sons ye have heard
From those old teachers taught of God.

"Yet think not unto them was lent
All light for all the coming days,
And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
In making straight the ancient ways.

"The living fountain overflows
For every flock, for every lamb,
Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."

He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
With tears of love and partings fond,
They floated down the creeping Maas,
Along the isle of Ysselmond.

They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
And grated soon with lifting keel
The sullen shores of Fatherland.

No home for these!--too well they knew
The mitred king behind the throne;
The sails were set, the pennons flew,
And westward ho! for worlds unknown.

--And these were they who gave us birth,
The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
Who won for us this virgin earth,
And freedom with the soil they gave.

The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,
--In alien earth the exiles lie,
--Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
His words our noblest battle-cry!

Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!

VIII

There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were going
on. There is no particular change that I can think of in the aspect
of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were quietly
playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this smooth surface
of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show themselves some
fine morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes. I have been
watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet. You
may laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble
myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like
ours. Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,--a
beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to
Nature's women, turned loose among live men.

-Terrible fact?

Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost heaven
for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who
mad