e greeted with courtesy many
acquaintances among the crowd through which he passed. He entered the
hall and listened in silence to the sentence condemning him to be
immediately executed with the sword. Van Dyk and Korenwinder shared the
same doom, but were provisionally taken back to prison.

Groeneveld then walked calmly and gracefully as before from the hall to
the scaffold, attended by his own valet, and preceded by the
provost-marshal and assistants. He was to suffer, not where his father
had been beheaded, but on the "Green Sod." This public place of execution
for ordinary criminals was singularly enough in the most elegant and
frequented quarter of the Hague. A few rods from the Gevangen Poort, at
the western end of the Vyverberg, on the edge of the cheerful triangle
called the Plaats, and looking directly down the broad and stately
Kneuterdyk, at the end of which stood Aremberg House, lately the
residence of the great Advocate, was the mean and sordid scaffold.

Groeneveld ascended it with perfect composure. The man who had been
browbeaten into crime by an overbearing and ferocious brother, who had
quailed before the angry waves of the North Sea, which would have borne
him to a place of entire security, now faced his fate with a smile upon
his lips. He took off his hat, cloak, and sword, and handed them to his
valet. He calmly undid his ruff and wristbands of pointlace, and tossed
them on the ground. With his own hands and the assistance of his servant
he unbuttoned his doublet, laying breast and neck open without suffering
the headsman's hands to approach him.

He then walked to the heap of sand and spoke a very few words to the vast
throng of spectators.

"Desire of vengeance and evil counsel," he said, "have brought me here.
If I have wronged any man among you, I beg him for Christ's sake to
forgive me."

Kneeling on the sand with his face turned towards his father's house at
the end of the Kneuterdyk, he said his prayers. Then putting a red velvet
cap over his eyes, he was heard to mutter:

"O God! what a man I was once, and what am I now?"

Calmly folding his hands, he said, "Patience."

The executioner then struck off his head at a blow. His body, wrapped in
a black cloak, was sent to his house and buried in his father's tomb.

Van Dyk and Korenwinder were executed immediately afterwards. They were
quartered and their heads exposed on stakes. The joiner Gerritsen and the
three sailors had already