they came together to-night with no fear of falling out, and spoiling
the musical interludes of Madame van Storck in the large back parlour.
A little way behind the other guests, three of them together, son,
grandson, and the grandfather, moving slowly, came the
Hondecoeters--Giles, Gybrecht, and Melchior. They led the party before
the house was entered, by fading light, to see the curious poultry of
the Burgomaster go to roost; and it was almost night when the
supper-room was reached at last. The occasion was an important one to
Sebastian, and to others through him. For (was it the music of the
duets? he asked himself next morning, with a certain distaste as he
remembered it all, or the heady Spanish wines poured out so freely in
those narrow but deep Venetian glasses?) on this evening he approached
more nearly than he had ever yet done to Mademoiselle van Westrheene,
as she sat there beside the clavecin looking very ruddy and fresh in
her white satin, trimmed with glossy crimson swans-down.

So genially attempered, so warm, was life become, in the land of which
Pliny had spoken as scarcely dry land at all. And, in truth, the sea
which Sebastian so much loved, and with so great a satisfaction and
sense of wellbeing in every hint of its nearness, is never far distant
in Holland. Invading all places, stealing under one's feet, insinuating
itself everywhere along an endless network of canals (by no means such
formal channels as we understand by the name, but picturesque rivers,
with sedgy banks and haunted by innumerable birds) its incidents
present themselves oddly even in one's park or woodland walks; the ship
in full sail appearing suddenly among the great trees or above the
garden wall, where we had no suspicion of the presence of water. In the
very conditions of life in such a country there was a standing force of
pathos. The country itself shared the uncertainty of the individual
human life; and there was pathos also in the constantly renewed,
heavily-taxed labour, necessary to keep the native soil, fought for so
unselfishly, there at all, with a warfare that must still be maintained
when that other struggle with the Spaniard was over. But though
Sebastian liked to breathe, so nearly, the sea and its influences,
those were considerations he scarcely entertained. In his passion for
Schwindsucht--we haven't the word--he found it pleasant to think of the
resistless element which left one hardly a foot-space amidst the