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