e
representation of the limpid element.

This innocent magic, the fruit at the same time of child-like musings
and of manly genius--this patient untiring labour, of which Boxtel knew
himself to be incapable--made him, gnawed as he was with envy, centre
all his life, all his thoughts, and all his hopes in his telescope.

For, strange to say, the love and interest of horticulture had not
deadened in Isaac his fierce envy and thirst of revenge. Sometimes,
whilst covering Van Baerle with his telescope, he deluded himself into a
belief that he was levelling a never-failing musket at him; and then he
would seek with his finger for the trigger to fire the shot which was
to have killed his neighbour. But it is time that we should connect with
this epoch of the operations of the one, and the espionage of the other,
the visit which Cornelius de Witt came to pay to his native town.

Chapter 7. The Happy Man makes Acquaintance with Misfortune

Cornelius de Witt, after having attended to his family affairs, reached
the house of his godson, Cornelius van Baerle, one evening in the month
of January, 1672.

De Witt, although being very little of a horticulturist or of an
artist, went over the whole mansion, from the studio to the green-house,
inspecting everything, from the pictures down to the tulips. He thanked
his godson for having joined him on the deck of the admiral's ship "The
Seven Provinces," during the battle of Southwold Bay, and for having
given his name to a magnificent tulip; and whilst he thus, with the
kindness and affability of a father to a son, visited Van Baerle's
treasures, the crowd gathered with curiosity, and even respect, before
the door of the happy man.

All this hubbub excited the attention of Boxtel, who was just taking his
meal by his fireside. He inquired what it meant, and, on being informed
of the cause of all this stir, climbed up to his post of observation,
where in spite of the cold, he took his stand, with the telescope to his
eye.

This telescope had not been of great service to him since the autumn of
1671. The tulips, like true daughters of the East, averse to cold, do
not abide in the open ground in winter. They need the shelter of the
house, the soft bed on the shelves, and the congenial warmth of the
stove. Van Baerle, therefore, passed the whole winter in his laboratory,
in the midst of his books and pictures. He went only rarely to the room
where he kept his bulbs, unless it