. But the change
was a sad one for us Dyrings; we lost a fair
manor-house, nine farms, and a village. They
say you can still see the church tower, on a still
day in summer, and we have been a decayed
family ever since. There was talk of a lost
treasure in money, too—idle talk, perhaps——"

And here the baron broke off, and became
moody and silent. Very soon after this, I went
back to Copenhagen.

It was autumn; the moors were brown, the
fields swept bare of corn, and the gales beginning,
as I sat in my lonely room at the Hôtel
de l'Europe, trying hard to fix my attention on
a column of figures in my account-book. Do
what I would, my thoughts wandered off
to Rothesgaard and Christina Dyring. Now
that I was absent from Christina, I knew for
the first time how dearly I loved her. And that
she did not dislike me, was certain enough. I
remembered what a sad sad look I had noticed
in her dear blue eyes when I announced one
morning after post time, that my employers were
impatient for my return to duty. I remembered,