United States or British Indian Ocean Territory ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The stormy month of March had come, and Vere, being called to service in the field for the coming season, transferred the command at Ostend to Frederic van Dorp, a rugged, hard-headed, ill-favoured, stout-hearted Zealand colonel, with the face of a bull-dog, and with the tenacious grip of one.
On Easter Monday all the village people betake themselves to the principal street of the 'dorp' to watch the 'eiergaarder. At about two o'clock in the afternoon the innkeeper who provides the eggs appears upon the scene with a basket containing twenty-five. These he places on the road at equal distances of twelve feet from each other.
In the Porcupine fort, a blaze of wickerwork and building materials suddenly illuminated the gathering gloom of night; and the loud cries of the assailants, who had succeeded in kindling this fire by their missiles, proclaimed the fierceness of the attack. Governor Dorp was himself in the fort, straining every nerve to extinguish the flames, and to hold this most important position.
He was buried in a mausoleum costing $300,000, which he himself had ordered to be built at New Dorp, Staten Island; and there to-day his ashes lie, splendidly interred, while millions of the living plundered and disinherited are suffered to live in the deadly congestion of miserable habitations. With the demise of William H. Vanderbilt the Vanderbilt fortune ceased being a one-man factor.
He alone, of all the people in the little dorp, made his own world and possessed it in solitude; about him, the folk held all interest in community and measured life by a trivial common standard. At his doorstep, though, lay the frontier of little things; he was something beyond us all, and therefore greater or less than we.
It was splendidly done. The discomfited Dorp met small bodies of his men, panic-struck, reeling out from their stronghold, wounded, bleeding, shrieking for help and for orders. It seemed as if the Spaniards had dropped from the clouds. The Dutch commandant did his best to rally the fugitives, and to encourage those who had remained.
Moving always in the thickest of the fight, he would probably have that day laid down his life, as so many of his race had done before in the cause of the republic, had not Colonel van Dorp come to his rescue, and so laid about him with a great broad sword, that the dyke was kept until Maurice arrived with Eytzinga's Frisian regiment and other reserves. Van Dorp then fell covered with wounds.
But on this day he went back briskly, walking well and striding long, with the gait of one that has good news, and he smiled at those he passed and nodded to them, unheeding or not seeing their strong surprise nor the alarm he wrought to the children. He went straight to his little house, that overlooks a crowded garden and a pool of the dorp spruit, entered, and was seen no more alive.
It was splendidly done. The discomfited Dorp met small bodies of his men, panic-struck, reeling out from their stronghold, wounded, bleeding, shrieking for help and for orders. It seemed as if the Spaniards had dropped from the clouds. The Dutch commandant did his best to rally the fugitives, and to encourage those who had remained.
Colonel Dorp said openly that it was a shame for the country to refuse their own natural-born Count for strangers. He swore that he would sing his song whose bread he had eaten. A "fat militia captain" of the place, one Soyssons, on the other hand, privately informed Willoughby that Maurice and Barneveld were treating underhand with Spain.
Word Of The Day