"To be sure," said the little man. "We are not quite of the same opinion in this matter," and a smile of superiority passed over his delicately formed face.
"You see," the dikegrave whispered in my ear, "he is still a little haughty. He studied theology once, in his youth, and stuck here in his home as schoolmaster only on account of an unfortunate betrothal."
In the meantime the schoolmaster had come forward out of his corner and seated himself beside me at the long table. "Go on Schoolmaster, let us have the story," called a few of the younger ones in the party.
"To be sure," said the old man turning to me, "I am glad to oblige you; but there is much superstition interwoven with it and it requires art to tell the tale without including that."
"Please don't leave that out," I replied, "trust me to separate the chaff from the wheat myself."
The old man looked at me with a smile of understanding. "Well, then," he said, "in the middle of the last century, or rather, to be more exact, before and after the middle, there was a dikegrave here who understood more about dikes, drains and sluices than peasants and farmers usually do; yet even so it seems hardly to have been enough, for he had read but little of what learned experts have written about such things, and had only thought out his own knowledge for himself from the time he was a little child. You have probably heard, sir, that the Friesians are good at figures and undoubtedly you have heard some talk too about our Hans Mommsen of Fahretoft, who was a peasant and yet could make compasses and chronometers, telescopes and organs. Well, the father of this dikegrave was a bit like that too; only a bit, to be sure. He had a few fields in the fens where he planted rape and beans, and where a cow grazed. Sometimes in autumn and spring he went out surveying, and in winter when the northwester came and shook his shutters, he sat at home sketching and engraving. His boy generally sat there with him and looked up from his reader or his Bible at his father measuring and calculating, and buried his hand in his blond hair. And one evening he asked his father why that which he had just written had to be just like that and not otherwise, and gave his own opinion about it." But his father, who did not know what answer to give, shook his head and said: "I can't tell you why, it is enough that it is so; and you yourself are mistaken. If you want to know more go up to the attic tomorrow and hunt for a book in the box up there. The man who wrote it was called Euclid; you can find out from that book."
The next day the boy did go up to the attic and soon found the book, for there were not many in the whole house; but his father laughed when the boy laid it down before him on the table. It was a Dutch Euclid, and Dutch, although after all it is half German, was beyond them both.
"Yes, yes," he said, "the book was my father's, he understood it. Isn't there a German one there?"
The boy, who was a child of few words, looked quietly at his father and only said: "May I keep it? There is no German one there."
And when the old man nodded he showed him a second little volume, half torn. "This one too?" he asked again.