of honest and industrious fishermen, but time had changed
all that. They had been remodelled to suit the demands of business, and
every house had now on the lower floor an expensive little shop with
monsieur sitting complacently at the door and madame, fat and voluble,
at the money-drawer, and on the floor above, a still more expensive
suite of rooms to let--rooms panelled in white and gold, resplendent
with rococo mouldings, and crowded with abominable furniture, intended
to be coquettish--gilt chairs, scalloped tables, embroidered
lambrequins, ottomans smothered in plush and fringe, beds draped with
curtains until they were all but air-tight--in effect more French than
France.

Here and there between the houses, a glimpse might be had of the low
country beyond, with its sluggish canal choked with rushes, a dingy
windmill here and there, and stretching away on either side the flat
meadows crinkling with yellow grain, and the green pastures dotted with
huge black-and-white cattle. A narrow road, straight as a line in
Euclid, and bordered by a row of trees each the counterpart of all the
others, mounted toward the horizon, leading, principally, to a low,
yellow house about a mile away, displaying above its door the
appropriate motto, "Lust en Rust." There, either in the cool,
vine-shaded garden, in the long, low-ceilinged dining-room, or in some
smaller and more ornate apartment, one might breakfast, dine, what not,
in the fashion of the country--which, for the most part, meant the
drinking of a muddy liquid with an unpronounceable name and the eating
of wafelen and poffertjes, and of little cheeses calculated to appal the
strongest stomach.

The shops and the landscape--the cosmopolitan crowd with its Babel of
many tongues--the great hotels, built of stucco in the nouveau-riche
style so rasping to sensitive nerves--the striped awnings, the low
balconies, the gaudy house-fronts--all these our heroines looked at and
commented on and revelled in with the joy of fresh and unspoiled youth.
It was life they were tasting--strange, interesting, intoxicating
life--and they drank deep of it.

As they neared the hotel entrance, they saw coming from the other
direction, pushed by two men, an invalid chair. They stood aside to let
it pass, and its occupant, carefully wrapped in a great steamer-rug,
glanced up at them with a quizzical light in his eyes.

They shrank back together against the wall with a simultaneous gasp of
dism