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After the little imps had reported, the chief kabouter, when his turn came, cried out: "I shall tell of three brothers, and what each one did with the first silver penny he earned." "Go on," they all cried. "I've caught one schim young. He married a wife only last year, but he won't give her one gulden a year to dress on.
To such fellows, when they became misers, he gave the name of "Schim," which means a shadow. It was believed by some people that such shrivelled up wretches had no bowels. Soon after this, a great meeting of kabouters was held, in the dark realms below ground. Each one told what he had been doing on the earth.
The bad ones, the imps, were sorry to miss what they hoped would be a jolly story. When a thousand years passed away and the age of newspapers and copper pennies had come, there were no descendants of the two brothers Spill-penny and Schim; but of Mynheer Eerlyk there were as many as the years that had flown since he made a will.
I smeared the purse with wax and hid it in the thick rib of a boat, by the wharf. There the penny will gather mould enough. Ha! Ha! Ha!" At this, the little imps broke out into a titter that sounded like the cackle of a hen trying to tell she had laid an egg. "Good for you! Serves the old schim right," said a good kabouter, who loved to help human beings.
After summoning witnesses, and cross-examining them and studying the strange creature, their verdict was that it could be nothing less than a Hersen Schim, that is, a spectre of the brain. They meant by this that there was no such animal. However, a man from Delft, who followed the business of a knickerbocker, or baker of knickers, or clay marles, begged the body of the Oni.
It sounds something like English gone quite mad and the last line, it seems to me, runs rather trippingly and contains something of an idea too, whatever it means: "Al wat er is. Mijn hoop is Christus en zyn bloed. Door deze leer ik en hoop door die het eenwig goed. Ons leven is maar eenen dag, vol ziekten en vol naar geklag. Een schim Eien droom en anders niet."
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