Delft is old and she show’s symptoms of the fact in spots. Down at the southern end of the city, near the Rotterdam gate, stands a venerable building, once one of the numerous warehouses scattered over the country belonging to the Dutch East India Company--that most famous and wealthiest of all Dutch trading concerns, founded in 1602, when the power and wealth of the Republic had attained their high-water marks under the stadtholdership of Maurice, one of the sons of the ill-fated Prince William of Orange. The place has long since been put to use as a military storehouse. Directly opposite is the ominous-looking city arsenal, bearing above its arched entrance a massive copy of the arms of the old Dutch Republic, carved in stone. Another of the old buildings is the Gemeelandshuis van Delftland, showing in sandstone a rich Gothic façade of the beginning of the sixteenth century. With us, Delft’s principal claim to notoriety lies in the manufacture of its faience, commonly called “Delft ware,” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its composition and design at first copied from the Chinese and Japanese porcelain, this faience became celebrated throughout the world. Dutch designs were soon substituted for the Oriental, and the industry prospered proportionately. Later it lapsed into decay and the true process has been revived in Delft only within comparatively recent years. A large plant for its manufacture now operates on the Oosteinde, not far from the New Church. But in the heart of the Hollander, Delft will ever be revered as the scene of the tragedy that cut short the life and terminated the praiseworthy deeds of that eminent founder of Dutch liberty, “William the Silent,” Prince of Orange, the George Washington of the Netherlands. Born of noble German parentage at Dillenburg in the Duchy of Nassau in 1533, William, curiously enough, became the favorite of Philip II of Spain, who appointed him, in 1559, when but twenty-six years of age, _stadtholder_ or governor of the provinces of Zeeland, Holland, Friesland, and Utrecht. Two years later William found himself in bad odor with Granvella, the Bishop of Arras, whom Philip had appointed as counselor to his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, the then regent of the Netherlands. William finally effected the enforced relinquishment of this post by the Bishop in 1564. The subsequent unrest in the Netherlands, provoked mainly by the atrocities of Spanish soldiery, led to the sanguinary assignment of Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, to command an army of 10,000 picked men, mustered from Lombardy, Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples, to quell the possible insurrection. This move was bitterly resented, not only by her subjects, but was opposed, although without success, by Margaret of Parma herself; for the name of Alva was as odious to her as it was to them.