"Tired us out? No, indeed, you haven't," cried the girls in a breath;
and one of the girls was Hope, who had come in softly just as Kate had
begun to read, and who now added,--
"It's lovely to listen to anything when you read it, Kate."
"Isn't it!" took up Myra. "Miss Marr ought to pay Kate a salary for the
good she does in this history business. I hate to _study_ it; I always
get all in a wabble with the dates and the names and the places, and by
and by, when I try to tell about it or think about it, I get a
fifteenth-century king into the sixteenth century just as likely as not.
But when Kate picks out her little nuggets of gold from the mass, and
sets them before me, I begin to see daylight."
"So do I, so do I!" cried Anna Fleming; "and another thing,--I am not
ashamed to ask Kate ignorant questions."
"Nor I," declared Myra; and then they all laughed, and Myra followed up
the laugh by immediately proceeding to ask two or three of these
"ignorant questions,"--the first being, "If Spain had possession of
Breda, what does it mean by the Italian infantry and cavalry being there
to defend it?"
"It means that at that time," answered Kate, "Philip II., called Philip
the Prudent, had possession of the better portion of Italy, with other
territory that he had gobbled up, and so, of course, he made use of
Italian soldiers."
"Who was Lewis William?"
"He was the stadt of Friesland,--Friesland was part of the Netherlands."
"Oh, and what became of the dare-devil skipper,--Van der Berg,--your
ancestor?"
"Oh, he didn't come to anything wonderful,--he 'fought and bled' in
freedom's cause like most of those Dutchmen, I suppose."
"But there was a family of Van _den_ Bergs who were cousins to Maurice,"
here spoke up Hope. "Were these any relations to Van der Berg, the
skipper?"
"Oh, no,--we didn't descend from princes and counts," laughed Kate.
"I don't believe but that it _is_ the Van den you belong to, anyway,"
said Anna.
"Nonsense," cried Kate; "if we 'belong,' as you say, to a family of that
early day, it is to the dare-devil Van der Bergs, and that's good enough
for me. My brother Schuyler ought to hear you give preference to the Van
_den_ Bergs. He would be ready to fight a duel with you; for, from a
little boy, he has been perfectly enchanted with that story of the
dare-devil, and when we were all at home five years ago,--little things
of ten and eleven and twelve,--we used to play the story, and we called
it 'The Siege of Breda.' It was when we were up at our summer place on
the Hudson. It was such fun. We had a queer little cottage on the place,
that had a lot of gables and turrets. It was unoccupied, except as a
sort of storehouse for fruit; and this cottage we called 'the castle.' A
rather wide stream of water runs through the grounds, and broadens out
into a sort of miniature lake at the foot of the garden. It was just
across this broader part, where it was also quite deep, that the cottage
showed its turrets and gables, and we got the gardener and one of the
stable men to build up a sort of palisade of bricks and stones and
boards all about it. Inside this we made a guard-house, and the arsenal
was in the castle itself. Then we knew an old sailor who fixed up our
little yacht, made a cabin and hold, where the boys crept in,--the boys
who represented the attacking party, the seventy Hollanders,--and we
packed around them a lot of dry moss we had prepared, to represent turf.
Mr. Brown--our old sailor--also fixed up something that did duty for a
water-gate. Well, when we had got everything as near to our minds as
possible, we dressed ourselves up in our costumes,--oh, yes, we had
regular costumes. My uncle Schuyler said it was a real history lesson
for us, and he should do all he could to help it along; and so he hunted
up some books that had the illustrations of the costumes of that time,
and we got mamma and a seamstress we had to help us make up suits for
us."
"And did _you_ take part?" asked Myra.
"Did _I_ take part? Well, I should think I did. _I_ was Captain Charles
de Heraugiere, if you please. And oh, the cunning little suit I had,--a
regular fighting suit of imitation leather and a rough-looking sort of
stuff like frieze, and a sort of waistcoat of chamois skin, and then a
dear little hat with a feather;--oh, and boots with tops that came 'way
up to the knee-bend. We made the tops ourselves of mock leather, russet
color, and sewed them to our russet shoes. Oh, it was _such_ fun!"
