I have calculated that our firm, during the last fifty years,
has gained four hundred thousand guilders by Stern. Our connexion
dates from the beginning of the continental system, when we smuggled
Colonial produce and such like things from Heligoland. No, I won't
reduce the brokerage.

I went to the Polen coffee-house, ordered pen and paper, and wrote:--

"That because of the many honoured commissions received from North
Germany, our business transactions had been extended"--(it is
the simple truth)--"and that this necessitated an augmentation of
our staff"--(it is the truth: no more than yesterday evening our
bookkeeper was in the office after eleven o'clock to look for his
spectacles);--"that, above all things, we were in want of respectable,
educated young men to conduct the German correspondence. That,
certainly, there were many young Germans in Amsterdam, who possessed
the requisite qualifications, but that a respectable firm"--(it is
the very truth),--"seeing the frivolity and immorality of young men,
and the daily increasing number of adventurers, and with an eye to
the necessity of making correctness of conduct go hand in hand with
correctness in the execution of orders"--(it is the truth, I observe,
and nothing but the truth),--"that such a firm--I mean Last and Co.,
coffee-brokers, 37 Laurier Canal--could not be anxious enough in
engaging new hands."

All that is the simple truth, reader. Do you know that the young
German who always stood at the Exchange, near the seventeenth pillar,
has eloped with the daughter of Busselinck and Waterman? Our Mary,
like her, will be thirteen years old in September.