Kap "Nei, kaptein, he dies not yet. tein, I will give you every kroner I have if you will let him go. Kaptein!" "You fool! What do you mean?" Thorstein hung his head. Every man on deck was staring at him, "Go aft!" commanded Schroeder. The mate hesitated, and then walked slowly away. "He dies!" said Schroder to the men. "See, it is the flurry!" The humpback was beating the water into scarlet froth. Presently he lay still, but he was not dead. He did not turn on his side, nor did he sink. Internally he must have been an awful ruin. Yet he lived. The captain went to the galley and drank a cup of scalding coffee. Many whales had he killed; some had died quickly, others slowly. But none save one great cachalot had received four shots-three of them good-and yet clung to the ghost like this knölhval. He returned to the platform in thickly falling snow. "Now he dies! Bring me a lance." The winches were started, and soon the humpback was lying under the port bow. Now and then a shudder passed over the monstrous bulk; the tail-flukes moved feebly. "Now he dies!" Steadying himself against a stay, Schroeder grasped the long lance-pole with both hands and raised it preparatory to plunging the point through blubber and flesh into the mighy heart beneath him. But the blow did not fall. In the twinkling of an eye the humpback's tail flew up, and came down with a shivering smash against the Haakon's bull. "Full speed astern!" and back went the Haakon with a couple of her plates --upper ones, fortunately-badly started. The whale rolled from side to side a dozen times, and lay still. LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIV. 2316 "Lower away the pram," ordered Schroeder, cursing the snow and the freshening wind-and the dead sejhval, which was now nowhere to be seen. The small double-bowed boat was soon lying alongside. Schroeder chose a couple of men to go with him, and they dropped into the pram. He was about to follow. when Thorstein gripped his arm. The styrmand's face was working terribly. "Let me go. Let me lance him, kaptein," he gasped. "Nei, nei!" came the impatient an swer. "Kaptein, let me go. I have been a fool-I am sorry-I ask pardon. Let me go. I want revenge on the knöl that made me foolish." Schroeder pushed him aside, but again his arm was gripped. "Kaptein, I will never ask another favor. I will leave your sight when you ask me. But let me go to lance this knöl. If-if you do not, I shall be a shamed man-a coward-all my days. My son will mock me." The captain was touched "You are not fit to lance a whale, Thorstein," he said. "I cannot" "I have lanced many whales. I have never made a mistake. What can I say, kaptein? You are a brave man. You must understand. Shall I go down on my knees to you? Let me go to lance this knöl. Then-then shall I dream no more foolish dreams; no more shall I deceive my good kaptein. Let me go." Schroeder wavered. "Are you sure you can do it?" "You will see!-you will see! Behold my hands! They are steady now! The madness has left me. And afterwards you, my kaptein, will tell my son that I did well. Let me go." Schroeder gave ir. With a ghastly smile Thorstein went over the side. As the boat was rowed towards the whale, which now lay quiet, seemingly exhausted, he waved bis hand. The captain would fain have called him back. He told two men to be ready with the second small boat in case of emergencies. The rowers, with their oars poised for dipping, waited breathlessly for the final assault. Thorstein stood erect, grasping the lance, as brave a figure of a man as ever faced death, knowing it to be death. The whale scarcely moved. Thorstein marked the vital spot with his eye, drew a deep breath, and drove in the lance. The knöl rolled over, away from the boat, the huge, fringed, pectoral fin, with its reach of some fourteen feet, waving stiffly aloft. body's fault-an accident that might have happened to any whalemen. It was some time before Kaptein Schroeder could talk about it, and it was not until the following year that he fully realized what had happened. He had gone one day to visit the widow and her son, for whom he had done many kindnesses since the disaster. "It is strange," said the widow just before he left "it is strange that Thorstein did not dream of what was going to happen. I have been thinking of it all the winter. For he dreamed of it before our little daughter died; and he dreamed of it before our son fell from the cliff. Perhaps he could dream only of the evil that would happen to others that he loved. He loved not so many people. But myself and his children he loved; and you also, kaptein-you also." And Kaptein Schroeder, as he stood that night in the steering-box, waiting for a strange mate to relieve him, recalled certain words of his old styrmand: "When it is well with you, kaptein, it is well with me." perhaps, also-though he was no dreamer-he heard the sound of a heart weeping. And, J. J, Bell. IN A GERMAN COUNTRY HOUSE. To reach Pomerania one should go back by that same way our AngloSaxon ancestors reached Britain-by the North Sea, skirting the coast of Holland-by the swan's path, the whale's road-a road unaltered since the brown-sailed Viking boats first crossed it, for the sea