In Great Waters: Four Stories

Transcriber's Notes: Blank pages have been eliminated. Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. A few typographical errors have been corrected. The cover page was created by the transcriber and can be considered public domain.
Four Stories
THOMAS A. JANVIER
Author of The Uncle of an Angel The Aztec Treasure-House The Passing of Thomas In Old New York etc.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1901
Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved. November, 1901.
C. A. J.

Old Jaap Visser was mad. Out there on the island of Marken, in the Zuyder Zee, he was the one madman, and a curiosity. The little boys—all born web-footed, and eager as soon as they could walk to toddle off on their stout little Dutch legs and take to the water—used to run after him and jeer at him. An underlying fear gave zest to this amusement. The older of them knew that he could lay a strange binding curse upon people. The younger of them, resolving this concept into simpler terms, knew that he could say something that would hurt more than a spanking; and that would keep on hurting, in some unexplained but dreadful way, beyond the sting of the worst spanking that ever they had known. Therefore, while they jeered, they jeered circumspect ly. Out in the open—on the brick-paved pathways which traverse the low marsh-land and unite the little knolls on which are the villages: the Hafenbeurt (where the harbour is), the Kerkehof, and the Kesbeurt—butter would not melt in their small Dutch mouths when they met him. But when they had him at their mercy among the houses of one or another of the villages things went differently. Then they would yell Old Jaap! Mad old Jaap! after him—and as he turned upon them would whip off their sabots, that they might run the more lightly, and would dash around corners into safety: with delightful thrills of dread running through their small scampish bodies at the thought of the curse that certainly was flying after them, and that certainly would make them no better than dead jelly-fish if they did not get around the corner in time to ward it off! And old Jaap would be left free for a moment from his tormentors, brandishing his staff in angry flourishes and shouting his strange curse after them: May you perish in the wrath of the Zuyder Zee!