At a table opposite, sipping their coffee, were two men strikingly like two of Frans Hals' arquebusiers.

Yet how unlike.

For the air of masterful recklessness had gone, that good-humoured glint of power in the eye was no more.

Hals had painted conquerors, or at any rate warriors for country; these coffee drinkers were meditating profit and loss.

Where once was authority is now calculation.
I quote a little poem by Mr.Van Lennep of Zeist, near Utrecht, which shows that the Dutch, whatever their present condition, have not forgotten:-- The shell, when put to child-like ears, Yet murmurs of its bygone years, In echoes of the sea; The Dutch-born youngster likes the sound, And ponders o'er its mystic ground And wondrous memory.
Thus, in Dutch hearts, an echo dwells, Which, like the ever-mindful shells, Yet murmurs of the sea: That sea, of ours in times of yore, And, when De Ruyter went before, Our road to victory..