of the red-brick house-fronts
under the gauze of white fog, the gleams of pale sunlight on the
cuirasses of the mounted soldiers as they receded into the distance.
Sebastian van Storck, confessedly the most graceful performer in all
that skating multitude, moving in endless maze over the vast surface of
the frozen water-meadow, liked best this season of the year for its
expression of a perfect impassivity, or at least of a perfect repose.
The earth was, or seemed to be, at rest, with a breathlessness of
slumber which suited the young man's peculiar temper. The heavy
summer, as it dried up the meadows now lying dead below the ice, set
free a crowded and competing world of life, which, while it gleamed
very pleasantly russet and [82] yellow for the painter Albert Cuyp,
seemed wellnigh to suffocate Sebastian van Storck.

Yet with all his appreciation of the national winter, Sebastian was not
altogether a Hollander. His mother, of Spanish descent and Catholic,
had given a richness of tone and form to the healthy freshness of the
Dutch physiognomy, apt to preserve its youthfulness of aspect far
beyond the period of life usual with other peoples. This mixed
expression charmed the eye of Isaac van Ostade, who had painted his
portrait from a sketch taken at one of those skating parties, with his
plume of squirrel's tail and fur muff, in all the modest pleasantness
of boyhood. When he returned home lately from his studies at a place
far inland, at the proposal of his tutor, to recover, as the tutor
suggested, a certain loss of robustness, something more than that
cheerful indifference of early youth had passed away. The learned man,
who held, as was alleged, the doctrines of a surprising new philosophy,
reluctant to disturb too early the fine intelligence of the pupil
entrusted to him, had found it, perhaps, a matter of honesty to send
back to his parents one likely enough to catch from others any sort of
theoretic light; for the letter he wrote dwelt much on the lad's
intellectual fearlessness. "At present," he had written, "he is
influenced more by curiosity than by a care for truth, according to the
character of the [83] young. Certainly, he differs strikingly from his
equals in age, by his passion for a vigorous intellectual gymnastic,
such as the supine character of their minds renders distasteful to most
young men, but in which he shows a fearlessness that at times makes me
fancy that his ultimate destination may be