proach of some graceless profligate.

But though the good woman had to come down to these humble means of
subsistence, yet she still kept up a feeling of family pride, having
descended from the Vanderspiegels, of Amsterdam; and she had the
family arms painted and framed, and hung over her mantel-piece. She
was, in truth, much respected by all the poorer people of the place;
her house was quite a resort of the old wives of the neighbourhood;
they would drop in there of a winter's afternoon, as she sat knitting
on one side of her fire-place, her cat purring on the other, and the
tea-kettle singing before it; and they would gossip with her until
late in the evening. There was always an arm-chair for Peter de
Groodt, sometimes called Long Peter, and sometimes Peter Longlegs, the
clerk and sexton of the little Lutheran church, who was her great
crony, and indeed the oracle of her fire-side. Nay, the Dominie
himself did not disdain, now and then, to step in, converse about the
state of her mind, and take a glass of her special good cherry-brandy.
Indeed, he never failed to call on new-year's day, and wish her a
happy new year; and the good dame, who was a little vain on some
points, always piqued herself on giving him as large a cake as any one
in town.

I have said that she had one son. He was the child of her old age; but
could hardly be called the comfort--for, of all unlucky urchins, Dolph
Heyliger was the most mischievous. Not that the whipster was really
vicious; he was only full of fun and frolic, and had that daring,
gamesome spirit, which is extolled in a rich man's child, but
execrated in a poor man's. He was continually getting into scrapes:
his mother was incessantly harassed with complaints of some waggish
pranks which he had played off; bills were sent in for windows that he
had broken; in a word, he had not reached his fourteenth year before
he was pronounced, by all the neighbourhood, to be a "wicked dog, the
wickedest dog in the street!" Nay, one old gentleman, in a
claret-coloured coat, with a thin red face, and ferret eyes, went so
far as to assure Dame Heyliger, that her son would, one day or other,
come to the gallows!

Yet, notwithstanding all this, the poor old soul loved her boy. It
seemed as though she loved him the better, the worse he behaved; and
that he grew more in her favour, the more he grew out of favour with
the world. Mothers are foolish, fond-hearted beings; there's no
reasoning them ou