near the mangers, so as to be first at the spilt corn, began quacking;
and the wind howled through the stable with a hellish din, until a
couple of men came out from the inn parlour, set their broad backs
against the doors and pressed them to again, while the sparks from their
great tobacco-pipes flew about their beards.

After these achievements the wind plunged down into the heather, ran
along the deep ditches, and took a substantial grip of the mail-coach,
which it met half a mile from the town.

'He is always in a devil of a hurry to get to Krarup Kro!' growled
Anders, the postboy, cracking his whip over the perspiring horses.

For this was certainly the twentieth time that the guard had lowered the
window to shout something or other up to Anders. First it was a friendly
invitation to a coffee-punch in the inn; but each time the friendliness
became scantier, until at last the window was let down with a bang, and
out sped some brief but expressive remarks about both driver and horses,
which Anders, at all events, could not have cared to hear.

Meanwhile the wind swept low along the ground, and sighed long and
strangely in the dry clusters of heather. The moon was full, but so
densely beclouded that only a pale hazy shimmer hovered over the night.

Behind Krarup Kro lay a peat moss, dark with black turf-stacks and
dangerous deep pits. And among the heathery mounds there wound a strip
of grass that looked like a path; but it was no path, for it stopped on
the very brink of a turf-pit that was larger than the others, and deeper
also.