Soon there was a general rush to another room, where stood a table, covered with the finest and whitest of linen damask. Each child, in a flutter of excitement, laid a shoe upon it. The door was then carefully locked, and its key hidden in the mother’s bedroom. Next followed goodnight kisses, a grand family procession to the upper floor, merry farewells at bedroom doors, and silence, at last, reigned in the Van Gleck mansion.
Early the next morning the door was solemnly unlocked and opened in the presence of the assembled household, when lo! a sight appeared, proving Saint Nicholas to be a saint of his word!
Every shoe was filled to overflowing[94], and beside each stood many a colored pile. The table was heavy with its load of presents – candies, toys, trinkets, books, and other articles. Everyone had gifts, from the grandfather down to the baby.
Little Katy clapped her hands with glee and vowed inwardly that the cat should never know another moment’s grief[95].
Hendrick capered about the room, flourishing a superb bow and arrows over his head. Hilda laughed with delight as she opened a crimson box and drew forth its glittering contents. The rest chuckled and said “Oh!” and “Ah!” over their treasures, very much as we did here in America on last Christmas Day.
With her glittering necklace in her hands, and a pile of books in her arms, Hilda stole towards her parents and held up her beaming face for a kiss. There was such an earnest, tender look in her bright eyes that her mother breathed a blessing as she leaned over her.
“I am delighted with this book. Thank you, Father,” she said, touching the top one with her chin. “I shall read it all day long.”
“Aye, sweetheart,” said mynheer, “you cannot do better. There is no one like Father Cats[96]. If my daughter learns his Moral Emblems by heart, the mother and I may keep silent. The work you have there is the Emblems – his best work. You will find it enriched with rare engravings from Van de Venne.”
Considering that the back of the book was turned away, mynheer certainly showed a surprising familiarity with an unopened volume, presented by Saint Nicholas. It was strange, too, that the saint should have found certain things made by the elder children and had actually placed them upon the table, labeled with parents’ and grandparents’ names. But all were too much absorbed in happiness to notice slight inconsistencies. Hilda saw, on her father’s face, the rapt expression he always wore when he spoke of Jakob Cats, so he put her armful of books upon the table and resigned herself to listen.
“Old Father Cats, my child, was a great poet, not a writer of plays like the Englishman, Shakespeare, who lived in his time. I have read them in the German and very good they are – very, very good – but not like Father Cats. Cats sees no daggers in the air; he has no white women falling in love with dusky Moors; no young fools sighing to be a lady’s glove; no crazy princes mistaking respectable old gentlemen for rats. No, no. He writes only sense.[97] It is great wisdom in little bundles, a bundle for every day of your life. You can guide a state with Cats’s poems, and you can put a little baby to sleep with his pretty songs. He was one of the greatest men of Holland. When I take you to The Hague, I will show you the Kloosterkerk where he lies buried. THERE was a man for you to study, my sons! He was good through and through. What did he say?
“O Lord, let me obtain this from Thee
To live with patience, and to die with pleasure!
“Did patience mean folding his hands? No, he was a lawyer, statesman, ambassador, farmer, philosopher, historian, and poet. He was keeper of the Great Seal of Holland! He was a – Bah! there is too much noise here, I cannot talk.” And mynheer, looking with great astonishment into the bowl of his meerschaum, for it had gone out[98], nodded to his vrouw and left the apartment in great haste.
The fact is, his discourse had been accompanied throughout with a subdued chorus of barking dogs, squeaking cats, and bleating lambs, to say nothing of a noisy ivory cricket that the baby was whirling with infinite delight. At the last, little Huygens, taking advantage of the increasing loudness of mynheer’s tones, had ventured a blast on his new trumpet, and Wolfert had hastily attempted an accompaniment on the drum. This had brought matters to a crisis, and it was good for the little creatures that it had. The saint had left no ticket for them to attend a lecture on Jakob Cats. It was not an appointed part of the ceremonies. Therefore when the youngsters saw that the mother looked neither frightened nor offended, they gathered new courage. The grand chorus rose triumphant, and frolic and joy reigned supreme.
Good Saint Nicholas! For the sake of the young Hollanders, I, for one, am willing to acknowledge him and defend his reality against all unbelievers.
Carl Schummel was quite busy during that day, assuring little children, confidentially, that not Saint Nicholas but their own fathers and mothers had produced the oracle and loaded the tables. But WE know better than that.
And yet if this were a saint, why did he not visit the Brinker cottage that night? Why was that one home, so dark and sorrowful, passed by?
What the Boys Saw and Did in Amsterdam
“Are we all here?” cried Peter, in high glee, as the party assembled upon the canal early the next morning, equipped for their skating journey. “Let me see. As Jacob has made me captain, I must call the roll[99]. Carl Schummel, you here?”
“Ya!”
“Jacob Poot!”
“Ya!”
“Benjamin Dobbs!”
“Ya-a!”
“Lambert van Mounen!”
“Ya!”
“That’s lucky! Couldn’t get on without YOU, as you’re the only one who can speak English. Ludwig van Holp!”
“Ya!”
“Voostenwalbert Schimmelpenninck!”
No answer.
“Ah, the little rogue has been kept at home! Now, boys, it’s just eight o’clock – glorious weather, and the Y is as firm as a rock. We’ll be at Amsterdam in thirty minutes. One, two, three, START!”
True enough, in less than half an hour they had crossed a dike of solid masonry and were in the very heart of the great metropolis of the Netherlands – a walled city of ninety-five islands and nearly two hundred bridges. Although Ben had been there twice since his arrival in Holland, he saw much to excite wonder, but his Dutch comrades, having lived nearby all their lives, considered it the most matter-of-course place in the world[100]. Everything interested Ben: the tall houses with their forked chimneys and gable ends facing the street; the merchants’ ware rooms, perched high up under the roofs of their dwellings, with long, armlike cranes hoisting and lowering goods past the household windows; the grand public buildings erected upon wooden piles driven deep into the marshy ground; the narrow streets; the canals crossing the city everywhere; the bridges; the locks; the various costumes; and, strangest of all, shops and dwellings crouching close to the fronts of the churches, sending their long, disproportionate chimneys far upward along the sacred walls.
If he looked up, he saw tall, leaning houses, seeming to pierce the sky with their shining roofs. If he looked down, there was the queer street, without crossing or curb – nothing to separate the cobblestone pavement from the footpath of brick – and if he rested his eyes halfway, he saw complicated little mirrors (spionnen) fastened upon the outside of nearly every window, so arranged that the inmates of the houses could observe all