the
mark of the bullets on the wall in a little whitewashed space which
bears a Dutch inscription reminding one that here died the father of
his country. The corporal showed me where the assassin had fled. While
I was looking round, with that pensive curiosity that one feels in
places where great crimes have been committed, soldiers were
ascending and descending; they stopped to look at me, and then went
away singing and whistling; some near me were humming; others were
laughing loudly in the courtyard. All this youthful gayety was in
sharp and moving contrast to the sad gravity of those memories, and
seemed like a festival of children in the room where died a
grandparent whose memory we cherish.

Opposite the barracks is the oldest church in Delft. It contains the
tomb of the famous Admiral Tromp, the veteran of the Dutch navy, who
saw thirty-two naval battles, and in 1652, at the battle of the Downs,
defeated the English fleet commanded by Blake. He re-entered his
country with a broom tied to the masthead of the admiral's ship to
indicate that he had swept the English off the seas. Here also is the
tomb of Peter Heyn, who from a simple fisherman rose to be a great
admiral, and took that memorable netful of Spanish ships that had
under their hatches more than eleven million florins; also the tomb of
Leeuwenhoek, the father of the science of the infinitely small--who,
with the "divining-glass," as Parini says, "saw primitive man swimming
in the genital wave." The church has a high steeple surmounted by four
conical turrets. It is inclined like the Tower of Pisa, because the
ground has sunk beneath it. Gerard was imprisoned in one of the cells
of this tower on the night of the assassination.

[Illustration: Refectory of the Convent of St. Agatha, Delft.]

At Rotterdam I had been given a letter to a citizen of Delft asking
him to show me his house. The letter read: "He desires to penetrate
into the mysteries of an old Dutch house; lift for a moment the
curtain of the sanctuary." The house was not hard to find, and as soon
as I saw it I said to myself, "That is the house for me!"

It was a red cottage, one story in height, with a long peaked gable,
situated at the end of a street which stretched out into the country.
It stood almost on the edge of a canal, leaning a little forward, as
if it wished to see its reflection in the water. A pretty linden tree
grew in front which spread over the window like a great fan, and