It was his delight to prance about the garden
with his steed between his legs, and a flowerstick in his hand.

A little way from the garden there was a hillock with a few small trees
upon it. Here he could lie in ambush and keep watch far and wide over
the heathery levels and the open sea.

He never failed to descry one danger or another drawing near; either
suspicious-looking boats on the beach, or great squadrons of cavalry
advancing so cunningly that they looked like nothing but a single horse.
But Ansgarius saw through their stealthy tactics; he wheeled Bucephalus
about, tore down from the mound and through the garden, and dashed at a
gallop into the farm-yard. The hens shrieked as if their last hour
had come, and Burgomaster Nansen flew right against the Pastor's study
window.

The Pastor hurried to the window, and just caught sight of Bucephalus's
tail as the hero dashed round the corner of the cow-house, where he
proposed to place himself in a posture of defence.

"That boy is deplorably wild," thought the Pastor. He did not at all
like all these martial proclivities. Ansgarius was to be a man of peace,
like the Pastor himself; and it was a positive pain to him to see how
easily the boy learned and assimilated everything that had to do with
war and fighting.

The Pastor would try now and then to depict the peaceful life of the
ancients or of foreign nations. But he made little impression. Ansgarius
pinned his faith to what he found in his book; and there it was nothing
but war after war. The people were all soldiers, the heroes waded in
blood; and it was fruitless labor for the Pastor to try to awaken the
boy to any sympathy with those whose blood they waded in.

It would occur to the Pastor now and again that it might, perhaps,
have been better to have filled the young head from the first with more
peaceful ideas and images than the wars of rapacious monarchs or the
murders and massacres of our forefathers. But then he remembered that he
himself had gone through the same course in his boyhood, so that it must
be all right. Ansgarius would be a man of peace none the less--and if
not! "Well, everything is in the hand of Providence," said the Pastor
confidingly, and set to work again at his sermon.

"You're quite forgetting your lunch to-day, father," said a blond head
in the door-way.

"Why, so I am, Rebecca; I'm a whole hour too late," answered the father,
and went at once into the dining-room.

The fa