"Your great-uncle, Trien'? Why just now you said you had experienced it yourself!" "It's all the same," said the old woman; "but you don't believe, Hauke Haien; I suppose you want to make my great-uncle out a liar." Then she drew nearer to the range and stretched her hands out over the flames in the grate. The dikegrave threw a glance towards the window; it was scarcely dusk as yet outside. "Come, Wienke," he said and drew his feeble-minded child to him; "come with me; I want to show you something from out on the dike! Only we shall have to walk; the white horse is at the blacksmith's." Then he went with her into the living-room and Elke tied thick woolen shawls about the little girl's throat and shoulders; soon after her father took her out on the old dike towards the northwest, past Jeverssand, to where the flats lay broad before them almost farther than the eye could reach. Part of the time he carried her, part of the time he led her by the hand; the twilight deepened gradually; in the distance everything disappeared in mist and vapor. But there, where one could still see, the invisibly swelling currents of the shallows had broken the ice, and, as Hauke had once seen it in his youth, smoking fog now rose from the cracks along which the uncanny, impish figures were once more to be seen hopping towards one another and bowing and suddenly stretching out wide, in a terrible fashion. The child clung to her father in fear and covered her little face with his hand: "The sea-devils!" she whispered tremblingly between his fingers; "the sea-devils!" He shook his head: "No, Wienke, neither water-women nor sea-devils; there are no such things; who told you about them?" She looked up at him dully but did not answer. He stroked her cheeks tenderly: "Just look again," he said; "those are only poor hungry birds. Just see how the big one spreads his wings now; they are catching the fish that come into the steaming cracks." "Fish," repeated Wienke. "Yes, child, all those creatures are alive like us, there _is_ nothing else. But God is everywhere!" Little Wienke had fixed her eyes on the ground and held her breath; she looked as if she were gazing into an abyss terrified. Perhaps it only seemed so; her father looked at her long; he bent down and looked into her little face, but no feeling of her imprisoned soul was visible in it. He lifted her in his arms and stuck her benumbed hands into one of his thick woolen gloves: "there, my little Wienke," and the child probably did not hear the tone of intense tenderness in his words--"there, warm yourself close to me! You are our child after all, our only one. You love us----" The man's voice broke, but the little girl pressed her head tenderly into his rough beard. Thus they went home full of peace. * * * * *