“Well, then, I shall go to Sapphira. My hands are itching for the flags. I am sure you understand, mother.” “Understand! If it comes to that, I made up my mind many years ago about those English tyrants--and I have not to make it over. I think about them and their ways exactly as I did when I sent my dear Peter with Joris Van Heemskirk’s troops to fight them. Gerardus was but a boy then--ten years old only--but he cried to go with his father. God be with us! Wives and mothers don’t forget, _O wee! O wee!_” Her voice softened, she looked wistfully backward and, with outstretched hand, waved her daughter-in-law upstairs. Then she opened for herself the wide, front entrance. The door was heavy, but it swung easily to her firm grip. And yet she was in the seventy-fourth year of her life days. With a slow but imperious step she took the road to her own home. She was not afraid of the crowd, nor of the enthusiasm that moved it. At every turn she was recognised and saluted, for Madame Bloommaert was part and parcel of the honour of the city, and her bright, handsome face with its coal-black eyes and eyebrows, and snow-white hair lying like mist upon its brown temples, was a familiar sight to old and young. She was rather small of stature, but so disdainfully erect that she gave the impression of being a tall woman--an illusion aided by the buoyancy of her temper and the definite character of her movements. Her home was on lower Nassau Street between Beaver and Marketfield. It had been her residence for fifty years, and was as perfectly Dutch as herself in its character. Nothing in the street, however, was more interesting than this human habitation. It appeared to have created for itself a sort of soul, so instinct with personality was it. A large garden surrounded it, though its space had been slowly curtailed as land in the vicinity became valuable; yet there was still room enough for some fine shrubbery, a little grass plot, beds of flowers, strawberry and other vines, and the deep, cool well, with its antique shed full of bright pewter dishes. The house itself was of red brick, mellow and warm, and soft to the eyes with the rains and sunshine of half a century; and nothing could be finer than its front, sending up sharp points to the sky, with a little boat weathercock on the tallest point boxing about in the wind. Over the wide casements a sweetbrier climbed, and nodded its tiny flower; and the veranda, cunningly carved along the bottom railing in an open leaf pattern, was a perfect bower of Virginia creeper.