ll it," said Cousin Robert. "It's good for driving; never
much dust or mud; and when you motor it gives grip to the 'pneus.' It
wouldn't do for us of the Netherlands to leave our roads bare."

"Why, what would happen?" I bent toward him to ask. "Would the bottom of
Holland drop out?"

"I think yes," he replied, seriously. "The saying is that there has been
as much of sand laid on the road between Rotterdam and The Hague as
would reach the top of the cathedral spire at Amsterdam, which you will
see one day."

"Dear me, and yet it's so low and flat, now," soliloquized Phil. "Lower
than the canals."

"It is nothing here to some places. We work hard to save the country we
have made with our hands, we Netherlanders. All the streets and gardens
of Rotterdam, and other towns too, sink down and down; but we are used
to that. We do not stop to care, but go to work adding more steps up to
the houses, so we can get in at our doors."

"I think you are wonderful," said Phyllis.

"I have not done very much myself," modestly replied Cousin Robert.

"But you would if necessary. I'm sure you'd have been like the little
boy who saw the trickle of water coming out of the dyke, and put his
thumb----"

"Phil, if you bring up that story I'll ask Cousin Robert van Buren to
run into a windmill and kill you," I shrieked over her shoulder.

"But I would not do that," said he. Oh yes, he really was wonderful, my
cousin Robert.

"There is a spot to interest an American," he deigned to fling a sop to
me, nodding vaguely upward at some roofs on the River Maas. "Did you
ever hear of Oude Delftshaven, cousin? But I don't suppose you have."

"Indeed I have!" I shrieked at him. "I wouldn't be a true descendant of
Knickerbocker stock if I hadn't. On July 22, 1620, some Pilgrim Fathers
(I'm not sure whether they were fathers then or afterwards) set sail
from Oude Delftshaven for America."

(I didn't think it necessary to explain that, Knickerbocker as I was, I
had absorbed this fact only the other day in "reading up" Holland.)

I was still more inclined to be reticent as to the newness of my
knowledge when it appeared that Phil knew something of a poem on the
subject by Mrs. Hemans. I could not allow my English stepsister to be
better informed than I concerning a country which I already began to
regard as a sort of confiscated family estate that ought to have been
mine.

We were going fast now, so fast that the tears came to my eyes as th