Yours very truly,
LAURITZ BOLDEMANN SEEHUS,
Late Master-Pilot.

KRYDSVIG, April 13, 1889.

MR. EDITOR,

About the rotten feet on the sheep, which animal I by nature despise, on account of its cowardice and a tremendous silliness, the one running after the other, but if a man will plague himself with farming who has been a sailor from his mother’s apron-string, he must keep these beasts and others like his neighbours, although he understands nothing, or very little, about the whole tribe.  So I have upon my small patch of ground two good ewes, with little wit, but wool, and I sent them long before Yule to a ram at Boerevig, one of the fine kind from Scotland, as folk bothered me that I must do it, because of the breed and the wool and many things, but not a rotten foot did I hear of until after much jangling among folk and a great to-do among the learned and such like, which is nothing new to me in that kind of folk, who always and always stand behind each other’s backs, crying with a loud cry, ’It was not my fault,’ but, faith, it was.  So I say to myself, ’What shall I do with these rotten feet from Scotland, if I get the disease ingrafted, and likewise upon the innocent offspring,’ who are already toddling about all three, because there were two in the one ewe.  But foreign sickness is not a thing to be afflicted with, at a time when we have scab among our sheep and much else, and more than I know of, and thus I turned my look again and again to that Government, to see if it will ever gather sense.  But yet the Government had not so very rotten feet in that other important matter of a Sheriff, whom we got with unexpected smartness and promptness, much to our gain and the reverse, when we think of what the man now is, but there must be a skipper all the same.  And now it is growing light all over the world; that is, in our hemisphere, for spring has come upon us with extraordinary quickness, and the ice, it went with Peder-Varmestol, [Footnote:  February 22nd.] and the lapwing, she came one morning with her back shining as if she had been polished out of bronze, with her crest erect, and throwing herself about in the air like a dolphin in the sea, with her head down and her tail up, crying and screaming.  But the lark is really the silliest creature, to sing on without ceasing the livelong day, and the sea-pie has come, and stands bobbing upon the same stone as last year, and the wild-goose and the water-wagtail.  So we are all cheered up again, all the men of Jaederen, and the cod bites, too, for those who have time, but folk are mostly carting sea-weed, and ploughing and sowing, not without grumbling in some places, but the work must be done.

Yours very truly,
L.B.  SEEHUS.

KRYDSVIG, July 1, 1889.

MR. EDITOR,