t if the consequences are
to be as you fear, I am ready at once to get into the chest again and be
carried back to prison."

But she answered, "No; whatever comes of it, we have you here and will do
all that we can to help you on."

Grotius being faint from his sufferings, the lady brought him a glass of
Spanish wine, but was too much flustered to find even a cloak or shawl to
throw over him. Leaving him sitting there in his very thin attire, just
as he had got out of the chest, she went to the front warehouse to call
her husband. But he prudently declined to go to his unexpected guest. It
would be better in the examination sure to follow, he said, for him to
say with truth that he had not seen him and knew nothing of the escape,
from first to last.

Grotius entirely approved of the answer when told to him. Meantime Madame
Daatselaer had gone to her brother-in-law van der Veen, a clothier by
trade, whom she found in his shop talking with an officer of the
Loevestein garrison. She whispered in the clothier's ear, and he, making
an excuse to the officer, followed her home at once. They found Grotius
sitting where he had been left. Van der Veen gave him his hand, saying:

"Sir, you are the man of whom the whole country is talking?"

"Yes, here I am," was the reply, "and I put myself in your hands--"

"There isn't a moment to lose," replied the clothier. "We must help you
away at once."

He went immediately in search of one John Lambertsen, a man in whom he
knew he could confide, a Lutheran in religion, a master-mason by
occupation. He found him on a scaffold against the gable-end of a house,
working at his trade.

He told him that there was a good deed to be done which he could do
better than any man, that his conscience would never reproach him for it,
and that he would at the same time earn no trifling reward.

He begged the mason to procure a complete dress as for a journeyman, and
to follow him to the house of his brother-in-law Daatselaer.

Lambertsen soon made his appearance with the doublet, trunk-hose, and
shoes of a bricklayer, together with trowel and measuring-rod. He was
informed who his new journeyman was to be, and Grotius at once put on the
disguise.

The doublet did not reach to the waistband of the trunkhose, while those
nether garments stopped short of his knees; the whole attire belonging to
a smaller man than the unfortunate statesman. His delicate white hands,
much exposed by the shortness