The Rider on the White Horse | Page 3

kind are supposed to be kept safest with dragons."
"Indeed!" said the little man, "in this we are not quite of the same
opinion." And a 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