es turned to silver, the furred
dresses of the skaters, the warmth of the red-brick house fronts under
the gauze of white fog, the gleams of pale sunlight on the cuirasses of
the mounted soldiers as they receded into the distance. Sebastian van
Storck, confessedly the most graceful performer in all that skating
multitude, moving in endless maze over the vast surface of the frozen
water-meadow, liked best this season of the year for its expression of
a perfect impassivity, or at least of a perfect repose. The earth was,
or seemed to be, at rest, with a breathlessness of slumber which suited
the young man's peculiar temper. The heavy summer, as it dried up the
meadows now lying dead below the ice, set free a crowded and competing
world of life, which, while it gleamed very pleasantly russet and
yellow for the painter Albert Cuyp, seemed wellnigh to suffocate
Sebastian van Storck. Yet with all his appreciation of the national
winter, Sebastian was not altogether a Hollander. His mother, of
Spanish descent and Catholic, had given a richness of tone and form to
the healthy freshness of the Dutch physiognomy, apt to preserve its
youthfulness of aspect far beyond the period of life usual with other
peoples. This mixed expression charmed the eye of Isaac van Ostade, who
had painted his portrait from a sketch taken at one of those skating
parties, with his plume of squirrel's tail and fur muff, in all the
modest pleasantness of boyhood. When he returned home lately from his
studies at a place far inland, at the proposal of his tutor, to
recover, as the tutor suggested, a certain loss of robustness,
something more than that cheerful indifference of early youth had
passed away. The learned man, who held, as was alleged, the doctrines
of a surprising new philosophy, reluctant to disturb too early the fine
intelligence of the pupil entrusted to him, had found it, perhaps, a
matter of honesty to send back to his parents one likely enough to
catch from others any sort of theoretic light; for the letter he wrote
dwelt much on the lad's intellectual fearlessness. "At present," he had
written, "he is influenced more by curiosity than by a care for truth,
according to the character of the young. Certainly, he differs
strikingly from his equals in age, by his passion for a vigorous
intellectual gymnastic, such as the supine character of their minds
renders distasteful to most young men, but in which he shows a
fearlessness that at times mak