DAY-DREAMS ON THE DIKE

THERE were five of them,— Dirk van Dorf, Katrina
van Dorf, Greitje Kuyp, Kassy Riker, and Ludoff Kleef,—
five stout little Hollanders, all well and happy, and all
sitting in the broad, bright sunlight—dreaming !

It was not so at first, you must know. They had been
trudging along the great dike,— their loose wooden shoes
beating the hard clay

 

laughing a little, talking less, yet
with an air of goodfellowship about them — these chubby
little neighbor children, who knew one another so well that
by a nod or a gesture, or by throwing a quick glance or a
sinile, they could take one another’s meaning and make
two words do the work of twenty. Their fathers and
mothers were thrifty, hard-working folk living in Volen-
dam, a little fishing-village hard by, built under one of
the dikes of the Zuyder Zee.

The children, being Hollanders, knew quite well that

the dike they were treading was a massive, wide bank or
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