coldly; and not even my tales of tapestry, lace,
old silver, and, above all, Persian carpets, to be seen behind the
veiled windows, could arouse the ladies' curiosity. It was well enough
to have built Amsterdam in concentric crescents, with the Heerengracht
in the center, and to say arbitrarily that the further you went
outwards, the further you descended in the social scale. That
distinction might do for the townspeople; as for them, they would rather
live in a black and brown house in the Keizergracht, with a crane and
pulley in one of the gables, and white frames on the windows, than in
this dull street of wealth and fashion.

"Even half a house, with a whole door of my own, like most middle-class
Dutch houses, would be nicer," said Nell. "Yes, I could be happy in 'a
_boven huis_,' with my little stairway and hall quite to myself."

But when I had shown her my favorite bit of Amsterdam, she became
unfaithful to the Keizergracht, and its picturesque fellows.

To reach this bit, we turned from the roar of a noisy street, and were
at once in the calm of a monastic cloister.

It was like opening a door in the twentieth century, and falling down a
step into the seventeenth, to find Time lying enchanted in a spell of
magic sleep.

What we saw was a spacious quadrangle with an old-fashioned, flowery
garden in the midst, and ranged round it pretty little houses, each one
a gem of individuality. There was a church, too, a charming,
forgotten-looking church; and in the quadrangle nothing stirred but
gleams of light on polished windows and birds which hopped about on the
pavement as if it had been made for them.

"I believe they're the inhabitants of the place, who've hurriedly
changed into birds just while we are here, but will change back into
little, trim old ladies and old gentlemen," whispered Nell; for it
seemed sacrilege to break the silence.

With that, a house door opened, and just such an old lady as she
described came out.

"Oh, she didn't know we were here. She won't have time to get into her
birdhood now," chuckled Nell, "so she's making the best of it. But see,
she's turned to warn her husband."

"She hasn't any husband," said I.

"How can you tell?" asked the girl.

"If she had, she couldn't live here," I explained, "because this is the
Begynenhof, half almshouse, half nunnery, which has been kept up since
our great year, 1574. But oddly enough the chapel of the sisterhood who
established it, has be