In summer the mighty ash tree murmured as before in front of the house; but on the bench that now stood beneath it, the young wife was usually seen alone in the evening, sitting with some sewing in her hands; there was no child yet from this marriage. The husband had other things to do than to sit in front of his house door, for, in spite of his having helped in the old man’s management before, there was still a multitude of labors to be done which, in those other times, he had not found it wise to touch upon; but now everything had to be cleared up gradually, and he swept with a stiff broom. Besides that, there was the management of the farm, enlarged by his own land, especially as he was trying to save a second hired man. So it came about that, except on Sundays, when they went to church, the two married people saw each other usually only during dinner, which Hauke ate with great haste, and at the rise and close of day; it was a life of continuous work, although one of content.

Then a troublesome rumor started. When one Sunday, after church, a somewhat noisy company of young land-owners from the marshes and the higher land had stayed over their cups at the inn, they talked, when it came to the fourth and fifth glass, not about the king and the government, to be sure—they did not soar so high in those days—but about communal and higher officials, specially about the taxes demanded of the community. And the longer they talked, the less there was that found mercy in their eyes, particularly not the new dike taxes. All the sluices and locks had always held out before, and now they have to be repaired; always new places were found on the dike that required hundreds of cartloads of earth—the devil take the whole affair!

“That’s all on account of your clever dikemaster,” cried one of the people of the higher land, “who always goes round pondering and sticks his finger into every pie!”

“Yes, he is tricky and wants to win the favor of the dikemaster general; but we have caught him!”

“Why did you let him be thrust on you?” said the other; “now you have to pay in cash.”

Ole Peters laughed. “Yes, Marten Fedders, that’s the way it is here, and it can’t be helped: the old one was made dikemaster on account of his father, the new one on account of his wife.” The laughter which ran round the table showed how this sally was appreciated.

But as it had been spoken at the public table of an inn, it did not stay there, and it was circulated in the village of the high land as well as that of the marshes below; and so it reached Hauke. Again the row of ill-meaning faces passed by his inner eye, and he heard the laughter round the tavern table more jeering than it really was. “Dogs!” he shouted, and his eyes looked grimly to the side, as if he wanted to have these people whipped.

Then Elke laid her hand upon his arm: “Let them be; they all would like to be what you are.”

“That’s just it,” he replied angrily.

“And,” she went on, “didn’t Ole Peters better himself by marriage?”

“He did, Elke; but what he married with Vollina wasn’t enough to be dikemaster on.”

“Say rather: he wasn’t enough,” and Elke turned her husband round so that he had to look into the mirror, for they stood between the windows in their room. “There is the dikemaster!” she said; “now look at him; only he who can manage an office has it.”

“You’re not wrong,” he replied pensively, “and yet—Well, Elke, I have to go to the eastern lock; the gates won’t close again.”

He went; but he was not gone long, before the repairing of the lock was forgotten. Another idea, which he had only half thought out and carried round with him for years, which, however, had been pushed back by the urgent affairs of his office, now took hold of him again and more powerfully than before, as if he had suddenly grown wings.

Before he was really aware of it himself, he found himself on the sea-dike a good way south toward the city; the village that lay on this side had some time ago vanished to the left. He was still walking on, fixing his eyes constantly on the seaward side of the broad foreland. If some one had walked beside him, he must have seen what concentrated mental work was going on behind those eyes. At last he stood still: the foreland here dwindled into a narrow strip along the dike. “It will have to work!” he said to himself. “Seven years in the office—they shan’t say any more that I am dikemaster only because of my wife.”

He was still standing there, and his eyes swept sharply and thoughtfully on all sides over the green foreland. Then he walked back until, here too, the broad plain that lay before him ended in a narrow strip of green pastureland. Through this, close by the dike, shot a strong arm of the sea which divided almost the whole foreland from the mainland and made it an island; a crude wooden bridge led to it, so that one could go back and forth with cattle or teams of hay or grain. It was low tide now, and the golden September sun was glistening on the strip of wet clay, about a hundred feet broad, and on the deep channel in the middle of it through which the sea was even now driving its waters. “That can be damned!” said Hauke to himself, after he had watched this playing of the water for a while. Then he looked up, and on from the dike upon which he stood, past the channel, he drew an imaginary line along the edge of the isolated land, round toward the south and back again to the east over the eastern continuation of the channel, up to the dike. But the line which he had drawn invisibly was a new dike, new also in the construction of its outline, which as yet existed only in his head.

“That would make dammed-in land of about a thousand acres,” he said smiling to himself; “not so large; but—”

Another calculation came into his mind: the foreland here belonged to the community, or rather, a number of shares to the single members, according to the size of their property in the municipality or other legal income. He began to count up how many shares he had received from his father and how many from Elke’s father, and how many he had already bought during his marriage, partly with a dim foreboding of future gain, partly because of his increased sheep stock. It was a considerable lot; for he had also bought all of Ole Peter’s shares when the latter had been disgusted because his best ram had been drowned, once when the foreland had been partly flooded. What excellent pasture and farm land that must make and how valuable it would be if it were all surrounded by his new dike! Like intoxication this idea rose into his brain; but he pressed his nails into the hollows of his hands and forced his eyes to see clearly and soberly what lay there before him: a great plain without a dike exposed to who knew what storms and floods in the next years, and at its outermost edge a herd of dirty sheep now wandering and grazing slowly. That meant a heap of work, struggle, and annoyance for him! In spite of all that, as he was walking on the footpath down from the dike across the fens toward his hill, he felt as if he were carrying home a great treasure.

In the hall Elke came to meet him: “How about the lock?” she asked.

He looked down at her with a mysterious smile: “We shall soon need another lock,” he said; “and sluices and a new dike.”

“I don’t understand,” returned Elke, as they walked into the room; “what do you want to do, Hauke?”

“I want,” he began slowly and then stopped for a second, “I want the big foreland that begins opposite our place and stretches on westward to be diked in and made into a solid enclosure. The high floods have left us in peace for almost a generation now; but when one of the bad ones comes again and destroys the growth down there—then all at once there’ll be an end to all this glory. Only the old slackway has let things stay like this till to-day.”

She looked at him with astonishment: “Why, you are scolding yourself!” she said.

“I am, Elke; but till now there were so many other things to do.”

“Yes, Hauke; surely, you have done enough.”

He had sat down in the armchair of the old dikemaster, and his hands were clutching both arms fast.

“Have you the courage for it?” his wife asked him.

“I have that, Elke,” he spoke hastily.

“Don’t be too hasty, Hauke; that work is a matter of life and death; and almost all the people will be against you, they won’t thank you for your labor and trouble.”

He nodded. “I know that!” he said.

“And if it will only succeed,” she cried again, “ever since I was a child I heard that the channel can’t be stopped up, and that therefore one shouldn’t touch it.”

“That was an excuse for the lazy ones!” said Hauke; “why shouldn’t one be able to stop up the channel?”

“That I have not heard; perhaps because it goes right through; the rush of the water is too strong.” A remembrance came over her and an almost mischievous smile gleamed out of her serious eyes: “When I was a child,” she told, “I heard our hired men talk about it once; they said, if a dam was to hold there, some live thing would have to be thrown into the hold and diked up with the rest; when they were building a dike on the other side, about a hundred years ago, a gipsy child was dammed in that they had bought from its mother for a lot of money.