What do you want?"

The Tiger answered in Dutch. The farmer had evidently seen him before,
as he bridled angrily.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" came the answer. "You have come back again.
Well, I am sorry we have no forage for you!"

"It is not forage I want. Where is your father? Here is an officer who
must see the 'boss.'"

"I tell you the 'boss' is not here. But will not the officer come in.
Good evening, mister, come in here. I will bring a light!"

The two men were shown into a sitting-room, and the youth disappeared.
A moment later a slender girl of about seventeen whisked into the room
with a lamp, put it on the table, and disappeared. But the light had
shone upon her just long enough to show that she was very comely. The
true Dutch type. Flaxen hair, straight forehead and nose, beautiful
complexion, and faded blue eyes. The farm evidently belonged to people
of some substance. The room, after the manner of the Dutch, was well
furnished. Ponderously decorated with the same lack of proportion
which is to be found in an English middle-class lodging-house.
Harmonium and piano in opposite corners,--crude chromos and distorted
prints upon the walls; artificial flowers, anaemic in colouring and
glass-protected, on the shelves; unwieldy albums on the table; coarse
crotchet drapings on the chairs; the Royal Family in startling
pigments as an over-mantel. For the moment one might have fancied that
it was Mrs Scroggins's best parlour in Woburn Square.

After considerable whispering in the passage, the mother of the
family, supported by two grown daughters and three children with
wide-opened eyes, marched into the room.

"Good evening," and there was a limp handshake all round.

The attitude and expression of the good dame was combative. She was
stout, slovenly, and forty. And the first impression was that she had
once been what her pretty daughter was now at seventeen. There is
nothing of the beauty of dignified age in the Dutch woman past her
prime.

"Where is your man?"[6] asked the Tiger.

"He has gone to Richmond to sell the _scaapen_."[7]

"And your sons?"

"I have no sons."

The Tiger threw open the photograph album on the table, and put his
finger on a recent photo of two hairless youths in bandoliers. The
likeness to the good lady in front of us was unmistakable.

"Who are these?"

"My sister's children," came the glib answer.

"Good," said the Tiger, as he slipped the photograph out. "I shall
keep t