as in its variety of brilliant
coloring, and worth, as Ben afterward learned, not less than three
hundred dollars.

The floor was of polished wooden mosaic, nearly covered with a rich
carpet bordered with thick black fringe. Another room displayed a margin
of satinwood around the carpet. Hung with tapestry, its walls of crimson
silk were topped with a gilded cornice which shot down gleams of light
far into the polished floor.

Over the doorway of the room in which Jacob and Ben slept was a bronze
stork that, with outstretched neck, held a lamp to light the guests
into the apartment. Between the two narrow beds of carved whitewood and
ebony, stood the household treasure of the Van Gends, a massive oaken
chair upon which the Prince of Orange had once sat during a council
meeting. Opposite stood a quaintly carved clothespress, waxed and
polished to the utmost and filled with precious stores of linen; beside
it a table holding a large Bible, whose great golden clasps looked poor
compared with its solid, ribbed binding made to outlast six generations.

There was a ship model on the mantleshelf, and over it hung an old
portrait of Peter the Great, who, you know, once gave the dockyard cats
of Holland a fine chance to look at a king, which is one of the special
prerogatives of cats. Peter, though czar of Russia, was not too proud to
work as a common shipwright in the dockyards of Saardam and Amsterdam,
that he might be able to introduce among his countrymen Dutch
improvements in ship building. It was this willingness to be thorough
even in the smallest beginnings that earned for him the title of Peter
the Great.

Peter the little (comparatively speaking) was up first, the next
morning; knowing the punctual habits of his brother-in-law, he took good
care that none of the boys should oversleep themselves. A hard task he
found it to wake Jacob Poot, but after pulling that young gentleman out
of bed, and, with Ben's help, dragging him about the room for a while,
he succeeded in arousing him.

While Jacob was dressing and moaning within him because the felt
slippers, provided him as a guest, were too tight for his swollen feet,
Peter wrote to inform their friends at Broek of the safe arrival of
his party at The Hague. He also begged his mother to send word to Hans
Brinker that Dr. Boekman had not yet reached Leyden but that a letter
containing Hans's message had been left at the hotel where the doctor
always lodged during his