“You will not, either.”

“Not, either?  Upon my word, that sounds strange, as though, after all, it were possible.  You seek to make Kessin interesting to me, but you carry it a trifle too far.  And have you many such foreigners in Kessin?”

“A great many.  The whole population is made up of such foreigners, people whose parents and grandparents lived in an entirely different region.”

“Most remarkable.  Please tell me more about them.  But no more creepy stories.  I feel that there is always something creepy about a Chinaman.”

“Yes, there is,” laughed Geert, “but the rest, thank heaven, are of an entirely different sort, all mannerly people, perhaps a little bit too commercial, too thoughtful of their own advantage, and always on hand with bills of questionable value.  In fact, one must be cautious with them.  But otherwise they are quite agreeable.  And to let you see that I have not been deceiving you I will just give you a little sample, a sort of index or list of names.”

“Please do, Geert.”

“For example, we have, not fifty paces from our house, and our gardens are even adjoining, the master machinist and dredger Macpherson, a real Scotchman and a Highlander.”

“And he still wears the native costume?”

“No, thank heaven, he doesn’t, for he is a shriveled up little man, of whom neither his clan nor Walter Scott would be particularly proud.  And then we have, further, in the same house where this Macpherson lives, an old surgeon by the name of Beza, in reality only a barber.  He comes from Lisbon, the same place that the famous general De Meza comes from.  Meza, Beza; you can hear the national relationship.  And then we have, up the river by the quay, where the ships lie, a goldsmith by the name of Stedingk, who is descended from an old Swedish family; indeed, I believe there are counts of the empire by that name.  Further, and with this man I will close for the present, we have good old Dr. Hannemann, who of course is a Dane, and was a long time in Iceland, has even written a book on the last eruption of Hekla, or Krabla.”

“Why, that is magnificent, Geert.  It is like having six novels that one can never finish reading.  At first it sounds commonplace, but afterward seems quite out of the ordinary.  And then you must also have people, simply because it is a seaport, who are not mere surgeons or barbers or anything of the sort.  You must also have captains, some flying Dutchman or other, or—­”

“You are quite right.  We even have a captain who was once a pirate among the Black Flags.”

“I don’t know what you mean.  What are Black Flags?”

“They are people away off in Tonquin and the South Sea—­But since he has been back among men he has resumed the best kind of manners and is quite entertaining.”

“I should be afraid of him nevertheless.”

“You don’t need to be, at any time, not even when I am out in the country or at the Prince’s for tea, for along with everything else that we have, we have, thank heaven, also Rollo.”