And then the tongues of the busy-bodies disturbed the peace. One Sunday after church a somewhat noisy gang of the younger landowners in the marsh and upland districts were sitting drinking in the tavern on the uplands. Over the fourth or fifth glass they began to talk, not indeed about the king and the government--no one went so high in those days--but about the municipal officials and their superiors and above all about the municipal taxes and assessments, and the longer they talked the less they were satisfied with them, least of all with the new dike assessments; all the drains and sluices which had hitherto been all right now needed repairs; new places were always being found in the dike that needed hundreds of barrows of earth; the devil take it all! "That's your clever dikegrave's doing," shouted one of the uplanders, "who always goes about thinking and then puts a finger into every pie." "Yes, Marten," said Ole Peters, who sat opposite the speaker; "you're right, he's tricky and is always trying to get into the chief dikegrave's good books; but we've got him now." "Why did you let them load him onto you?" said the other; "now you've got to pay for it." Ole Peters laughed. "Yes, Marten Fedders, that's the way it goes with us here and there's nothing to be done. The old dikegrave got the office on his father's account; the new one on his wife's." The laughter that greeted this sally showed how it pleased the company. But it was said at a public house table and it did not stop there; soon it went the rounds on the uplands as well as down on the marshes; thus it came to Hauke's ears too. And again all the malicious faces passed before his inward eye and when he thought of the laughter at the tavern table it sounded more mocking than it had been in reality. "The dogs!" he shouted and looked wrathfully to one side as if he would have had them thrashed. At that Elke laid her hand on his arm: "Never mind them! They would all like to be what you are!" "That's just it," he answered rancorously. "And," she went on, "did not Ole Peters himself marry money?" "That he did, Elke; but what he got when he married Vollina was not enough to make him dikegrave!" "Say rather; he was not enough himself to become dikegrave!" And Elke turned her husband round so that he looked at himself in the mirror, for they were standing between the windows in their room. "There stands the dikegrave," she said; "now look at him; only he who can exercise an office holds one!" "You are not wrong there," he answered, thinking, "and yet * * * Well, Elke, I must go on to the eastern sluice; the gates don't lock again." She pressed his hand. "Come, look at me a minute first! What is the matter with you, your eyes look so far away?" "Nothing, Elke; you're right."