It was a hoary old woman who had installed Klaus at the farm; the eighty-year-old Trien' Jans had no longer been able to make a living in her cottage on the outside dike, and Elke had thought that the worn-out servant of her grandfather might still find with them a few peaceful hours at the end of her life and a comfortable place to die. So half by force she and Hauke had fetched the old body to the farm and settled her in the little northwest room of the new barn, which the dikegrave had been obliged to build when he enlarged his place a few years before. A few of the maids had been given their rooms next to hers so that they could look after her at night. All round the walls she had her old household goods; a strong box made of red cedar, above which hung two colored pictures of the prodigal son, a spinning wheel which had long since been laid aside and a very clean four-post bed in front of which stood a clumsy footstool covered with the white skin of the deceased Angora cat. But she also still had something living, and had brought it with her: this was the gull Klaus that had stuck to her for years and been fed by her; when winter came, to be sure, it flew south with the other gulls and did not come again till the wormwood exhaled its sweet odor along the shore. The barn lay somewhat farther down the mound; from her window the old woman could not see out over the dike to the sea. "You've got me here like a prisoner," she murmured one day when Hauke came in, and pointed with her gnarled finger to the fens which lay spread out below. "Where is Jeverssand? Out there above the red or above the black ox?" "What do you want with Jeverssand?" asked Hauke. "Oh, never mind Jeverssand," grumbled the old woman. "But I want to see where, long ago, my lad went to God!" "If you want to see that," replied Hauke, "you must go and sit up under the ash-tree; from there you can look well out over the sea." "Yes," said the old woman; "yes, if I had your young legs, dikegrave!" For a long time such were the thanks for the aid that the dikegrave and his wife had given her; then all at once there was a change. One morning Wienke's little head peeped in at her through the half-open door. "Well!" called the old woman, who was sitting on her wooden chair with her hands clasped, "what message have you got to tell me?" But the child came silently nearer and looked at her unceasingly with indifferent eyes. "Are you the dikegrave's child?" asked Trien' Jans, and, as the child lowered her head as if nodding, she continued: "Sit down here on my footstool then! It was an Angora tom-cat--as big as that! But your father killed him. If he were still alive you could ride on him." Wienke looked at the white skin dumbly; then she knelt down and began to stroke it with her little hands as children do a living cat or dog. "Poor Tomcat!" she said, and continued her caresses.