"Thus keeping to himself and loving best to live only with the wind and water and the images that solitude brings, Hauke grew up to be a tall, lean fellow. He had been confirmed for more than a year when things began to change with him, and that was owing to the old white Angora tom-cat which had been brought home from a Spanish sea voyage to old Trien' Jans by her son, who later perished on the flats. Trien' lived a good distance out on the dike in a little cottage and when she was working about in her house this monster of a cat used to sit in front of the door and blink out at the summer day, and the lapwings that flew by. When Hauke passed the cat mewed at him and Hauke nodded; they both knew what was going on between them." Once, it was spring, and Hauke often lay out on the dike as was his habit, farther down nearer the water, among the shore-pinks and the sweet-smelling sea-wormwood, and let the sun, which was already strong, shine down on him. The day before, when he was on the uplands, he had filled his pockets with pebbles and when the low tide had laid bare the flats and the little gray sand-pipers hopped over them, piping as they went, he suddenly took a stone out of his pocket and threw it at the birds. He had practised this from childhood and generally managed to bring one down; but just as often it was impossible to go out on the mud after it; Hauke had often thought of bringing the cat with him and teaching it to retrieve. Here and there, however, there were firm spots in the mud or sandbanks and then he could run out and fetch his plunder himself. If the cat was still sitting in front of the door as he passed on his way home it mewed wild with rapacity until Hauke threw it one of the birds he had killed.