can never change. Returning thus, old half-forgotten history becomes vivid and very real. For along that path went Canute, the great Danish King of Eng land, to fight against the fierce and heathen Wends who conquered the Baltic shores, and threatened his Danish kingdom on the east. On that same unchanging pathway I saw the sun go down in glory in a molten silver sea, while on the left lay Helgoland, a blue shadow dimly seen, and on the right the long, low German coastline. I saw the sun rise again over the narrowing Elbe bank, very flat and gannet-haunted, sheltering many little brown-sailed fishing-boats. Lineal descendants, perhaps, these boats, of those dark-sailed Viking keels which the old Emperor Charlemagne, the conqueror of half the world, saw beating up the Seine-and wept and tore his hoary beard in anguish at the sight. Then I must traverse the long, interminable, flat and sandy stretches of dune and forest, forest and dune, which bring home to the most heedless traveller the fact that this is part of the central plain of Europe mentioned in all geographies. Great, wide, level fields, lakes, and slow, sluggish rivers, with white, deliberate storks frogcatching along their banks, and pine forests, above all pine forests-these were my first impressions of Pomerania. Every now and then, too, a little quaint village of black and white houses deeply thatched with storks' nests atop, a slender church spire, and not far away from it an enormous mansion, sometimes towered and turreted like an old castle, sometimes high-roofed and ornate like a modern French château, but always dominating the little village by its stateliness and grandeur. For Pomerania is well known as the land of great estates and large proprietors, a stronghold of the "Junker" party of German politics, and each big estate or "Landgut" has its "Schloss," in which resides, year in, year out, the noble family who are its owners. "Life on a Pomeranian 'Landgut' is one of the pleasantest in the world," one who knew it well assured meand I was about to try it for myself for the first time. At last, at one of the little wayside stations of Hither Pomerania, a tiny red-brick island in a great pine-forest, I found a substantial-looking mail phaeton with a stout pair of useful horses, and a very smart liveried and cockaded coachman, who clicked his heels together, and, bowing swept his hat through the air with a grace unknown in England. "For Schloss Japenzin?" said heand we drove away through the forest by a wide road only stoned upon one side, the other half of the natural sand, loose and dusty in the extreme. This was the main road, but presently we turned into a side-track, sandy, deeply rutted, diversified by great loose boulders which apparently nobody had ever thought of moving out of the waya track never stoned or mended, but just worn in the sand. Now I perceived the reason of the strongly-built carriage and the stout horses. The phaeton bumped and jumped, the coachman jerked about on the box, and I was obliged to hold on tightly inside to avoid disaster. If the roads were like this in the summertime, what would be their state in winter weather? And how deep must be the isolation of these great houses, miles from any railway, and cut off from one another by such roads-roads which, as I heard later, were sometimes almost impassable even with four horses to a carriage. At last the coachman pointed out a tall white tower glittering in the distance among thick trees. "Schloss Japenzin," said he. Japenzin, like very many of these Pomeranian mansions, is approached through its farmyard. We drove past a cluster of peasants' cottages, then through long ranges of cow-sheds, sheep byres, piggeries and stables, black and white, thatched and picturesque, with storks' nests on the roof ridges and all the indispensable litter of farm work about them till we reached the great veranda which shelters the front door. There my hosts, Graf and Gräfin Von Stein, met me with a welcome so kindly, so hospitable, that the veriest stranger must have felt at home at once. The simplicity and charm of daily life at Japenzin carried me back a hun dred years-in England of to-day such a manner of living would seem no longer possible. The Von Steins belonged to a family not only one of the oldest, but also the richest and most powerful in Hither Pomerania, yet to English ideas their life was simple in the extreme, void of all luxury; useful and busy enough, but ruled by duty, not by pleasure. The Graf worked as hard as any English farmer; every morning he rose at daylight and went out into his fields; he farmed his great estate himself with two bailiffs under him. It was a very large estate, well stocked with flocks and herds; and he reared, not bred, a great many young horses of which the Government every year took their pick at a fixed price for cavalry remounts. His principal crop was, however, sugar beet-an exceedingly remunerative crop both bounty fed and duty protected by the Government. Since the labor of his own peasantry was not sufficient for the estate in the summer time, he employed a gang of a hundred Polish peasants to supplement it, brought by their own contractor and lodged in barracks built