adder which led to a square hole in the
floor above. We followed, all but Lady MacNairne, who would not go
because Tibe could not, and at the top of the hole were two little boxes
of rooms with beds in the wall--stuffy, unmade beds, which perhaps the
landlord and some members of the family had slept in.

"This is going to be an adventure," said Nell; but her voice did not
sound very cheerful, and I felt I could have cried when I heard that she
and I would have to bunk together in the wall, in a two-foot wide bed
smelling like wet moss.

We were dying for tea, or even coffee, but it seemed useless to ask for
it, as apparently there were no servants, and the landlord went back to
his cleaning the instant we had scrambled down the ladder.

"Perhaps," said I, "we can find a _cafe_, if we go out and explore."

So we went, followed by beggars for the first time in Holland, and it
was a hideous island, with no sign of a _cafe_ or anything else nice, or
even clean. All was as unlike as possible to the ideas we had formed of
the dear little Hollow Land. There were dead cats, and bad eggs, and old
bones lying about the oozy gutters, and people shouted disagreeable
things at us from their doorways.

Mr. Starr tried to be merry, but it was as difficult, even for him, as
making jokes in the tumbril on the way to have your head cut off, and
Lady MacNairne said at last that she would much rather have hers cut off
than stay seventeen more hours in such a ghastly hole.

"I simply can't and won't, and you shan't, either!" she exclaimed.
"We've been here an hour, and it seems a month. Somehow we must get
away."

Poor Nell was sadly crushed. She admitted that she had made a horrible
mistake, which she regretted more for our sakes than her own, though she
herself was so bored that she felt a decrepit wreck, a hundred years
old.

"But the steamer doesn't come back till eight or nine to-morrow morning.
I'm afraid we'll have to grin and bear it till then," said Mr. Starr.

"I can't grin, and I won't bear it," replied Lady MacNairne. "Dearest
Ronny, you are a man, and we look to you to get us away from here."

Poor Mr. Starr stared wildly out to sea, as if he would call a bark of
some sort from the vasty deep; but there was nothing to be seen except
an endless expanse of gray water. Nell had torn her dress on a
barbed-wire fence which shut us away from the only spot of green on the
hideous island; Tibe had unfortunately eaten part of