A great change has taken place
within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear
sight and patient devotion of one strong man, the Gifford Pinchot of
Denmark. The story of that unique achievement reads like the tale
of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years' sleep
by the kiss of her lover prince. The prince who awoke the slumbering
heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name.
Not altogether fanciful is the conceit. Barren, black, and desolate,
the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of
field and forest could--does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as
eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre
pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the
blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human
habitation in sight some heath boer's ling-thatched hut, flanked by
rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the
pitiless west wind. On the barrows where the vikings sleep their
long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between steep banks
a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to escape from the
universal blight. Over it all broods the silence of the desert,
drowsy with the hum of many bees winging their swift way to the
secret feeding-places they know of, where mayflower and anemone hide
under the heather, witness that forests grew here in the long ago.
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