"It was a sad day, a cruel hour, a heavy trial to sustain; but the heart was hard--the neck was stiff.
"They possessed nothing but the clothes they had on. Yes, they had a newly-bought alchemist's glass, which was filled with what had been wasted on the floor: it had been scraped up, the treasure promised, but not yielded. Waldemar Daae concealed this near his breast, took his stick in his hand, and the once wealthy man went, with his three daughters, away from Borreby Castle. I blew coldly on his wan cheeks, and ruffled his grey beard and his long white hair. I sang around them, 'Wheu-gh--wheu-gh!'
"Idé and Anna Dorthea walked on each side of their father; Johanné turned round at the gate. Why did she do so? Fortune would not turn. She gazed at the red stones of the wall, the stones from Marshal Stig's castle, and she thought of his daughters:--
'The eldest took the younger's hand, And out in the wide world they went.'
She thought upon that song. Here there were three, and their father was with them. They passed as beggars over the same road where they had so often driven in their splendid carriage to SMIDSTRUP MARK, to a house with mud floors that was let for ten marks a year--their new manor-house, with bare walls and empty closets. The crows and the jackdaws flew after them, and cried, as if in derision, 'From the nest--from the nest! away--away!' as the birds had screeched at Borreby Wood when the trees were cut down.
"And thus they entered the humble house at Smidstrup Mark, and I wandered away over moors and meadows, through naked hedges and leafless woods, to the open sea--to other lands. Wheugh--wheugh! On--on--on!"
What became of Waldemar Daae? What became of his daughters? The wind will tell.
"The last of them I saw was Anna Dorthea, the pale hyacinth. She had become old and decrepit: that was about fifty years after she had left the castle. She lived the longest--she saw them all out."
"Yonder, on the heath, near the town of Viborg, stood the dean's handsome house, built of red granite. The smoke rolled plentifully from its chimneys. The gentle lady and her beautiful daughters sat on the balcony, and looked over their pretty garden on the brown heath. At what were they gazing? They were looking at the storks' nests, on a castle that was almost in ruins. The roof, where there was any roof, was covered with moss and houseleeks; but the best part of it sustained the storks' nests--that was the only portion which was in tolerable repair.