n hand for that
very liberal allotment of stock which he gave himself for his trouble in
getting up the New York and Rangoon Petroleum Company, is very likely
half or a quarter as rich as he says.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE TULIPOMANIA.

Alboni, the singer, had an exquisitely sweet voice, but was a very big
fat woman. Somebody accordingly remarked that she was an elephant that
had swallowed a nightingale. About as incongruous is the idea of a
nation of damp, foggy, fat, full-figured, broad-sterned, gin-drinking,
tobacco-smoking Dutchmen in Holland, going crazy over a flower. But they
did so, for three or four years together. Their craze is known in
history as the Tulipomania, because it was a mania about tulips.

Just a word about the Dutchmen first.

These stout old fellows were not only hardy navigators, keen
discoverers, ingenious engineers, laborious workmen, able financiers,
shrewd and rich merchants, enthusiastic patriots and tremendous
fighters, but they were eminently distinguished (as they still are to a
considerable extent) by a love of elegant literature, poetry, painting,
music and other fine arts, including horticulture. It was a Fleming that
invented painting in oils. Before him, white of egg was used, or
gum-water, or some such imperfect material, for spreading the color.
Erasmus, one of the most learned, ready-minded, acute, graceful and
witty scholars that ever lived, was a Dutchman. All Holland and
Flanders, in days when they were richer, and stronger compared with the
rest of the world than they are now, were full of singing societies and
musical societies and poetry making societies. The universities of
Leyden and Utrecht and Louvain are of highly an ancient European fame.
And as for flowers, and bulbs in particular, Holland is a principal home
and market of them now, more than two hundred years after the time I am
going to tell of.

Tulips grow wild in Southern Russia, the Crimea and Asia Minor, as
potatoes do in Peru. The first tulip in Christian Europe was raised in
Augsburg, in the garden of a flower-loving lawyer, one Counsellor
Herwart, in the year 1559, thirteen years after Luther died. This tulip
bulb was sent to Herwart from Constantinople. For about eighty years
after this the flower continually increased in repute and became more
and more known and cultivated, until the fantastic eagerness of the
demand for fine ones and the great prices that they brought, resulted in
a real mania