h a delicate oscillation that was
charming.

The Amstel took her time to get into Rotterdam, and when her passengers
had gone ashore the next forenoon the train that carried Breckon to The
Hague in the same compartment with the Kentons was in no greater hurry.
It arrived with a deliberation which kept it from carrying them on to
Amsterdam before they knew it, and Mrs. Kenton had time to place such
parts of the wars in the Rise of the Dutch Republic as she could attach
to the names of the stations and the general features of the landscape.
Boyne was occupied with improvements for the windmills and the
canal-boats, which did not seem to him of the quality of the Michigan
aerometers, or the craft with which he was familiar on the Hudson River
and on the canal that passed through Tuskingum. Lottie, with respect
to the canals, offered the frank observation that they smelt, and in
recognizing a fact which travel almost universally ignores in Holland,
she watched her chance of popping up the window between herself and
Boyne, which Boyne put down with mounting rage. The agriculture which
triumphed everywhere on the little half--acre plots lifted fifteen
inches above the waters of the environing ditches, and the black and
white cattle everywhere attesting the immemorial Dutch ideal of a cow,
were what at first occupied Kenton, and he was tardily won from them to
the question of fighting over a country like that. It was a concession
to his wife's impassioned interest in the overthrow of the Spaniards in
a landscape which had evidently not changed since. She said it was hard
to realize that Holland was not still a republic, and she was not very
patient with Breckon's defence of the monarchy on the ground that the
young Queen was a very pretty girl.

"And she is only sixteen," Boyne urged.

"Then she is two years too old for you," said Lottie.

"No such thing!" Boyne retorted. "I was fifteen in June."

"Dear me! I should never have thought it," said his sister.

Ellen seemed hardly to look out of the window at anything directly, but
when her father bade her see this thing and that, it seemed that she had
seen it already. She said at last, with a quiet sigh, "I never want to
go away."

She had been a little shy of Breckon the whole morning, and had kept him
asking himself whether she was sorry she had walked so long with him the
night before, or, having offered him due reparation for her family, she
was again dropping him. N