When the sea was calm and everything normal, my skill as a swimmer was just sufficient to carry me safely over the deep places to the nearest sandbank.  But if the conditions were less favorable, or if by chance I let myself down too soon, so that I had no solid ground beneath my feet, I was frightened, sometimes almost to death.  Luckily I always managed to get out, though not by myself.  Strength and help came from some other source.

Another danger of water which I was destined to undergo had no connection with the sea, but occurred on the river, close by the “Bulwark,” not five hundred paces from our house.  I shall tell about it later; but first I wish to insert here another little occurrence, in which no help of an angel was needed.

I was not good at swimming, nor at steering or rowing; but one of the things I could do well, very well indeed, was walking on stilts.  According to our family tradition we came from the region of Montpelier, whereas I personally ought by rights to be able, in view of my virtuosity as a stilt-walker, to trace my ancestry back to the Landes, where the inhabitants are, so to speak, grown fast to their stilts, and hardly take them off when they go to bed.  To make a long story short, I was a brilliant stilt-walker, and in comparison with those of the western Garonne region, the home of the very low stilts, I had the advantage that I could not get my buskins high enough to suit me, for the little blocks of wood fastened on the inner side of my stilts were some three feet high.  By taking a quick start and running the ends of the two poles slantingly into the ground I was able to swing myself without fail upon the stilt-blocks and to begin immediately my giant stride.  Ordinarily this was an unremunerative art, but on a few occasions I derived real profit from it, when my stilts enabled me to escape storms that were about to break over my head.  That was in the days just after Captain Ferber, who had served out his time with the “Neufchatellers,” retired on a pension and moved to Swinemuende.  Ferber, whom the Swinemuenders called Teinturier, the French translation of his name, because of his relation to Neufchatel, came of a very good family, was, if I mistake not, the son of a high official in the ministry of finance, who could boast of long-standing relations to the Berlin Court, dating back to the war times of the year 1813.  This was no doubt the reason why the son, in spite of the fact that he did not belong to the nobility and was of German extraction—­the Neufchatel officers were in those days still for the most part French-Swiss—­was permitted to serve with the elite battalion, where he was well liked, because he was clever, a good comrade, and an author besides.  He wrote novelettes after the fashions then in vogue.  But in spite of his popularity he could not hold his position, because his fondness for coffee and cognac, which soon became restricted to the latter, grew upon him so rapidly that he was forced to retire.  His removal to Swinemuende was doubtless due to the fact that seaports are better suited for such passions than are inland cities.  Fondness for cognac attracts less attention.