The storehouses disappeared, and in their place, for some reason, Andrew saw the silver-sanded floor of a Dutch kitchen. He was munching an oelykoek and Gerrit Jans was telling him stolidly of the wonders of St. Nicholas who stuffed the wooden shoes of godly little boys in Holland with crullers and toy windmills and silver skates on his name-day.... The heavy, flowery scent of the catalpa-trees outside the King's Arms, on Broadway between Crown and Little Prince Streets, where the officers came from Fort George, mixed, somehow, with the odor of mignonette and sweet-william in his mother's garden in the country. She was walking along the bricked path on a hot, Spring morning, with her green calash shading her stern, fine face, and a small painted basket of seeds in her hand. Then he was one of a group of boys running home past the Fort on a chill, green winter evening, not daring to look aside lest Governor Sir Danvers Osborne, who had hanged himself on the palisade after five days of office, should suddenly be dangling there to appal them, with his silk-handkerchief noosed around his neck ... he was sitting on his brother Lucius's knees watching the historic cockfight out on the Germantown road when Massachusetts Boy had beaten and killed Mr. Signet's long-undefeated Cock of the North ... he was walking with his father underneath the arches of the Exchange, unspeakably proud at being allowed to hold his father's gold-headed cane and see him converse with the great ones of the city. The images faded. He sighed, lazily. Boyhood had been a good time. If he had never been as dashing as Lucius, he had always admired Lucius far too much to envy him and had been well content to take second place. As for Peggy, poor child, he certainly did not envy her--with her stiff, buckram stays clamped on her round, adolescent body, and the long needle stuck upright in the front of her dress for an hour each day to teach her to hold her chin erect as a young girl of quality should. Somewhere among his baggage he had the letter case stitched with red and green silk that had been her damp, parting gift to him--and how she had begged him to bring her home a little alligator from the Floridas! He smiled amusedly. He felt quite old enough to be Peggy's grandfather, now that he was travelling alone on important business for his father--though he was only twenty-one and she was fourteen.