If the flood came before the mail had got in, an anxious outlook was kept at the town gate, where the sea could be seen rising higher and higher, threatening with each swell to wash quite over the roadway. White-painted posts were set on both sides of it to mark out the way for the driver even if water covered it knee-deep, but in spite of this precaution, the trip was full of peril. If the coach were blown over, or the team succumbed, the passengers had but a slim chance of escaping with their lives. On such nights a band of resolute men gathered in the shelter of the farthest houses ready to go to the rescue on the first warning of danger. I was very proud to be one of these when I was a big boy of sixteen. But big as I was when the summons came and we sallied forth to bring the exhausted team in, it took all my strength to stand against the furious blast. The waves beat upon the causeway and were carried across it in a pelting rain of brine that stung like whip-lashes. In water halfway to our waists, in utter darkness and numbed with cold, we groped our way toward the lights of the town scarce a hundred yards away. How that driver had lived through it, I shall never understand. The relief when we reached shelter was great, but greater my pride when the stern old Amtmand, the chief government officer of the county, caught me by the shoulder and whirled me around to have a look at the fellow who had lent him a hand in need. “Strong boy,” he said, and rapped me smartly with his cane; “be a man yet,” which was praise indeed from him. And I forgot that I was cold and wet through, in my pride. They used to tell a story of another Amtmand who, fresh from his snug berth at the capital, had come out to take the post in the Old Town, as ill luck would have it a passenger in the mail on just such a night. It was too much for him. He waited only till the tide fell enough to clear the way, then fled the town, with the parting shot that “Ribe might be good enough for ducks and geese, but not for men.” He never came back, but set up his office in another town where he was out of reach of the North Sea. Well for him he was not there on that awful Christmas Eve when the water reached the very Domkirke itself, and rose five feet or more over its floor. Many years before, another flood had torn thirty parishes from the coast. The sea swallowed them up. It stands in the old records as “de grote Mandranck” (1362) because of the loss of life it caused. Shortly before the Reformation the water rose so high in the streets that the cloister of the Black Friars stood in a lake, and the monks caught fish for their supper in the portico that enclosed their garden. One may be permitted the hope that this flood came on a Friday to fitly replenish their larder.