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? X 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. 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 dyke 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 near by all their lives, considered it the most matter-of-course place in the world. Everything interested Ben; the tall houses with their forked chimneys and gable ends facing the street; the merchants' warerooms, perched high up under the roofs of their dwellings, with long, arm-like 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 everywhere crossing the city; 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 foot-path of brick--and if he rested his eyes half-way, 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 that was going on in the street, or inspect whoever might be knocking at the door, without being seen themselves.