It was early in the month of June. For more than three months Harry Rochester had been engaged with the worthy Dutchman, who was kept busy morning, noon, and night in provisioning the allied forces now entering upon a new campaign. He found his employment very much to his taste, and his employer the best of friends. Grootz never alluded to the time when his offer of employment had been slighted, and Harry often smiled as he remembered the pride with which, in the days of his high expectations, he had refused to cast in his lot with a mere merchant. The novelty of the scenes amid which he found himself on his arrival in Holland had banished his ambitions for the time. The flat country, with its dunes and dykes, its endless canals and innumerable windmills; its quaint towns, in which chimneys and steeples and masts seemed so curiously jumbled; the stolid, hospitable people—the men with their big pipes and snuff-boxes, the women with their characteristic head-dress, the girls with the riband of maidenhood at their right brow; the strange customs—the _spionnen_ at the windows, an arrangement of mirrors by which from the upper rooms all that passed in the street below could be seen within; the placard at the door when a child was born; the incessant scrubbing that went on indoors and out; the _trekschuiten_ and _pakschuiten_ that conveyed goods and passengers along the canals, drawn sometimes by horses, more often by a stout mynheer and his vrouw; the storks nesting among the chimney-pots; the stiff formal gardens with their beds of tulips—everything interested him; his low spirits vanished into thin air, and he enjoyed life with a zest he had never known before. His duties had taken him into many parts of the country. In March he was at the Hague when the Duke of Marlborough returned to resume command of the forces, and he did not even feel a pang when, a humble member of the crowd, he saw the great soldier whose forgetfulness or insincerity had so woefully disappointed him. He knew the potteries of Delft, and the cheese-factories of Gouda; he had heard the great organ of Haarlem, and the sweet carillons of Antwerp, and practised skating for the first time on a frozen arm of the Y. Finding it difficult to get on without a knowledge of Dutch, the only language understood by his teamsters and the country people, he had thrown himself energetically into the study of the language; and he had, besides, picked up a smattering of everyday German phrases from one of his men, a German Swiss. After his natural British diffidence in adventuring on a foreign tongue had worn off, he delighted to air his new accomplishment with the comely juffrouws whom he met in the course of his journeys. He dropped into the routine of the business so rapidly that Mynheer Grootz once told him he was a born merchant—a compliment which, to his own surprise, did not give the least shock to his dignity.