he staircase.

Then came the chamber of torture, the "Sweating Room," that bare,
whitewashed cell remembered by all Leideners with anguish. There I (and
thousands before and thousands after) had sat to wait my dreaded turn
with the professors behind the green-baize table in the room next door.
There I--among those other nerve-shattered ones--had scribbled my name
and scrawled a sketch or two. "Here sweated Rudolph Brederode," read out
Miss Rivers, with a sweet look, as if she pitied me now for what I
suffered then. But Miss Van Buren showed sublime indifference. She
wished, she said, to pick out names that were really interesting.

Even she, however, was roused to compassion for the tortured ones, when
in the adjoining room she heard that the examinations were conducted
publicly, and that there was no reason why any stranger should not walk
in from the street to hear the victims put to the question.

"It's good for us," I said. "Helps us to pluck and self-control." But
nobody agreed with me, and it was Miss Van Buren's opinion that none
save Dutchmen would stand it.

The Senate Room, which Niebuhr wrote of, found favor in her eyes; but
after that there was nothing more to do in the University, and it was
only six o'clock. There were two hours before the surprise dinner; so,
without giving my secret away, I said that, if we put off dining until
eight, we could see the Laeckenhalle, and go up to the Burg at sunset.

The Laeckenhalle and the Burg were mere names to them, as few scraps are
thrown to either place by the guide-books; but so delighted were they
with the carvings on the house of the Cloth Spinner's Guild and the
marbles in the courtyard that I could hardly get them inside. Once
within, Starr made Miss Van Buren laugh at the things she ought to have
respected and linger before the things I hadn't intended to point out.

But I was not shocked at her flippant delight in a quaint representation
of tortures in hell, nor was I stirred by her scorn of the stiff
siege-pictures, with van der Werf offering his arm as food for the
starving people, rather than surrender to the Spaniards. In spite of her
distaste for the painting, however, she would not hear me decry van der
Werf in favor of an obscure engineer, lately discovered as the true hero
of the siege. Van der Werf should not be snatched from her by a man she
chose to detest, so she argued and abused my treachery during the whole
time spent among the relics of