e gambling transactions, and though the cure was very severe
because very sudden, they preferred to let "the bottom drop out" of the
whole affair at once. So it did. Almost everybody was either ruined or
impoverished. The very few who had kept any or all of their gains by
selling out in season, remained so far rich. And the vast actual
business interests of Holland received a damaging check, from which it
took many years to recover.

There were some curious incidents in the course of the tulipomania. They
have been told before, but they are worth telling again, as the poet
says, "To point the moral or adorn the tale."

A sailor brought to a rich Dutch merchant news of the safe arrival of a
very valuable cargo from the Levant. The old hunks rewarded the mariner
for his good tidings with one red herring for breakfast. Now Ben Bolt
(if that was his name--perhaps as he was a Dutchman it was something
like Benje Boltje) was very fond of onions, and spying one on the
counter as he went out of the store, he slipped it into his pocket, and
strolling back to the wharf, sat down to an odoriferous breakfast of
onions and herring. He munched away without finding anything unusual in
the flavor, until just as he was through, down came Mr. Merchant,
tearing along like a madman at the head of an excited procession of
clerks, and flying upon the luckless son of Neptune, demanded what he
had carried off besides his herring?

"An onion that I found on the counter."

"Where is it? Give it back instantly!"

"Just ate it up with my herring, mynheer."

Wretched merchant! In a fury of useless grief he apprised the sailor
that his sacrilegious back teeth had demolished a Semper Augustus
valuable enough, explained the unhappy old fellow, to have feasted the
Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder's whole court. "Thieves!" he cried
out--"Seize the rascal!" So they did seize him, and he was actually
tried, condemned and imprisoned for some months, all of which however
did not bring back the tulip root. It is a question after all in my
mind, whether that sailor was really as green as he pretended, and
whether he did not know very well what he was taking. It would have been
just like a reckless seaman's trick to eat up the old miser's twelve
hundred dollar root, to teach him not to give such stingy gifts next
time.

An English traveller, very fond of botany, was one day in the
conservatory of a rich Dutchman, when he saw a strange bulb lying on