Café Brinkmann through some inches of water. At a table opposite,
sipping their coffee, were two men strikingly like two of Frans Hals'
arquebusiers. Yet how unlike. For the air of masterful recklessness had
gone, that good-humoured glint of power in the eye was no more. Hals
had painted conquerors, or at any rate warriors for country; these
coffee drinkers were meditating profit and loss. Where once was
authority is now calculation.

I quote a little poem by Mr. Van Lennep of Zeist, near Utrecht,
which shows that the Dutch, whatever their present condition, have
not forgotten:--


The shell, when put to child-like ears,
Yet murmurs of its bygone years,
In echoes of the sea;
The Dutch-born youngster likes the sound,
And ponders o'er its mystic ground
And wondrous memory.

Thus, in Dutch hearts, an echo dwells,
Which, like the ever-mindful shells,
Yet murmurs of the sea:
That sea, of ours in times of yore,
And, when De Ruyter went before,
Our road to victory.