"I am not unaware, Sir," the narrator interrupted himself, "that this same incident is told of Hans Mommsen; but, here with us, people used to tell it of Hauke Haien--that was the boy's name--before Mommsen was born. You know how it is, when a greater man arises, he is credited with everything that his predecessors may have done, in earnest or in fun." When the old man saw that the lad cared nothing about cows or sheep and scarcely even noticed when the beans were in blossom--which after all is the joy of every man from the marshlands--and that his little place might indeed get on with a peasant and a boy, but not with a semi-scholar and a servant, and also because he himself had failed of prosperity, he sent his big boy to the dike, where from Easter till Martinmas he was to wheel his barrow of earth with the other laborers. "That will cure him of Euclid!" he said to himself. And the lad pushed his wheelbarrow, but he kept the Euclid in his pocket all the time, and when the workmen ate their lunch or stopped for a bite in the late afternoon he sat on the bottom of a wheelbarrow with the book in his hand. And in autumn when the tides began to be higher, and the work had sometimes to be stopped he did not go home with the others, but stayed, and sat on the slope of the dike, his hands clasped round his knee, and watched for hours how the gray waves of the North Sea dashed up higher and higher towards the grass-line of the dike. Not until the water came in over his feet and the foam spattered in his face did he move up a few feet higher and then sit on there. He heard neither the splashing of the water nor the screaming of the gulls and shore-birds that flew above and around him, almost touching him with their wings, and flashing their black eyes into his; nor did he see how night came and enveloped the broad, wild desert of water in front of him. All that he saw was the hem of the water outlined by the surf which, when the tide was in, struck again and again with its heavy beat on the same spot in the dike and washed away the grass-line on its steep side before his very eyes. After staring at it long he sometimes nodded his head slowly, or, without looking up, drew a soft line in the air with his hand as if he would thus give the dike a gentler slope. When it grew so dark that all earthly things vanished from his sight and only the tide continued to thunder in his ears, he got up and trotted home half wet through. One evening when he came home in this state, his father, who was cleaning his measuring instruments, looked up and turned on him. "What have you been doing out there so long? You might have been drowned; the water is eating right into the dike today." Hauke looked at him stubbornly. "Don't you hear what I say? You might have been drowned." "Yes," said Hauke; "but I didn't get drowned." "No," replied the old man after a time and looked at him absent-mindedly--"not this time." "But," went on Hauke, "our dikes are no good!"