And this simple form of settlement--a note of hand (in color), payable in yearly patronage--has not been confined to modern times. Many an inn owes its survival to a square of canvas--the head of a child, a copper pot, or stretch of dune; and more than one collector now boasts of a masterpiece which had hung for years on some taproom wall, a sure but silent witness of the poverty of a Franz Hals, Wouverman or Van der Helst. Each year had brought new additions to the impecunious group about Mynheer's table. Dear old Marny, with his big boiler amidships, his round, sunburned face shaded by a wide-brimmed, slouch hat--the one he wore when he lived with the Sioux Indians--loose red tie tossed over one shoulder, and rusty velveteen coat, was an old habitue. And so was dry, crusty Malone, "the man from Dublin," rough outside as a potato and white inside as its meal. And so, too, was Stebbins, the silent man of the party, and the only listener in the group. All these came with the earliest birds and stayed until the boys got out their skates. But there were others this year who were new. Pudfut, the Englishman, first--in from Norway, where he had been sketching on board some lord's yacht--he of the grizzly brown beard, brown ulster reaching to his toes, gray-checked steamer-cap and brierwood pipe--an outfit which he never changed--"slept in them," Marny insisted. "Me name's Pudfut," he began, holding out his hand to Marny. "I've got a letter in my clothes for ye from a chap in Paris." "Don't pull it out," had come the answer. "Put it there!" and within an hour the breezy fellow, his arm through the Englishman's, had trotted him all over Dort from the Groote Kerk to the old Gate of William of Orange, introducing him to every painter he met on the way, first as Pudfut, then as Puddy, then as Pretty-foot, then as Tootsie-Wootsie, and last as Toots--a name by which he is known in the Quartier to this day. This done, he had taken him up to his own room and had dumped him into an extra cot--his for the rest of the summer. Then Schonholz wandered in--five gulden a week board was the magnet--a cheese-faced, good-natured German lad with forehead so high that when he raised his hat Marny declared, with a cry of alarm, that his scalp had slipped, and only regained his peace of mind when he had twisted his fat fingers in the lad's forelock to make sure that it was still fast. Schonholz had passed a year at Heidelberg and carried his diploma on his cheek--two crisscross slashes that had never healed--spoke battered English, wore a green flat-topped cap, and gray bobtailed coat with two rows of horn buttons ("Come to shoot chamois, have you?" Marny had asked when he presented his credentials.)--laughed three-quarters of the time he was awake, and never opened his kit or set a palette while he was in Dort. "Too vet and too fodgy all dime," was the way he accounted for his laziness.