Her name was Koosje van Kampen, and she lived in Utrecht, that most
quaint of quaint cities, the Venice of the North.

All her life had been passed under the shadow of the grand old Dom Kerk;
she had played bo-peep behind the columns and arcades of the ruined,
moss-grown cloisters; had slipped up and fallen down the steps leading
to the _grachts_; had once or twice, in this very early life, been
fished out of those same slimy, stagnant waters; had wandered under the
great lindens in the Baan, and gazed curiously up at the stork's nest
in the tree by the Veterinary School; had pattered about the
hollow-sounding streets in her noisy wooden _klompen_; had danced and
laughed, had quarrelled and wept, and fought and made friends again,
to the tune of the silver chimes high up in the Dom--chimes that were
sometimes old _Nederlandsche_ hymns, sometimes Mendelssohn's melodies
and tender "Lieder ohne Worte."

But that was ever so long ago, and now she had left her romping
childhood behind her, and had become a maid-servant--a very dignified
and aristocratic maid-servant indeed--with no less a sum than eight
pounds ten a year in wages.

She lived in the house of a professor, who dwelt on the Munster
Kerkhoff, one of the most aristocratic parts of that wonderfully
aristocratic city; and once or twice every week you might have seen her,
if you had been there to see, busily engaged in washing the red tile
and blue slate pathway in front of the professor's house. You would have
seen that she was very pleasant to look at, this Koosje, very comely
and clean, whether she happened to be very busy, or whether it had been
Sunday, and, with her very best gown on, she was out for a promenade in
the Baan, after duly going to service as regularly as the Sabbath dawned