"The thanks Jewe Manners once promised the builder that the grandchildren should give have not come, as you have seen; for thus it is, sir: they gave Socrates poison to drink and our Lord Jesus Christ they nailed to the cross! It is not so easy to do such things as that any longer; but--to make a saint of a man of violence or a malicious bull-necked priest, or to make a ghost or a phantom of night of an able fellow just because he is a whole head above the rest of us--that can be done any day." When the earnest little man had said that he got up and listened at the window. "It is different out there now," he said, and drew the woolen curtain back; it was bright moonlight. "See," he continued, "there are the commissioners coming back, but they are separating, they are going home; there must have been a break over on the other side; the water has fallen." I looked out beside him; the windows upstairs, where we were, lay above the edge of the dike; it was as he had said. I took my glass and finished it: "I thank you for this evening," I said; "I think we can sleep in peace!" "That we can," replied the little man; "I wish you a good night's sleep from my heart!" In going down I met the dikegrave below in the hall; he wanted to take home with him a map that he had left in the tap-room. "It's all over," he said. "But our schoolmaster has told you a story of his own, I suppose; he belongs to the rationalists!" "He seems to be a sensible man." "Oh yes, certainly; but you can't mistrust your own eyes after all. And over on the other side, just as I said it would be, the dike is broken!" I shrugged my shoulders: "We will have to take counsel with our pillows about that! Good night, dikegrave!" He laughed. "Good night!" The next morning, in the most golden of sunlights, which had risen on a wide devastation, I rode along the Hauke Haien Dike down to the town. TO A DECEASED[2] But this is more than I can bear, That still the laughing sun is bright, As in the days when you were there, That clocks are striking, unaware, And mark the change of day and night-- That we, as twilight dims the air, Assemble when the day is done, And that the place where stood your chair Already many others share, And that you seem thus missed by none; When meanwhile from the gate below The narrow strips of moonlight spare Into your vault down deeply go And with a ghostly pallid glow Are stealing o'er your coffin there. THE CITY[2] The shore is gray, the sea is gray, And there the city stands; The mists upon the houses weigh And through the calm, the ocean gray Roars dully on the strands. There are no rustling woods, there fly No birds at all in May, The wild goose with its callous cry Alone on autumn nights soars by, The wind-blown grasses sway.