friend the watchman, who lived in a small shack, built in a
sheltered corner of the gallery. He looked after the clock
and was a father to the bells, and he warned of fires, but he
enjoyed many free hours and then he smoked a pipe and
thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost
fifty years before and he had rarely read a book, but he
had lived on the top of his tower for so many years that he had
absorbed the wisdom of that wide world which surrounded him
on all sides.

History he knew well, for it was a living thing with him.
``There,'' he would say, pointing to a bend of the river, ``there,
my boy, do you see those trees? That is where the Prince of
Orange cut the dikes to drown the land and save Leyden.''
Or he would tell me the tale of the old Meuse, until the broad
river ceased to be a convenient harbour and became a wonderful
highroad, carrying the ships of De Ruyter and Tromp upon
that famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the
sea might be free to all.

Then there were the little villages, clustering around the
protecting church which once, many years ago, had been the
home of their Patron Saints. In the distance we could see the
leaning tower of Delft. Within sight of its high arches,
William the Silent had been murdered and there Grotius had
learned to construe his first Latin sentences. And still further
away, the long low body of the church of Gouda, the early home
of the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of
many an emperor, the charity-boy whom the world came to
know as Erasmus.