“He might well say so; for this was a peculiarly dangerous point on the coast, and the people knew that if the ocean should break the dyke all Holland would be in peril, and thousands of lives, as well as no end of valuable property, would be lost. So they had made the sea-wall doubly thick and high for several miles in each direction.”
“I’ve seen the waves dash up that way on Star Island, at the Shoals,” said Bess. “They are awful, after a storm.”
“On one of these quiet evening walks Hans’ father had been talking to him about little faults.
“‘If you do wrong once, my boy,’ he said, ‘no matter how little a wrong it is, there will some other bad thing be pretty apt to follow it; and so all the good in you may be swept away, bit by bit, until it is almost impossible to stop it.’
“‘But it could be stopped very easily at first, father, you mean?’
“‘Yes, Hans; just as you could stop with one finger a tiny leak in this dyke, which before morning would be a roaring flood so strong that no human power could hold it back. And Holland would be lost.’
“Hans pondered over this a great deal, in his quiet way, as he went to bed that night and drove the cattle back and forth from their pasture during the next few days. He was thinking of it as he walked along the sea-shore about a week later. His father was not with him this time, having gone to a city several miles away to spend the night with a sick friend.”
As Mr. Percival reached this point in his story, a gust of wind arose that made the old house creak and tremble in every joint; floods of rain dashed against the little window, and the smoke at intervals puffed from the fireplace out into the room.
“There had been a long storm, and to-night the waves were running enormously large—larger than Hans had ever seen them. It was flood tide; and as they rolled up, one by one, like long green hills, they would topple over and break with a sound like thunder, so near that the spray flew all over Hans and soaked him through before he had been there two minutes. He was plodding along, with head bent down against the wind, when all at once his heart stood still, and he could almost feel his hair start up in terror at what he saw. If you had seen it, perhaps you wouldn’t have noticed it; but he knew what it meant. It was a very, very small stream of water trickling out through the soil and gravel on the inside of the dyke. Hans knew it was the sea, which had at last found its way through. ‘Before morning,’ his father had said! Hans thought one moment of the awful scene that was coming, and the picture of his own home, surrounded by the terrible waves, rose before him.
“He threw himself flat upon the dyke, and thrusting the forefinger of his right hand into the hole, shrieked for help.