"But your brother--what character did he take?"
"Oh, there was but one character that _he_ would take, and that was the
dare-devil boatman who stood on the deck and joked with the purchasers
of the peat. You should have seen Schuyler as he did it. It was
moonlight, for mamma and papa wouldn't let us play it as we wanted to on
a dark night, for there might be an accident; but we ran the boat down
by some sheltering bushes, and the boys who took the part of the
purchasers from the castle stood in the lighter place where the
moonlight fell, and that left the place where our hidden soldiers were
quite dusky and mysterious. But Schuyler stood in the light, the moon
shining straight in his face. His suit was a good deal rougher than
mine, but a good deal like it; only he had a cap on, and that was pushed
back, and he looked so handsome and bold when he joked and laughed and
answered the purchasers. Then when we soldiers stole out of the ship
where we were in hiding--What! how could I see Schuyler when I was
hidden? Oh, I peeped through the moss. And how many boys had we? Oh,
twenty in all,--about eight in the boat,--it wouldn't hold any more; but
the eight of them made _such_ a show in their costumes. They were all
our neighbors and close friends, the whole twenty of them. Four were the
Dyker brothers, and the Burton boys with _their_ cousins who had come up
a-visiting them from Philadelphia; and there were our boys and the Van
Loons and Delmars to make up the twenty. But, as I was saying, when we
soldiers stole up out of the vessel, and I marched at the head of my
band, the dare-devil _would_ lead the way. I told him it was all out of
order, but he declared that Captain Heraugiere _couldn't_ know the way
as the dare-devil who had carried the peat so often must know it, and
that of course he must be guided; so I had to give in.
"We started our play at the point where the officer of the guard puts off
from the castle in a skiff, and comes on board our vessel; then, after
that, we slip down through the water-gate,--of course we don't have any
leak,--the Burton boys and the Van Loons come to the shore and drag us
into the harbor and make the vessel fast, close to the guard-house. It
was just after that, you know, that the dare-devil receives the
purchasers, and goes through all that joking and sending the people off,
saying that he was tired. And then I followed as Captain Heraugiere; and
what do you think!--Schuyler at first wanted to be Captain Heraugiere
too. He said he could easily manage it; but it was when he found he
wouldn't be allowed to gobble up the two characters, he insisted upon
showing the captain the way, and so he stuck to me all through,
flourishing his wooden sword on the slightest excuse. But how we did lay
about us! Whack, whack, we knocked over the Burtons, and all the rest of
the Italians, with the young Lanzavecchia at their head; and then came
the great end of the victory, the arrival of Hohenlo with the vanguard
of Maurice's troops, and then Prince Maurice himself with his fine
attendants,--his counts and admirals, and these were the Van Loons and
the Burtons again, who had rigged themselves up in other clothes,--nice
honest Dutch clothes to play the Netherlander parts. So we turned and
twisted our twenty boys, just as they do on the stage, and you'd have
thought there were a host of them. Well, when the vanguard arrived, we
all joined together and marched into the town--that is, around our
grounds and into the castle, the Dyker brothers, who are musical,
playing the national air with a drum and fife and cornet, and some of
the rest of us, breaking out now and then at the top of our voices into
the chorus,--
'Wilhelmus van Nassouwen
Ben ick van Duytsem bloed,'
which means,
'William from Nassau,
I am from German blood.'
William from Nassau, you know, was the great Prince of Orange.
"And marching to this playing and singing, we entered the castle,--our
cottage,--where a table had been set with a lot of Dutch dainties, made
by our German cook, Wilhelmina, who had lived in Holland and knew
everything about the dear little Dutch cakes and things they eat there.
Then, after we had partaken of the feast, the table was carried out, and
we danced to our heart's content. Oh, we did have such a good time, and
we kept it up every year until we got too old for it."
"What fun it _must_ have been!" cried Myra. "I wish I could have been
there; but didn't you have any other girl but yourself in the play with
those twenty boys?"
