Did not water always rise where turf was cut? Heins asked. Would not the proprietors of the soil object that no share of the fuel procured would compensate to them for having their fields turned into a bog? Slyk assured him that nothing was further from his thoughts than parting with the turf so near home. At Winkel, Heins was reminded, there was a strand, backed by a line of sand-hills, where the accumulated cockle-shells of a million of tides were heaped. On these hills a range of kilns was to be erected to convert the cockle-shells into lime to manure the wet soil by filling up the spaces from which the turf was dug. From this strand was the fuel to be shifted, in order to command a sale in every town and village on the Zuyder Zee, and the coasts with which it communicated. The next thing would be to import lean Danish cattle, to fatten on the meadows enriched by the produce of the lime-kilns. From these arose visions, in Heins's fancy, of unfathomable depths of butter, innumerable multitudes of cheeses, of dairy farms rising on the slope of every dyke, and vessels entering each creek and bay along the shore. Slyk had succeeded in captivating his mercantile imagination far better than Francesca the nobler part of the faculty. While turf was the only object in the picture, Heins doubted and weighed as a Dutchman should; but when above the turf there were meadows, and on the meadows cattle, with dairy farms in the fore-ground, lime-kilns in the distance, and shipping on the horizon, Heins was carried away by a vehement desire to have a share in all this enterprise; to be in part master of this grand new creation. He was little aware on what a shaking bog all this superstructure of hopes was built. Slyk had many requisites for the conduct of a speculation. He had enterprise; he had experience; and he had not the restraint of a conscience; but he had also no money: at least, he had what in Holland at that time was called no money. He had enough in house, furniture, clothes, and jewels to have sold for what would comfortably maintain himself and his daughter; but this was poverty, in the eyes of the Dutch merchants of 1696. To have no disposable funds, was a degree of poverty at which many a boor would have been alarmed; and it was so extraordinary a case, that Slyk's whole endeavour was to keep his plight a secret, and to get out of it as soon as he could. As he was rather changeable in his employments, it was not very easy to track him; and his manner was of that imposing kind which commonly bespeaks conscious wealth; so that Heins was excusable for concluding, with the rest of the world of Amsterdam, that old Jakob Slyk was rich. So rapidly did his supposition rise, this day, to conviction, that he was presently conscious of lamenting that he had destined so much of his disposable capital to investments in foreign produce; and pondering how much he could extricate, to be applied in Slyk's speculation.