IN GREAT WATERS - 1901 -- Contents -- PAGE THE WRATH O F THE ZUYDER ZEE . . . . . . 3 A DULUTH T RAGEDY . . . . . . . . . 65 THE D EATH-FIRE O S F L a M ABTIGUES . 135 A SEA UPCAST . . . . . . . . . . . 171 The Wrath of the Zuyder Zee The Wrath of the Zuyder Zee 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 knem that he could lay a strange binding curse upon people. The younger of them, resolving this concept into simpler terms, knem 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 erer they had known. Therefore, while they jeered, they jeered circumspect-3 In Great Waters Jy.. Out ip the open-on the brick-paved path- . C. L L b p a p y vhb t . r averse the low marsh-land and unite the little knolls on which are the villages the Hafenbeurt where the harbour is, the lierkehof, 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 fly ing after them, and that certainly mould 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 The young men and women of Marken, who never had known old Jaap save as a mad man, felt toward him much as the children 4 The Wrath of the Zuyder Zee did though as they got older, and came to - 1lnderstand the cause of his madness and the effectiveness of his curse, their dread of him was apt to take on a more serious cast. Even Krelis liess, a notorious daredevil in all other directions, and for a long while one of old Jaaps most persistent tormentors, came in the end to treat him with a very obliging civility. But then, to be sure, Marretje de Witt was old Jaaps granddaughter-and everybody in Narken knem that this gentle Marretje, because of her very unlikeness to him it was supposed, had made capture of Krelis Kesss much too vagrant heart. One person, it is true, did dissent from this view of the matter, and that was Geert Thysen-who declared that Iirelis was too much of a man really to care for a pale-faced thing fit only to marry another oyster like herself...