98 Hans Brinker

garbage. After a snow-storm, they are
expected to sweep the feathery covering
away before it hardens into a marble,
pretty to look at, but very unwelcome
to skaters. Now and then the boys so
far forgot their dignity as to clamber
among the ice-bound canal-boats, crowd-
ed together in a widened harbor off the
canal; but the watchful guards would
soon spy them out, and order them
down with a growl.

Nothing could be straighter than
the canal upon which our party were
skating, and nothing straighter than

‘ the long rows of willow-trees that
stood, bare and wispy, along the bank. On the opposite side,

 

A GUARD.

lifted high above the surrounding country, lay the carriage-
road on top of the great dike built to keep the Haarlem Lake
within bounds. Stretching out far in the distance, until it
became lost in a point, was the glassy canal with its many
skaters, its brown-winged ice-boats, its push-chairs, and _ its
queer little sleds, light as cork, flying over the ice by means
of iron-pronged sticks in the hands of the riders. Ben was
in ecstasy with the scene.

Ludwig van Holp had been thinking how strange it was that
the English boy should know so much of Holland. According
to Lambert’s account, he knew more about it than the Dutch
did. This did not quite please our young Hollander. Suddenly
he thought of something that he believed would make the
“Shon Pull” open his eyes. He drew near Lambert
with a triumphant, —