254 Hans Brinker

« What was the name? ” he asked.

« Indeed, it went in one ear, and out of the other, for all I
hindered it. Plague to people who can’t see a traveller in
comfortable lodgings, but they must whisk him off before one
can breathe!”

“© A lady in Broek, did you say ?”

“Yes,” very gruffly. ‘¢ Any other business, young master ?”

“No, mine host, except that I and my comrades here
would like a bite of something, and a drink of hot coffee.”

“ Ah!” said the landlord, sweetly.. “A bite you shall have,
and coffee too, —the finest in Leyden. Walk up to the
stove, my masters. Now I think again, that was a widow-
lady from Rotterdam, I think they said, visiting at one Van
Stoepel’s, if I mistake not.”

“Ah!” said Peter, greatly relieved. “ They live in the
white house by the Schlossen Mill. Now, mynheer, the
coffee, please.”

“ What a goose I was!” thought he, as the party left the
Golden Eagle, “ to feel so sure it was my mother. But she
may be somebody’s mother, poor woman, for all that. Who
can she be, I wonder?”

There were not many upon the canal that day, between
Leyden and Haarlem. However, as the boys neared Amster-
dam, they found themselves once more in the midst of a
moving throng. The big Ysbreeker 1 had been at work for
the first time that season; but there was any amount of
skating-ground left yet.

1 Ice-breaker. A heavy machine, armed with iron spikes, for break-
ing the ice as it is dragged along. Some of the small ones are worked by
men; but the large ones are drawn by horses, sixty or seventy of which
are sometimes attached to one Ysbreeker.