money of the two hundred families--nine hundred souls--had been paid had
absconded.

They could go neither forward nor back. Days, weeks, months passed, and
there still lay the great hulk teeming with its population and swinging
idly at anchor; fathers gazing wistfully over the high bulwarks, mothers
nursing their babes, and the children, Eva, Daniel, Henry, Andrew,
Dorothea, Salome, and all the rest, by hundreds.

Salome was a pretty child, dark, as both her parents were, and looking
much like her mother; having especially her black hair and eyes and her
chin. Playing around with her was one little cousin, a girl of her own
age,--that is, somewhere between three and five,--whose face was
strikingly like Salome's. It was she who in later life became Madame Karl
Rouff, or, more familiarly, Madame Karl.

Provisions began to diminish, grew scanty, and at length were gone. The
emigrants' summer was turned into winter; it was now December. So pitiful
did their case become that it forced the attention of the Dutch
Government. Under its direction they were brought back to Amsterdam, where
many of them, without goods, money, or even shelter, and strangers to the
place and to the language, were reduced to beg for bread.

But by and by there came a word of great relief. The Government offered a
reward of thirty thousand gilders--about twelve thousand dollars--to any
merchant or captain of a vessel who would take them to America, and a
certain Grandsteiner accepted the task. For a time he quartered them in
Amsterdam, but by and by, with hearts revived, they began to go again on
shipboard. This time there were three ships in place of the one; or two
ships, and one of those old Dutch, flattish-bottomed, round-sided,