What the Marken folk still speak of as "the great storm"—the worst storm of which there is record in the island's history—set in a good four-and-twenty hours before the December day on which Geert Thysen and Krelis Kess were married. From the Polar ice-fields a rushing and a mighty wind thundered southward over the Arctic Ocean and down across the shallows of the North Sea—sucking away the water from the Baltic, sending a roaring tide out through the English Channel into the Atlantic, and piling higher and higher against the Holland coast a wall of ocean: which broke at the one opening and went pouring onward into the Zuyder Zee.  
Already on the morning of that wild wedding-day the waves were lapping high about[43] Marken, and here and there a dull gleam of water showed where the marshes were overflowed. Just before daybreak the storm lulled a little, but came on again with a fresh force after the unseen sunrise, and grew stronger and stronger as the black day wore on. Down by the little haven the fishermen were gathered in groups anxiously watching their tossing boats—in dread lest in spite of the doubled and tripled moorings they should fetch away. Steadily from the black sky poured downward sheets of rain.
 
According to Marken notions, even a landsman should not have ventured to marry on a day like that; and for a fisherman to marry while such a storm was raging was a sheer tempting of all the forces which work together for evil in the tempests of the sea. Every one expected that the wedding would be put off; and when word was passed around that it was not to be put off, all of the older and steadier folk refused with one voice to have anything to do with it. How Krelis succeeded in inducing the minister to perform the ceremony no one ever knew—for the minister was one of the many that day on Marken who never saw the rising of another sun. He was not well[44] liked, that minister, and stories not to his credit were whispered about him; at least so one of the old women told me—and more than half hinted that what happened to him was a judgment upon him for his sins.
 
Even when the wedding-party came across from the Kerkehof to the Hafenbeurt, some little time before mid-day, the marshes on each side of the raised path were marshes no longer, but open water—that was whipped southward before the gale in little angry waves. There was no chance for a show of finery. The men wore their oil-skins over their Sunday clothes, and the women were wrapped in cloaks and shawls. But it was a company of young dare-devils, that wedding-party, and the members of it came on through the storm laughing and shouting—with Geert and Krelis leading and the gayest madcaps of them all. So far from being dismayed by the roaring tempest, those two wild natures seemed only to be stirred and aroused by it to a fierce happiness. They say that Geert never was so beautiful as she was that day—her face glowing with a strong rich colour, her eyes sparkling with a wonderful brilliancy, her full red lips parted and showing the gleam of those strong white teeth of hers, her[45] lithe............