"What's that, boy?" "The dikes, I say!" "What about the dikes?" "They're no good, Father." The old man laughed in his face. "Is that so, boy? I suppose you are the child prodigy of Lübeck!" But the lad would not allow himself to be confused. "The water-side is too steep," he said; "if it should happen again as it has already happened more than once we may all drown in here, behind the dike too." The old man pulled his tobacco out of his pocket, twisted off a piece and pushed it in behind his teeth. "And how many barrows did you wheel today?" he asked crossly, for he saw that working at the dike could not cure the boy of working with his mind. "I don't know, Father; about the same as the others; perhaps half a dozen more. But--the dikes must be built different." "Good," said his father with a laugh; "you may get to be dikegrave; then, build them different." "Yes, Father," returned the boy. The old man looked at him and swallowed once or twice; then he went out. He did not know what answer to give the lad. * * * * * When, at the end of October, work on the dike came to an end Hauke Haien still continued to find more pleasure in a walk out towards the north, to the sea, than in anything else. Just as the children of today look forward to Christmas, he looked forward to All Saints' Day, when the equinoctial gales burst over the land, an occasion for lamentation in Friesland. In spite of wind and weather he was certain to be found at the time of the high spring tides lying out on the dike all by himself; and when the gulls shrieked, when the waves dashed high against the dike, and in rolling back washed out whole pieces of sod into the sea, Hauke's angry laughter was something worth hearing. "You can't do anything right," he shouted out into the noise, "just as people don't know how to do anything!" And at last, often when it was quite dark, he would turn away from the broad, bleak expanse and trot home along the dike till he reached the low door under his father's thatch, and his tall, overgrown figure slipped through and into the little room beyond. Sometimes he brought a handful of clay with him. Then he sat down beside his father who had begun to let him go his own way, and, by the light of the thin tallow candle, kneaded all kinds of dike-models, laid them in a shallow dish of water and tried to imitate the way in which the waves washed out the bank. Or he took his slate and drew on it profiles of dikes on the water-side as he thought they ought to be. It never entered his head to associate with the boys who had been his companions in school, and apparently they cared nothing about such a dreamer. When it came winter again and the frost had taken hold he wandered out along the dike farther than he had ever been before to where the ice-covered surface of the shoals stretched before him as far as the eye could reach.