"That is no defect, Manners; then you know the affairs all the better and won't have any trouble with them." But the old man shook his head: "No, no, your Honor, leave me where I am, then I can run along with the rest for a few years longer." The pastor agreed with him: "Why not give the office," he said, "to the man who has actually managed the affairs in the last years?" The dikemaster general looked at him: "I don't understand you, pastor!" But the pastor pointed with his finger to the best parlor, where Hauke in a slow serious manner seemed to be explaining something to two older people. "There he stands," he said; "the long Frisian over there with the keen grey eyes, the bony nose and the high, projecting forehead. He was the old man's hired man and now has his own little place; to be sure, he is rather young." "He seems to be about thirty," said the dikemaster general, inspecting the man thus presented to him. "He is scarcely twenty-four," remarked the overseer Manners; "but the pastor is right: all the good work that has been done with dikes and sluices and the like in the last years through the office of dikemaster has been due to him; the old man couldn't do much toward the end." "Indeed?" said the dikemaster general; "and you think, he would be the right man to move up into the office of his old master?" "He would be absolutely the right man," replied Jewe Manners; "but he lacks what they call here 'clay under one's feet;' his father had about fifteen, he may well have twenty acres; but with that nobody has yet been made dikemaster." The pastor had already opened his mouth, as if he wanted to object, when Elke Volkers, who had been in the room for a while, spoke to them suddenly: "Will your Honor allow me a word?" she said to the dikemaster general; "I am speaking only to prevent a mistake from turning into a wrong." "Then speak, Miss Elke," he replied; "wisdom always sounds well from the lips of pretty girls." "It isn't wisdom, your Honor; I only want to tell the truth." "That too one must be able to hear, Miss Elke." The girl let her dark eyes glance sideways, as if she wanted to make sure that there were no superfluous ears about: "Your Honor," she began then, and her breast heaved with a stronger motion, "my godfather, Jewe Manners, told you that Hauke Haien owned only about twenty acres; that is quite true in this moment, but as soon as it will be necessary, Hauke will call his own just so many more acres as my father's, now my own farm, contains. All that together ought to be enough for a dikemaster." Old Manners stretched his white head toward her, as if he had to see who was talking there: "What is that?" he said; "child, what are you talking about?" But Elke pulled a gleaming gold ring on a black ribbon out of her bodice: "I am engaged, godfather Manners," she said; "here is my ring, and Hauke Haien is my betrothed."