teamboat captain slid his gangplank.
Thereupon Tine slipped her pretty little feet into her white
sabots--she and Johann have been called in church since--and walked
straight over to the Holland Arms. Johann now fights the steamboat
captain, backed not only by the landlord of the Arms, who rubs his
hands in glee over the possession of two of his competitor's best
servants, but by the whole coterie of painters whose boots Johann
blacks, whose kits be packs and unpacks, whose errands he runs; while
Tine, no less loyal and obliging, darns their stockings, mends their
clothes, sews on buttons, washes brushes, stretches canvases, waits on
table, rings the dinner-bell, and with her own hands scrubs every
square inch of visible surface inside and out of this quaint old inn in
this sleepy old town of Dort-on-the-Maas--side-walks, windows,
cobbles--clear to the middle of the street, her ruddy arms bare to the
elbow, her sturdy, blue-yarn-stockinged legs thrust into snow-white
sabots to keep her trim feet from the wet and slop.

Built in 1620, this inn of the Holland Arms--so the mildewed brick in
the keystone over the arch of the doorway says--and once the home of a
Dutchman made rich by the China trade, whose ships cast anchor where
Fop Smit's steamboats now tie up (I have no interest in the Line); a
grimy, green-moulded, lean-over front and moss-covered, sloping-roof
sort of an inn, with big beams supporting the ceilings of the bedrooms;
lumbering furniture blackened with the smoke of a thousand pipes
flanking the walls of the coffee-room; bits of Delft a century old
lining the mantel; tiny panes of glass with here and there a bull's-eye
illumining the squat windows; rows of mugs with pewter tops crowding
the narrow shelves beside the fireplace, and last, and by no means
least, a big, bulky sun-moon-and-stars clock, with one eye always open,
which strikes the hours as if it meant to beat the very life out of
them.

But there is something more in this coffee-room--something that neither
Mynheer Boudier of the Bellevue nor any other landlord in any other
hostelry, great or small, up and down the Maas, can boast. This is the
coffee-room picture gallery--free to whoever comes.

It began with a contribution from the first impecunious painter in
payment of an overdue board-bill, his painting being hung on a nail
beside the clock. Now; all over the walls--above the sideboard with its
pewter plates and queer mugs; over the mantel h