for the purpose. The relations between employers and employed seemed cordial in the extreme -the sick and aged among the peasants were cared for under the Gräfin's own eyes while the Graf was personally acquainted with every man upon his estate. The Gräfin ruled over a large household mainly composed of rough, goodnatured untidy maids, peasant girls off the estate. Her right hand was the cook-housekeeper called "Mamselle" in Pomerania, who had one or more kitchen-maids under her; girls with ambitions, who paid her for the privilege of learning her work. The household was nearly self-supporting, the baker and the butcher were dispensed with; laundry work was done at home -regularly every three months came the "great wash" when peasant labor from without reinforced the maidsunless the right day happened to clash with the hay harvest or an anxious time with the sugar-beet crop. To an English eye housekeeping was a simpler matter here than at home. Breakfast and supper never varied-cold meat, boiled eggs and bread and butter were their chief delicacies. Even for luncheon, the principal meal of the day, there was never any choice of dishes. "Only the rich burgers think it necessary to have any variety," said Gräfin Von Stein; "for myself, I despise people who worry or trouble about their food. It must be good and wholesome, that is enough for me." The Gräfin, a beautiful and singularly intelligent woman, had her own theories on the subject of education, of which simplicity and discipline were the keynotes. Her children, a happy, healthy, vivacious little flock, were brought up in the strictest simplicity. "I only hope I may teach them all to despise luxury and daintiness as much as I do," said she. Schloss Japenzin itself was a bewildering labyrinth of large, uncomfortable, sparsely furnished rooms, opening out of one another, half of them overlooking the farmyard, half a small park of rough turf and ornamental trees. It was not an old house -the medieval home of the Von Steins lay ruined and deserted in the forests near; but it was wretchedly designed, according to modern ideas, especially as regards the servants' quarters. One great advantage Japenzin possessed above its neighbors, for Graf Von Stein, an enlightened man, who had travelled much, had just introduced English sanitation and baths, with hot and cold water supply. Many imposing castles I visited lacked these necessaries and their domestic arrangements would have disgraced an English village inn. The garden craze, so popular in England, had not reached Pomerania. The Japenzin garden, a great walled place, ruled over by a gardener and four garden apprentices, who each paid him a certain premium in order to learn his business, was dependent upon peasant labor for the rest of its work-and in the Graf's opinion garden work always came last. It was not the fashion for the lady of the house to busy herself in the garden, but at a neighboring Schloss its mistress had made some effort to train roses over the inevitable back veranda facing the farmyard. "But my husband's pigs will destroy them, I know," she said plaintively. The idea of fencing the pigs off had evidently not occurred to her. In the summer evenings the veranda overlooking the farm buildings was my favorite place for watching the pageant of farm life when the peasants came back from the fields at sundown. First the geese of the village, flock after flock, walking in orderly troops each to its own pen, all talking together at the top of their voices; with dear little ragged, fair-haired goose girls in attendance, just like Hans Andersen's heroines. Each of the villagers had the right of pasturing so many geese upon the Graf's fields, and in return they were obliged to give him a certain number at their great gooseslaying in the autumn. These geese "Mamselle" and her helpers cured and salted for winter consumption. They and driving the leaders before him. This return from the fields was the only time I ever saw the peasants hurry. They are of German race here, very slow and lethargic, fair-haired and blue-eyed. Their own local rhyme roughly translated well describes them: Every winter is the Pommer it runs. Our own East Anglian peasants are said to be of the same race, but if so, the brightest certainly crossed the sea and left the dullards behind them. The houses of the peasants, picturesque enough without, contained little of interest: one or two old dames still used their spinning-wheels, and a few big, wooden chests, curiously studded with brass nails, were to be seen; the rest of the furniture was poor and plain in the extreme. Some of the oldest "Junker" families, the Von Steins among the number, are of Wendish, not German descent, and bear with their crest the twisted bulls' horns which once distinguished the chiefs of the Wends. "As old as the Von Steins or the devil," runs a local proverb. Also, in spite of much intermixture of German blood, these families often show the high cheek bones which mark a Slavonic kinship. The Wends indeed were among the last of European peoples to embrace Christianity. They martyred very cruelly many of the missionaries who, like St. Adalbert and St. Bruno, came to Prussia to convert them. It |