"No, not in the play; but we had plenty of girls as spectators and at
the feast and dancing."
"And did you ever make a play out of any other historical incident?"
asked Anna Fleming.
"Yes, several; and I think that is the reason why historical events
became so fixed in my mind, and I got so interested in reading history.
It began by accident, as you might say,--that is, by Schuyler's delight
in the Van der Berg story, and insisting on playing it. It's the best
way in the world, let me tell you, to play history like this,--it
teaches you more than any ordinary study possibly can, and you find that
through it you get events and epochs perfectly clear in your mind, and
everything by and by spreads out before you like reality."
"I wish Miss Marr would let us have history lessons this way," said
Myra.
"Perhaps she will, some time, if Kate tells her what she has told us,"
said Anna, hopefully; "and you _will_ tell her some time, won't you,
Kate?"
"Yes, I'll tell her, but I don't think it is the thing to do in school
days; you ought to get it up in the summer, during vacations. It would
interfere with other studies to go into all the preparation and work of
such performances in school."
"Did you ever like any other of your plays as well as the Siege?" asked
Hope.
"No, never; but what made you ask that, Hope?"
"Because it was so stirring and out-door-sy, and the boatman was so
jolly and brave, I thought it wasn't possible that there could have been
another story quite so playable as that."
"I said the Van der Bergs were proud of only one thing,--this
performance of the boatman; but there was another of our ancestors of a
later day who is very interesting, I think, and just as plucky and brave
in another way."
"Oh!" ejaculated Anna Fleming, with such an air of anticipation that
they all laughed, for they all knew Anna's weakness for ancestors; and
this "Oh," said very plainly, "Now we are to hear of something more
worth while than an old boatman, something probably about those
aristocratic Knickerbocker ancestors of Kate's."
Kate herself, thoroughly appreciating Anna's state of mind, went on
demurely: "This ancestor was my mother's great-great-grandfather. He was
the son of a small farmer in England, and he came to New York a poor
boy, with only a few shillings in his pocket; and with these few
shillings he started, and, working at all sorts of things,--as a
stevedore, and anything else he could find to do,--he at last worked his
way up to a little clerkship in a little mercantile house, and from
there he climbed step by step into a bigger clerkship, in the same
little house, and then step by step into a clerkship in a big house,
until after a while, after all sorts of working and waiting and
hardships, he came to be at the head of the big house, and one of the
first merchants of the day in New York. We have in our family now one of
those English shillings that he brought over and saved for luck when he
was working on the wharves, and we keep it for luck; and there
is a packet of old letters and a diary he kept, telling the
whole story, that we have too. Oh, yes, we are very proud of our
great-great-great-grandfather, I can tell you," smiling up at the girls.
"But where did those lovely old shoe-buckles and gold buttons, and that
old silver with the V. der B. engraved on it, that I saw when I visited
you,--where did those come from, if that boatman was the only Dutch
ancestor you had that you were proud of?" anxiously and disappointedly
asked Anna here.
"Oh, they came from some of the later V. der B.'s; some descendants that
had nothing specially interesting about them,--were not heroes of any
kind, but just rich old burghers."
"But weren't they what are called the Knickerbocker families?"
"Yes; but you know how that name came to be given to them, don't you?"
"No, not exactly," answered Anna, shamefacedly.
"And _I_ haven't the least idea. I know I ought to know, but I don't,"
burst out Myra, blithely and boldly; "so do tell us."
"Well, it came about in this way. Washington Irving wrote a burlesque
history of New York,--that is, it was a burlesque on a pompous handbook
of the city, that had just been published. He called it 'A History of
New York from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch
Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker.'
