The old man remained on his seat, with a superior, almost pitying smile on his lips. "It is too empty here now," he said; "may I invite you to my room? I live in this house; and believe me, I know every kind of weather here by the dike--there is nothing for us to fear." This invitation I accepted with thanks, for I too began to feel chilly, and so we took a light and climbed up the stairs to a room under the gables; there the windows also looked toward the west, but they were covered by woollen rugs. In a bookcase I saw a small library, beside it portraits of two old professors; before a table stood a great high armchair. "Make yourself comfortable," said my pleasant host and threw some pieces of peat into the still faintly glowing stove, which was crowned by a tin kettle on top. "Only wait a little while! The fire will soon roar; then I'll mix you a little glass of grog--that'll keep you awake!" "I don't need that," I said; "I won't grow sleepy, when I accompany your Hauke upon his life-journey!" "Do you think so?" and he nodded toward me with his keen eyes, after I had been comfortably settled in his armchair. Well, where did we leave off? Yes, yes; I know. Well, Hauke had received his inheritance, and as old Antje Wohlers, too, had died of her ailment, his property was increased by her fen. But since the death, or rather, since the last words of his father, something had sprung up within him, the seed of which he had carried in his heart since his boyhood; he repeated to himself more often than enough that he was the right man for the post if there had to be a new dikemaster. That was it; his father, who had to know, who was the cleverest man in the village, had added his word, like a last gift to his heritage. The fen of the Wohlers woman, for which he had to thank his father too, should be the first stepping-stone to this height. For, to be sure, even with this--a dikemaster had to be able to show more real estate! But his father had got on frugally through his lonely years; and with what he had saved he had made himself owner of new property. This Hauke could do too, and even more; for his father's strength had already been spent, but he could do the hardest work for years. To be sure, even if he should succeed along this line--on account of the sharp methods he had brought into the administration of his old employer, he had made no friends in the village, and Ole Peters, his old antagonist, had just inherited property and was beginning to be a well-to-do man. A row of faces passed before his inner vision, and they all looked at him with hostile eyes. Then a rage against these people seized him: he stretched out his arms as if he would clutch them, for they wanted to push him from the office for which he alone, of all, was destined. These thoughts did not leave him; they were always there again, and so in his young heart there grew beside honor and love, also ambition and hate.