But when Hauke had explained the matter to him, he slapped the young man's shoulder, laughing: "Oh, well, the inland road is broad enough; God help the dikemaster if he has to worry about duck pens!" It weighed on Hauke's heart that he should have delivered the old woman and her ducks over to the rats, but he allowed himself to be quieted by this objection. "But, master," he began again, "it might be good for some people to be prodded a little, and if you don't want to go after them yourself, why don't you prod the overseers who ought to look out for order on the dike?" "How--what is the boy saying?" and the dikemaster sat up straight, and Elke let her fancy stocking sink down and turned an ear toward Hauke. "Yes, master," Hauke went on, "you have already gone round on your spring inspection; but just the same Peter Jansen hasn't weeded his lot to this day; and in summer the goldfinches will play round the red thistles as gaily as ever. And near by--I don't know to whom it belongs--there is a hole like a cradle on the outer side of the dike; when the weather is good it is always full of little children that roll in it; but--God save us from high water!" The eyes of the old dikemaster had grown bigger and bigger. "And then--" said Hauke again. "Then what more, boy?" asked the dikemaster; "haven't you finished yet?" and it seemed as if he had already had too much of his second man's speech. "Yes; then, master," Hauke went on; "you know that fat Vollina, the daughter of the overseer Harder, who always fetches her father's horse from the fen--well, as soon as she sits with her round legs on the old yellow mare--Get up!--why, then every time she goes diagonally up the slope of the dike!" Hauke did not notice until now that Elke had fixed her intelligent eyes on him and was gently shaking her head. He was silent, but a bang on the table from the old man's fist thundered in his ears. "Confound it!" he cried, and Hauke was almost frightened by the bear's voice that suddenly broke out: "to the fens! Note down that fat creature in the fens, Hauke! That girl caught three of my young ducks last summer! Yes, yes, put it down," he repeated, when Hauke hesitated; "I even believe there were four!" "Oh, father," said Elke, "wasn't it an otter that took the ducks?" "A big otter!" cried the old man, panting; "I guess I can tell the fat Vollina and an otter apart! No, no, four ducks, Hauke--but as for the rest of what you have been chattering--last spring the dikemaster general and I, after we had breakfasted together at my house, drove by your weeds and your cradle-hole and yet couldn't see anything. But you two," and he nodded a few times significantly at Hauke and his daughter, "you can thank God that you are no dikemaster! Two eyes are all one has, and one is supposed to look with a hundred. Take the bills for the straw coverings, Hauke, and look them over; those rascals do keep their accounts in such a shiftless way!"