These and a hundred other things make me love this quaint old town on the Maas. There is everything within its borders for the painter who loves form and color--boats, queer houses, streets, canals, odd, picturesque interiors, figures, brass milk cans, white-capped girls, and stretches of marsh. If there were not other places on the earth I love equally as well--Venice, for instance--I would be content never to leave its shower-drenched streets. But I know that my gondola, gay in its new _tenta_ and polished brasses, is waiting for me in the little canal next the bridge, and I must be off. Tyne has already packed my trunk, and Johan is ready to take it down the stairs. Tyne sent for him. I did not. When Johan, like an overloaded burro stumbling down the narrow defile of the staircase, my trunk on his back, disappears through the lower door, Tyne reënters my room, closes the door softly, and tells me that Johan's wages have been raised, and that before I return next summer she and-- But I forgot. This is another strictly confidential communication. Under no possible circumstances could a man of honor--certainly not. Peter, to my surprise, is not in his customary place when I reach the outer street door. Johan, at my inquiring gesture, grins the width of his face, but has no information to impart regarding Peter's unusual absence. Heer Boudier is more explicit. "Where's Peter?" I cry with some impatience. My host shrugs his shoulders with a helpless movement, and opens wide the fingers of both hands. "Mynheer, the five days are up. Peter has gone to jail." "What for?" I ask in astonishment. "To save two gulden." ONE OF BOB'S TRAMPS I had passed him coming up the dingy corridor that led to Bob's law office, and knew at once that he was one of Bob's tramps. When he had squeezed himself through the partly open door and had closed it gently,--closed it with a hand held behind his back, like one who had some favor to ask or some confidence game to play,--he proved to be a man about fifty years of age, fat and short, with a round head partly bald, and hair quite gray. His face had not known a razor for days. He was dressed in dark clothes, once good, showing a white shirt, and he wore a collar without a cravat. Down his cheeks were uneven furrows, beginning at his spilling, watery eyes, and losing themselves in the stubble-covered cheeks,--like old rain-courses dried up,--while on his flat nose were perched a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, over which he looked at us in a dazed, half-bewildered, half-frightened way. In one hand he held his shapeless slouch hat; the other grasped an old violin wrapped in a grimy red silk handkerchief. For an instant he stood before the door, bent low with unspoken apologies; then placing his hat on the floor, he fumbled nervously in the breast pocket of his coat, from which he drew a letter, penned in an unknown hand and signed with an unknown name. Bob read it, and passed it to me.