y
embroidered with gold flowers, the wonderful manufacture of India and
China; and near these brilliant stuffs, large lines set to catch the
voracious eels, which are attracted towards the houses by the garbage
thrown every day from the kitchens into the river.

Craeke, standing on the deck of the boat, saw, across the moving sails
of the windmills, on the slope of the hill, the red and pink house which
was the goal of his errand. The outlines of its roof were merging in the
yellow foliage of a curtain of poplar trees, the whole habitation having
for background a dark grove of gigantic elms. The mansion was situated
in such a way that the sun, falling on it as into a funnel, dried up,
warmed, and fertilised the mist which the verdant screen could not
prevent the river wind from carrying there every morning and evening.

Having disembarked unobserved amid the usual bustle of the city,
Craeke at once directed his steps towards the house which we have just
described, and which--white, trim, and tidy, even more cleanly scoured
and more carefully waxed in the hidden corners than in the places which
were exposed to view--enclosed a truly happy mortal.

This happy mortal, rara avis, was Dr. van Baerle, the godson of
Cornelius de Witt. He had inhabited the same house ever since his
childhood, for it was the house in which his father and grandfather, old
established princely merchants of the princely city of Dort, were born.

Mynheer van Baerle the father had amassed in the Indian trade three or
four hundred thousand guilders, which Mynheer van Baerle the son, at the
death of his dear and worthy parents, found still quite new, although
one set of them bore the date of coinage of 1640, and the other that
of 1610, a fact which proved that they were guilders of Van Baerle the
father and of Van Baerle the grandfather; but we will inform the reader
at once that these three or four hundred thousand guilders were only the
pocket money, or sort of purse, for Cornelius van Baerle, the hero of
this story, as his landed property in the province yielded him an income
of about ten thousand guilders a year.

When the worthy citizen, the father of Cornelius, passed from time into
eternity, three months after having buried his wife, who seemed to have
departed first to smooth for him the path of death as she had smoothed
for him the path of life, he said to his son, as he embraced him for the
last time,--

"Eat, drink, and spend your mone