Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
Olaf van Noord rose to meet Helen Cumberly and Denise Ryland, advancing across the floor with the measured gait of a tragic actor. He greeted them aloofly, and a little negro boy proffered tiny cups of China tea. Denise Ryland distended her nostrils as her gaze swept the picture-covered walls; but she seemed to approve of the tea.
The further south one goes Zeeland excepted the lower becomes the standard of life, and the peasants seem to care for little else than their fields and cattle, while the people of Noord Brabant are the poorest and dirtiest of them all. The produce of the soil varies according to the ground cultivated.
It is not necessary for my purpose to describe in detail the series of voyages by way of the Cape of Good Hope which, beginning with the adventures of the brothers Houtmann at this period, and with the circumnavigation of the world by Olivier van Noord, made the Dutch for a long time the leading Christian nation in those golden regions, and which carried the United Netherlands to the highest point of prosperity and power.
The others, as well as I can recognize them at this distance, are Lambert Van Noord, Egide Mostaert, William Key, Bernard de Rycke, and the two brothers Henry and Martin Van Cleef, all celebrated historical, fancy, or portrait painters.
It had been arranged that I was to go by the North Sea, to put into the Texel, and to go to the Hague to pay my respects in person to the King of the Netherlands. Almost as soon as I had disembarked at the Helder, I went on board the royal yacht, which was to take me to Alkmaar by the Noord Holland Canal.
"Do you mean," she began, "that there is a living original?" Olaf van Noord bowed absently, and left her side to greet one who at that moment entered the studio. Something magnetic in the personality of the newcomer drew all eyes from the canvas to the figure on the threshold.
The lady of the tiger skins was surrounded by an admiring group of unusuals, and Helen, who had turned again to the big canvas, suddenly became aware that the little cross-eyed man was bowing and beaming radiantly before her. "May I be allowed," said Olaf van Noord who stood beside him, "to present my friend Mr. Gianapolis, my dear Miss Cumberly?"...
One can imagine their consternation. This prodigy is explained by the fact that Dordrecht is founded on a stratum of clay, which had slipped on to the mass of turf which forms the basis of the soil. Such is the story as I heard it. Before the vessel left the Noord Canal the hope of seeing my first Dutch sunset was disappointed by another sudden change in the weather.
Six weeks afterwards, as the old Noord Brabant lay groaning over on her beam ends, thrashing her canvas to ribbons in a fierce night squall off Beveridge Reef, Tom Masters, hurrying on deck to help the hands shorten sail, was knocked overboard by the parting of the spanker-boom guy, and disappeared without a cry, into the seething boil to leeward.
"They are a special brand," explained Olaf van Noord, distractedly, "which I have imported for me from Smyrna. They contain a small percentage of opium." "Opium!" exclaimed Denise Ryland, glaring at the speaker and then at Helen Cumberly, as though the latter were responsible in some way for the vices of the painter.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking