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Harmen lived in the mill, and as years went by were blessed with a nice little family of six children. The fifth child is the only one that especially interests us. They named him Rembrandt. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Ryn, he called himself when he entered at the grammar-school at Leyden, aged fourteen.
Teach him as you taught Valderschoon and those others my memory is bad, I can not remember the names I'm only a poor woman. Show my boy how to paint. And when I am dead, and you are dead, men will come to your grave and say, "It is here that he rests, here the man who first taught Rembrandt Harmenszoon to use a brush!" Do you hear, Mynheer Van Swanenburch?
Then when we find names with a final ending of "s," such as Robbins, Larkins and Perkins, we are to understand that the owner is the son of his father. And so we find Rembrandt Harmenszoon in his later years writing his name Harmensz and then simply Harmens. Mynheer Harmen Gerritszoon's windmill ground exceeding small, and the product found a ready market.
So skilfully did Rembrandt sketch, that one of the great printers made a proposition to his father to take the boy until he was twenty-one, and pay the father a thousand florins a year for the lad's services as an illustrator. The father accepted the proposition; and the next day brought around another Harmenszoon, who he declared was just as good.
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