have thrown the world away for a glance of a certain pair of blue eyes,
at the bidding of a certain English tongue, whose broken _Nederlandsche
taal_ was to him the sweetest music ever heard on earth--sweeter even
than the strains of the Stradivari when from under his skilful fingers
rose the perfect melodies of old masters. Ay, but the sweet eyes had
been closed in death many a long, long, year, the sweet voice hushed
in silence. He had watched the dear life ebb away, the fire in the
blue eyes fade out. He had felt each day that the clasp of the little
greeting fingers was less close; each day he had seen the outline of the
face grow sharper; and at last there had come one when the poor little
English-woman met him with the gaze of one who knew him not, and
babbled, not of green fields, but of horses and dogs, and of a brother
Jack, who, five years before, had gone down with her Majesty's ship
_Alligator_ in mid-Atlantic.

Ay, but that was many and many a year agone. His young, blue-eyed love
stood out alone in life's history, a thing apart. Of the gentler sex, in
a general way, the old professor had not seen that which had raised it
in his estimation to the level of the one woman over whose memory hung a
bright halo of romance.


Fifteen years had passed away; the old professor of osteology had passed
away with them; and in the large house on the Domplein lived a baron,
with half a dozen noisy, happy, healthy children,--young _fraulas_ and
_jonkheers_,--who scampered up and down the marble passages, and fell
headlong down the steep, narrow, unlighted stairways, to the imminent
danger of dislocating their aristocratic little necks. There was a new
race of neat maids, clad in the same neat livery of lilac and black,
who scoured and cleaned, just as Koosje and Dortje had done in the