"If you mean stomach, Sir, you will not have reason to be disappointed,"
retorted the Alderman, a little more severely than was usual with one so
callous. "The heiress of Myndert Van Beverout will not be a penniless
bride, and Monsieur Barbérie did not close the books of life without
taking good care of the balance-sheet--but yonder are those devils of
ferrymen quitting the wharf without us! Scamper ahead, Brutus, and tell
them to wait the legal minute. The rogues are never exact; sometimes
starting before I am ready, and sometimes keeping me waiting in the sun,
as if I were no better than a dried dun-fish. Punctuality is the soul of
business, and one of my habits does not like to be ahead, nor behind his
time."

In this manner the worthy burgher, who would have been glad to regulate
the movements of others, on all occasions, a good deal by his own, vented
his complaints, while he and his companion hurried on to overtake the
slow-moving boat in which they were to embark. A brief description of the
scene will not be without interest, to a generation that may be termed
modern in reference to the time of which we write.

A deep narrow creek penetrated the island, at this point, for the distance
of a quarter of a mile. Each of its banks had a row of buildings, as the
houses line a canal in the cities of Holland. As the natural course of the
inlet was necessarily respected, the street had taken a curvature not
unlike that of a new moon. The houses were ultra-Dutch, being low,
angular, fastidiously neat, and all erected with their gables to the
street. Each had its ugly and inconvenient entrance, termed a stoop, its
vane or weathercock, its dormer-windows, and its graduated
battlement-walls. Near the apex of one of the latter, a little iron crane
projected into the street. A small boat, of the same metal, swung from its
end,--a sign that the building to which it was appended was the