The one thing that made death bitter for him was the thought of his children.  The son had been sent for from Copenhagen, but as we afterwards learned, he had been absent from the city, and therefore did not arrive until shortly after his father had paid the penalty for his crime.

I took the daughter into my home, where she was brought, half fainting, after they had led her father from the prison.  She had been tending him lovingly all the days of his trial.  What made even greater sorrow for the poor girl, and for the district judge who spoke the sentence, was that these two young people had solemnly plighted their troth but a few short weeks before, in the rectory of Veilbye.  The son arrived just as the body of the executed criminal was brought into my house.  It had been permitted to us to bury the body with Christian rites, if we could do it in secret.  The young man threw himself over the lifeless body.  Then, clasping his sister in his arms, the two wept together in silence for some while.  At midnight we held a quiet service over the remains of the Rector of Veilbye, and the body was buried near the door of Aalsoe church.  A simple stone, upon which I have carved a cross, still stands to remind the passer-by of the sin of a most unfortunate man.

The next morning his two children had disappeared.  They have never been heard of since.  God knows to what far-away corner of the world they have fled, to hide their shame and their sorrow.  The district judge is very ill, and it is not believed that he will recover.

May God deal with us all after His wisdom and His mercy!

O Lord, inscrutable are thy ways!

In the thirty-eighth year of my service, and twenty-one years after my unfortunate brother in office, the Rector of Veilbye had been beheaded for the murder of his servant, it happened one day that a beggar came to my door.  He was an elderly man, with gray hair, and walked with a crutch.  He looked sad and needy.  None of the servants were about, so I myself went into the kitchen and gave him a piece of bread.  I asked him where he came from.  He sighed and answered: 

“From nowhere in particular.”

Then I asked him his name.  He sighed still deeper, looked about him as if in fear, and said, “They once called me Niels Bruus.”

I was startled, and said, “God have mercy on us!  That is a bad name.  That is the name of a man who was killed many years back.”

Whereat the man sighed still deeper and replied:  “It would have been better for me had I died then.  It has gone ill with me since I left the country.”

At this the hair rose on my head, and I trembled in every limb.  For it seemed to me that I could recognize him, and also it seemed to me that I saw Morten Bruus before me in the flesh, and yet I had laid the earth over him three years before.  I stepped back and made the sign of the cross, for verily I thought it was a ghost I saw before me.