earts, our lips smiling, our eyes sparkling
in response to his; almost forgetting the genius of the artist who
portrayed him in the very realism of the personality which literally
seems to breathe and palpitate and certainly to laugh to us out of the
canvas.

Those twinkling eyes! how well we know them! that laugh! we can almost
hear it; as for the swagger, the devil-may-care arrogance, do we not
condone it, seeing that it has its mainspring behind a fine straight
brow whose noble, sweeping lines betray an undercurrent of dignity and
of thought.

And yet no biographer has--so far as is known to the author of this
veracious chronicle--ever attempted to tell us anything of this man's
life, no one has attempted hitherto to lift the veil of anonymity which
only thinly hides the identity of the Laughing Cavalier.

But here in Haarlem--in the sleepy, yet thriving little town where he
lived, the hard-frozen ground in winter seems at times to send forth a
memory-echo of his firm footstep, of the jingling of his spurs, and the
clang of his sword, and the old gate of the Spaarne through which he
passed so often is still haunted with the sound of his merry laughter,
and his pleasant voice seems still to rouse the ancient walls from
their sleep.

Here too--hearing these memory-echoes whenever the shadows of evening
draw in on the quaint old city--I had a dream. I saw him just as he
lived, three hundred years ago. He had stepped out of the canvas in
London, had crossed the sea and was walking the streets of Haarlem just
as he had done then, filling them with his swagger, with his engaging
personality, above all with his laughter. And sitting beside me in the
old tavern of the "Lame Cow," in that self-same tap-room where he was
wont to make merry, he told me the history of his life.

Since then kind friends at Haarlem have placed documents in my hands
which confirmed the story told me by the Laughing Cavalier. To them do I
tender my heartfelt and grateful thanks. But it is to the man
himself--to the memory of him which is so alive here in Haarlem--that I
am indebted for the true history of his life, and therefore I feel that
but little apology is needed for placing the true facts before all those
who have known him hitherto only by his picture, who have loved him only
for what they guessed.

The monograph which I now present with but few additions of minor
details, goes to prove what I myself had known long ago, namely, that