Farther down is another 'recht—I cannot for the life of me remember the first part of its name—where there is a shipyard and big windlasses and a horse hitched to a sweep, which winds up water-soaked luggers on to rude ways, and great pots of boiling tar, the yellow smoke drifting away toward the sea.
And between these towns of Dort, Pappendrecht, and the other 'recht moves a constant procession of water craft; a never-ceasing string of low, rakish barges that bear the commerce of Germany out to the sea, each in charge of a powerful tug puffing eagerly in its hurry to reach tide water, besides all the other boats and luggers that sail and steam up and down the forked Maas in front of Boudier's Inn—for Dort is really on an island, the water of the Rhine being divided here. You would never think, were you to watch these ungainly boats, that they could ever arrive anywhere. They look as if they were built to go sideways, endways, or both ways; and yet they mind their helms and dodge in and out and swoop past the long points of land ending in the waving marsh grass, and all with the ease of a steam yacht.
These and a hundred other things make me love this quaint old town on the Maas. There is everything within its borders for the painter who loves form and color—boats, queer houses, streets, canals, odd, picturesque interiors, figures, brass milk cans, white-capped girls, and stretches of marsh. If there were not other places on the earth I love equally as well—Venice, for instance—I would be content never to leave its shower-drenched streets. But I know that my gondola, gay in its new tenta and polished brasses, is waiting for me in the little canal next the bridge, and I must be off.
Tyne has already packed my trunk, and Johan is ready to take it down the stairs. Tyne sent for him. I did not.
When Johan, like an overloaded burro stumbling down the narrow defile of the staircase, my trunk on his back, disappears through the lower door, Tyne reënters my room, closes the door softly, and tells me that Johan's wages have been raised, and that before I return next summer she and—
But I forgot. This is another strictly confidential communication. Under no possible circumstances could a man of honor—certainly not.
Peter, to my surprise, is not in his customary place when I reach the outer street door. Johan, at my inquiring gesture, grins the width of his face, but has no information to impart regarding Peter's unusual absence.
Heer Boudier is more explicit.
"Where's Peter?" I cry with some impatience.