smuggling, but to learn how far French smuggling could annoy
English trade. These men appeared convinced; they were
effectively so. D'Artagnan was quite sure that at the first
debauch when thoroughly drunk, one of the two would divulge
the secret to the whole band. His game appeared infallible.

A fortnight after all we have said had taken place at
Calais, the whole troop assembled at the Hague.

Then D'Artagnan perceived that all his men, with remarkable
intelligence, had already travestied themselves into
sailors, more or less ill-treated by the sea. D'Artagnan
left them to sleep in a den in Newkerke street, whilst he
lodged comfortably upon the Grand Canal. He learned that the
king of England had come back to his old ally, William II.
of Nassau, stadtholder of Holland. He learned also that the
refusal of Louis XIV. had a little cooled the protection
afforded him up to that time, and in consequence he had gone
to reside in a little village house at Scheveningen,
situated in the downs, on the sea-shore, about a league from
the Hague.

There, it was said, the unfortunate banished king consoled
himself in his exile, by looking, with the melancholy
peculiar to the princes of his race, at that immense North
Sea, which separated him from his England, as it had
formerly separated Mary Stuart from France. There behind the
trees of the beautiful wood of Scheveningen on the fine sand
upon which grows the golden broom of the down, Charles II.
vegetated as it did, more unfortunate, for he had life and