the boys reached the street.
"He ought to be sent to jail at once. If I had been in your place,
Peter, I certainly should have killed him outright!"

"He was fortunate, then, in falling into gentler hands," was Peter's
quiet reply. "It appears he has been arrested before under a charge of
housebreaking. He did not succeed in robbing this time, but he broke the
door-fastenings, and that I believe constitutes a burglary in the eyes
of the law. He was armed with a knife, too, and that makes it worse for
him, poor fellow!"

"Poor fellow!" mimicked Carl. "One would think he was your brother!"

"So he is my brother, and yours too, Carl Schummel, for that matter,"
answered Peter, looking into Carl's eye. "We cannot say what we might
have become under other circumstances. WE have been bolstered up from
evil, since the hour we were born. A happy home and good parents might
have made that man a fine fellow instead of what he is. God grant that
the law may cure and not crush him!"

"Amen to that!" said Lambert heartily while Ludwig van Holp looked at
his brother in such a bright, proud way that Jacob Poot, who was an only
son, wished from his heart that the little form buried in the old church
at home had lived to grow up beside him.

"Humph!" said Carl. "It's all very well to be saintly and forgiving,
and all that sort of thing, but I'm naturally hard. All these fine
ideas seem to rattle off me like hailstones--and it's nobody's business,
either, if they do."

Peter recognized a touch of good feeling in this clumsy concession.
Holding out his hand, he said in a frank, hearty tone, "Come, lad, shake
hands, and let us be good friends, even if we don't exactly agree on all
questions."

"We do agree better than you think," sulked Carl as he returned Peter's
grasp.

"All right," responded Peter briskly. "Now, Van Mounen, we await
Benjamin's wishes. Where would he like to go?"

"To the Egyptian Museum?" answered Lambert after holding a brief
consultation with Ben.

"That is on the Breedstraat. To the museum let it be. Come, boys!"

The Beleaguered Cities

"This open square before us," said Lambert, as he and Ben walked on
together, "is pretty in summer, with its shady trees. They call it the
Ruine. Years ago it was covered with houses, and the Rapenburg Canal,
here, ran through the street. Well, one day a barge loaded with forty
thousand pounds of gunpowder, bound for Delft, was lying alongside, and
the barge