Jutland - Storms of the Spring

These times were not like ours. It went hard with the poor then; for
then it had not come to pass that peasants found their way up to
lordly mansions, and that from these regiments coachmen and other
servants became judges in the petty courts, which were invested with
the power to condemn, for perhaps a trifling fault, the poor man to be
deprived of all his goods and chattels, or to be flogged at the
whipping-post. A few of these courts still remain; and in Jutland, far
from "the King's Copenhagen," and the enlightened and liberal
government, even now the law is not always very wisely administered:
it certainly was not so in the case of poor Jörgen.

It was bitterly cold in the place where he was confined. When was this
imprisonment to be at an end? Though innocent, he had been cast into
wretchedness and solitude—that was his fate. How things had been
ordained for him in this world, he had now time to think over. Why had
he been thus treated—his portion made so hard to bear? Well, this
would be revealed "in that other life" which assuredly awaits all. In
the humble cottage that belief had been engrafted into him, which,
amidst the grandeur and brightness of his Spanish home, had never
shone upon his father's heart: that now, in the midst of cold and
darkness, became his consolation, God's gift of grace, which never can
deceive.

The storms of spring were now raging; the roaring of the German Ocean
was heard far inland; but just when the tempest had lulled, it sounded
as if hundreds of heavy[31] wagons were driving over a hard tunnelled
road. Jörgen heard it even in his dungeon, and it was a change in the
monotony of his existence. No old melody could have gone more deeply
to his heart than these sounds—the rolling ocean—the free ocean—on
which one can be borne throughout the world, fly with the wind, and
wherever one went have one's own house with one, as the snail has
his—to stand always upon home's ground, even in a foreign land.