“Of course I do.”

“How are you going to do it without the looking-glass to tell you?”

“Use my own eyes, to be sure!”

“Whose eyes do you use when you look in a glass?” said Greta.

Martin looked puzzled, and had no reply ready; and Will thought his cousin Greta very clever, although she was a girl, and a year younger than himself.

But Martin soon recovered his composure.

“What lots of flowers!” was his next comment.  “They are everywhere, except in this brick pavement, and nothing could grow here, it is so clean.”

“And such pretty houses in the gardens!” said Will.

“But they are so small,” said Martin, “It would take a dozen of them to make a New York house.”

“My goodness!” said Greta, turning her head back as far as she could, and looking at the sky.  “How do you ever see up to their roofs?”

“Divide Martin’s twelve by four, and you will come nearer the truth,” said Will, laughing.  “But, at any rate, the houses are pretty—­painted green and yellow, with red-tiled roofs.”

The next thing the boys observed was the loneliness of the streets.  In America a town of twelve thousand inhabitants would have more of an air of bustle, they said.  Will liked the quiet, “for a change,” as he expressed it, and because it made him feel, somehow, as if he owned the place.  Martin declared it to be his opinion that the people kept out of the streets for fear that their shoes would soil them, and that accounted for the almost spotless cleanliness everywhere.

The streets were not deserted, however; for, at intervals, there were row-boat ferries across the river, and occasionally a man or woman would be seen in one of these boats.

There were also a number of children, and some women, in the streets.  These apparently belonged to the poorer classes.  Hats and bonnets were scarce among them, though all the women, and many of the little girls, had on close-fitting muslin caps.  They wore short, loose sacques, and short dress skirts, made up without trimmings.  The boys were dressed in jackets and baggy trousers.  All wore clumsy wooden shoes.

The Van Schaick family followed the French fashions, as we do in America; the difference between the two countries being that here every one attempts to follow the prevailing style, while in Holland this change of fashion is confined to the wealthy; the middle and lower classes preserving the same style of costume from generation to generation.

A good many of the children in the street were carrying painted iron or stone buckets, with a tea-kettle on the top.  After proceeding some distance up the street, Will and Martin saw some of them coming out of a basement door-way, still with the buckets in their hands; but clouds of steam were issuing from the tea-kettle spouts!

“What place is that?” asked Will.

“It is the fire-woman’s,” said Greta.