The Rider on the White Horse | Page 3

superior smile flitted over his delicate face.
"You see," the dikemaster whispered in my ear, "he is still a little proud; in his youth he once studied theology and it was only because of an unhappy courtship that he stayed hanging about his home as schoolmaster."
The schoolmaster had meanwhile come forward from his corner by the stove and had sat down beside me at the long table.
"Come on! Tell the story, schoolmaster," cried some of the younger members of the party.
"Yes, indeed," said the old man, turning toward me. "I will gladly oblige you; but there is a good deal of superstition mixed in with it, and it is quite a feat to tell the story without it."
"I must beg you not to leave the superstition out," I replied. "You can trust me to sift the chaff from the wheat by myself!"
The old man looked at me with an appreciative smile.
Well, he said, in the middle of the last century, or rather, to be more exact, before and after the middle of that century, there was a dikemaster here who knew more about dikes and sluices than peasants and landowners usually do. But I suppose it was nevertheless not quite enough, for he had read little of what learned specialists had written about it; his knowledge, though he began in childhood, he had thought out all by himself. I dare say you have heard, sir, that the Frisians are good at arithmetic, and perhaps you have heard tell of our Hans Mommsen from Fahntoft, who was a peasant and yet could make chronometers, telescopes, and organs. Well, the father of this man who later became dikemaster was made out of this same stuff--to be sure, only a little. He had a few fens, where he planted turnips and beans and kept a cow grazing; once in a while in the fall and spring he also surveyed land, and in winter, when the northwest wind blew outside and shook his shutters, he sat in his room to scratch and prick with his instruments. The boy usually would sit by and look away from his primer or Bible to watch his father measure and calculate, and would thrust his hand into his blond hair. And one evening he asked the old man why something that he had written down had to be just so and could not be something different, and stated his own opinion about it. But his father, who did not know how to answer this, shook his head and said:
"That I cannot tell you; anyway it is so, and you are mistaken. If you want to know more, search for a book to-morrow in a box in our attic; someone whose name is Euclid has written it; that will tell you."
The next day the boy had run up to the attic and soon had found the book, for there were not many books in the house anyway, but his father laughed when he laid it in front of him on the table. It was a Dutch Euclid, and Dutch, although it was half German, neither of them understood.
"Yes, yes," he said, "this book belonged to my father; he understood it; is there no German Euclid up there?"
The boy, who spoke little, looked at his father quietly and said only: "May I keep it? There isn't any German one."
And when the old man nodded, he showed him a second half-torn little book.
"That too?" he asked again.
"Take them both!" said Tede Haien; "they won't be of much use of you."
But the second book was a little Dutch grammar, and as the winter was not over for a long while, by the time the gooseberries bloomed again in the garden it had helped the boy so far that he could almost entirely understand his Euclid, which at that time was much in vogue.
I know perfectly well, sir, the story teller interrupted himself, that this same incident is also told of Hans Mommsen, but before his birth our people here have told the same of Hauke Haien--that was the name of the boy. You know well enough that as soon as a greater man has come, everything is heaped on him that his predecessor has done before him, either seriously or in fun.
When the old man saw that the boy had no sense for cows or sheep and scarcely noticed when the beans were in bloom, which is the joy of every marshman, and when he considered that his little place might be kept up by a farmer and a boy, but not by a half-scholar and a hired man, inasmuch as he himself had not been over-prosperous, he sent his big boy to the dike, where he had to cart earth from Easter until Martinmas. "That will cure him of his Euclid," he