ear it, but stands
quite alone with its adjoining miller's hut nestling close up against it
like a tiny chick beside the mother hen, and dominates the mud flats and
lean pastures which lie for many leagues around.

On this day which was the fourth of the New Year, these mud flats and
the pasture land lay under a carpet of half-melted snow and ice which
seemed to render the landscape more weird and desolate, and the molens
itself more deserted and solitary. Yet less than half a league away the
pointed gables and wooden spires of Ryswyk break the monotony of the
horizon line and suggest the life and movement pertaining to a city,
however small. But life and movement never seem to penetrate as far as
this molens; they spread their way out toward 'S Graven Hage and the
sea.

Nature herself hath decreed that the molens shall remain solitary and
cut off from the busy world, for day after day and night after night

throughout the year a mist rises from the mud flats around and envelops
the molens as in a shroud. In winter the mist is frosty, in summer at
times it is faintly tinged with gold, but it is always there and through
it the rest of the living world--Ryswyk and 'S Graven Hage and Delft
further away only appear as visions on the other side of a veil.

Just opposite the molens, some two hundred paces away to the east, the
waters of the Schie rush with unwonted swiftness round the curve; so
swiftly in fact that the ice hardly ever forms a thick crust over them,
and this portion of an otherwise excellent waterway is--in the
winter--impracticable for sleighs.

Beyond this bend in the river, however, less than half a league away,
there is a wooden bridge, wide and strongly built, across which it is
quite easy for men and beasts to pass who have come from the south and
desire to rejoin the great highway which leads from Delft to Leyden.

In the morning of that same fourth day in the New Year, two men sat
together in what was once the weighing-room of the molens; their fur
coats were wrapped closely round their shoulders, for a keen
north-westerly wind had found its way through the chinks and cracks of
tumble-down doors and ill-fitting window frames.

Though a soft powdery veil--smooth as velvet to the touch and made up of
flour and fine dust-lay over everything, and the dry, sweet smell of
corn still hung in the close atmosphere, there was little else in this
room now that suggested the peaceful use for which it had be