"He made up the name of Knickerbocker probably, as people now make up a
name for a _nom de plume_. But at the time by a facetious advertisement,
such as Hawthorne might have written at a later day,--an advertisement
'inquiring for a small, elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat
and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker, who was said to have
disappeared from the Columbus Hotel in Mulberry Street, and left behind
a very curious kind of a written book,'--he fooled some of those Dutch
ancestors of mine into thinking that this was a veritable Dutch name,
and that this old gentleman was a veritable owner of the name, and
writer of the History of New York, which they thought was meant for a
veritable history. Then some of them finding it was a burlesque were
seriously offended, and made a great fuss about it; but in spite of all
this, the name stuck, and as it was really meant as a sort of
interpretation of the aristocratic Dutch character, it was after a while
accepted as a title for the descendants of the old Dutch burghers, and
so grew into a term for the gentry or aristocratic class. That is all
there is to it."
"Well, then, that proves that you _are_ from the Dutch gentry,--an old
Knickerbocker family!" exclaimed Anna, in a tone of satisfaction, that
brought forth a perfect shout of laughter from Kate, and after the
laughter the immediate answer, "Oh, yes; and the New York head of this
old Knickerbocker family of mine kept a shop down near the wharves,
where he bought and sold flour and molasses, just as that dear old Joris
Van Heemskirk did in Mrs. Barr's dear, delightful story, 'The Bow of
Orange Ribbon.' In trade, you see,--shopkeepers!" and Kate nodded her
head and laughed again, as she looked at Anna, who had a silly way
sometimes of talking as she had heard some English people talk of
"people in trade."
But Anna, who did not like to be laughed at, any more than the rest of
us, retorted here: "It will do for you to go on in this way about
family, and ancestors, and all that. _You_ can afford to tell the truth
because you _do_ belong and _have_ belonged, or your family has
belonged, for years to the upper class; but if you had only just come up
from--from--"
"Selling flour and molasses," struck in Kate, mischievously.
"No, I did not mean that, for I suppose things were different then; but
if you belonged to new rich people,--people who had just made money,
people who had been common working-people, mechanics, or something of
that sort,--you wouldn't talk like this, you'd keep still."
"Yes, if I belonged to common working-people, people whose minds were
common and vulgar; but how if I belonged to working-people like George
Stephenson, the father of English railways, and the locomotive? Oh,
Anna, _don't_ you remember we had to study up about Watt and Boulton and
the Stephensons last term in connection with our applied-science
lessons?"
"Last term!" cried Anna; "you can't expect _me_ to remember everything I
studied up on, last term. Things like that don't stick in my mind as
they do in yours."
"Well, you ought to remember about George Stephenson, who was the son of
a fireman of a colliery engine in England, and how he worked up, and
educated himself, and finally constructed the steam locomotive that made
him famous, and led to his being employed in the construction of the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway. And there was his son Robert, who
followed in his father's footsteps and became an authority on everything
connected with railways and engines; and then there was James Watt, who
preceded them as the inventor of the condensing steam-engine for
manufacturing purposes, which led the way to Stephenson's locomotive.
Watt was only a poor boy, the son of a small trader in Scotland, and was
an apprentice to a philosophical-instrument maker, where he worked so
hard and lived so poorly that he nearly lost his health. Do you think
that men like these wouldn't dare to talk about their humble beginnings?
Do you think _they_ would keep still, or do you think their families
would keep still, because they were ashamed of the humble beginnings?
No, no, not unless they were miserable cowards and didn't know what to
be proud of, and that indeed would make them dirt common and vulgar, and
not deserving their good fortune."
"Well, I wasn't thinking of geniuses, of course. I don't suppose that
anybody who was connected with such people as you speak of would be
ashamed exactly of the 'humble beginnings,' as you call them,--the
people _I_ mean are the ordinary people, who have just come up from
nowhere, with a lot of money made out of--"
"Flour and molasses; yes, I see--you think the molasses sticks to them,
and they pretend to ignore it. Well, all I've got to say is that I do so
hate cowardice, I think, if I were in their places, with the molasses so
new and sticky, that I should blurt out, 'Molasses! molasses!' if
anybody so much as _looked_ at me attentively. But goodness, girls, do
you know what time it is?"
"Half-past eight," guessed Myra and Anna, confidently.
"Half-past eight! you geese, it's half-past nine."
There was a chorus of "Oh's" and "Ah's," and then a general good-night
and scampering off to bed.