But now I suppose no one would sell her child.”

Hauke shook his head: “Then it is just as well that we have none; else they would do nothing less than demand it of us.”

“They shouldn’t get it!” said Elke and folded her arms across her body as if in fear.

And Hauke smiled; but she asked again: “And the huge cost? Have you thought of that?”

“I have, Elke; what we will get out of it will far surpass the cost; even the cost of keeping up the old dike will be covered a good bit by the new one. We do our own work and there are over eight teams of horses in the community, and there is no lack of young strong arms. At least you shan’t have made me dikemaster for nothing, Elke; I want to show them that I am one!”

She had been crouching in front of him and looking at him full of care; now she rose with a sigh. “I have to go back to my day’s work,” she said, and gently stroked his cheek; “you do yours, Hauke.”

“Amen, Elke!” he said with a serious smile; “there is work enough for us both.”

There was truly work enough for both, but the heaviest burden was now on the man’s shoulder. On Sunday afternoons, often too in the evenings, Hauke sat together with a good surveyor, deep in calculations, drawings and plans; when he was alone, he did the same and often did not stop till long after midnight. Then he would slip into their common sleeping-room—for the stuffy beds fixed to the wall in the living-room were no longer used in Hauke’s household—and his wife would lie with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep, so that he would get his rest at last, although she was really waiting for him with a beating heart. Then he would sometimes kiss her forehead and say a low word of love, and then lie down to sleep, though sleep often did not come to him before the first crowing of the cock. In the winter storms he ran out on the dike with pencil and paper in his hand, and stood and made drawings and took notes while a gust of wind would tear his cap from his head and make his long, light hair fly round his heated face. Soon, as long as the ice did not bar his way, he rowed with a servant out into the sea and with plumb line and rods measured the depths of the currents about which he was not yet sure. Often enough Elke trembled for his life, but when he was safely back, he could hardly have noticed anything, except by the tight clasp of her hand or by the bright lightning that gleamed from her usually so quiet eyes. “Have patience, Elke,” he said once when it seemed to him as if his wife would not let him alone; “I have to have the whole thing clear to myself before I propose it.” Then she nodded and let him be. There were no less rides into the city, either, to see the dikemaster general, and all these and the labors for house and farm were always followed by work late into the night. His intercourse with other people outside of his work and business vanished almost entirely; even with his wife it grew less and less. “These are bad times, and they will last long yet,” said Elke to herself and went to her work.

  At last, when sun and spring winds had broken the ice everywhere, the last work in preparation had been done. The petition to the dikemaster general, to be seconded by a higher official, contained the proposal that the foreland should be diked for the promoting of the general weal, particularly of the diked-in district, as well as the ruler’s treasury, as this would receive in a few years the taxes from about a thousand acres. This was neatly copied and put into a firm envelope together with the corresponding drafts and plans of all the positions, present and future, of the locks and sluices and everything else that belonged to the project; and this was sealed with the official seal of the dikemaster.

“Here it is, Elke,” said the young dikemaster; “now give it your blessing.”

Elke laid her hand into his: “We want to stand by each other,” she said.

“Yes, we do.”

Then the petition was sent into the city by a messenger on horseback.

I must call your attention to the fact, dear sir, the school-master interrupted his account, fixing his eyes pleasantly upon me, that what I have told you up to this point I have gathered during my activity of almost forty years in this district from the traditions of intelligent people or from the tales of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What I am about to tell you now, so that you may find the right connection between what has gone before and the final outcome of my story, used to be and is still the talk of the whole marsh village, as soon as the spinning-wheels begin to whir round All Saints’ Day.

If one stood on the dike, about five or six hundred feet to the north of the dikemaster’s farm, one could, at that time, look a few thousand feet out over the sea, and somewhat farther from the opposite shore one could see a little island, which they called “Jeverssand,” or “Jevers Island.” Our forefathers of that generation had used it as a pasture for sheep, for at that time grass was still growing on it; but even that had stopped, because the low island had several times been flooded by the sea, and in midsummer too, so that the growth of grass was stunted and made useless as a sheep pasture. So it happened that the island had no more visitors except gulls and other birds and occasionally a sea eagle; and on moonlight nights from the dike one could only see the light or heavy mists pass over it. And people believed that, when the moon shone upon the island from the east, they could recognise a few bleached skeletons of drowned sheep and that of a horse, although, to be sure, no one could understand how it had come there.

It was at the end of March that the day laborer from the house of Tede Haien and Iven Johns, the hired man of the young dikemaster, stood beside each other at that place and without stirring stared at the island which could scarcely be recognised in the dim moonshine; but something out of the ordinary seemed to hold them there. The laborer put his hands into his pockets and shuddered: “Come, Iven,” he said; “there’s nothing good in that; let us go home.”

The other laughed, even though horror sounded through his laughter: “Oh, bosh, it’s a live creature, a big one! Who the devil has chased it on to the clay out there? Look, now it’s stretching its neck our way! No, it’s drooping its head; it is feeding. I’d have thought, there was nothing to feed on there! What can it be?”

“That’s not our business!” replied the other. “Good night, Iven, if you don’t want to go with me; I’m going home!”

“Oh, yes; you’ve got a wife, you can go into your warm bed! But I’ve got a lot of March air in my room!”

“Good night, then,” the laborer called back, as he marched home on the dike. The hired man looked round a few times after his fleeing companion; but the desire to see something gruesome held him fast. Then a dark, stocky figure came toward him on the dike from the village; it was the servant boy of the dikemaster. “What do you want, Carsten?” the hired man called to him.

“I?—nothing,” said the boy; but our master wants to speak to you, Iven Johns.”

The man’s eyes were drawn back to the island again. “All right, I’m coming right off,” he said.

“What are you looking at so?” asked the boy.

The man raised his arm and pointed silently to the island. “Oh, look!” whispered the boy; “there goes a horse—a white horse—the devil must be riding that—how can a horse get to Jevers Island?”

“Don’t know, Carsten; if it’s only a real horse!”

“Yes, yes, Iven; look, now it’s feeding just like a horse! But who has brought it there—we have no boats in the village big enough! Perhaps it’s only a sheep; Peter Ohm says by moonlight ten circles of peat look like a whole village. No, look! Now it’s jumping around—it must be a horse after all!”

Both stood silent for a while, their eyes fixed on what they saw indistinctly going on upon yonder island. The moon stood high in the heavens and shone upon the wide sea what was just beginning, as the tide rose, to wash with its waters over the glistening flats of clay. Only the low murmur of the water, not the sound of a single animal was heard here in the vast open; on the marshes behind the dike, too, all was deserted, and cows and oxen were still in their stalls.