While skating along at full speed, they heard the cars from Amsterdam coming close behind them.
"Hollo!" cried Ludwig, glancing toward the rail-track—"who can't beat a locomotive? Let's give it a race!"
The whistle screamed at the very idea—so did the boys—and at it they went.
For an instant the boys were ahead, hurrahing with all their might—only for an instant, but even that was something.
This excitement over, they began to travel more leisurely, and indulge in conversation and frolic. Sometimes they stopped to exchange a word with the guards who were stationed at certain distances along the canal. These men, in Winter, attend to keeping the surface free from obstruction and garbage. After a snow-storm they are expected to sweep the feathery covering away before it hardens into a marble pretty to look at but very unwelcome to skaters. Now and then the boys so far forgot their dignity as to clamber among the ice-bound canal-boats crowded together in a widened harbor off the canal, but the watchful guards would soon spy them out and order them down with a growl.
Nothing could be straighter than the canal upon which our party were skating, and nothing straighter than the long rows of willow trees that stood, bare and wispy, along the bank. On the opposite side, lifted high above the surrounding country, lay the carriage road on top of the great dyke built to keep the Haarlem Lake within bounds; stretching out far in the distance until it became lost in a point, was the glassy canal with its many skaters, its brown-winged ice-boats, its push-chairs and its queer little sleds, light as cork, flying over the ice by means of iron-pronged sticks in the hands of the riders. Ben was in ecstasy with the scene.
Ludwig van Holp had been thinking how strange it was that the English boy should know so much of Holland. According to Lambert's account he knew more about it than the Dutch did. This did not quite please our young Hollander. Suddenly he thought of something that he believed would make the "Shon Pull" open his eyes; he drew near Lambert with a triumphant:
"Tell him about the tulips!"
Ben caught the word "tulpen."
"Oh! yes," said he eagerly, in English, "the Tulip Mania—are you speaking of that? I have often heard it mentioned, but know very little about it. It reached its height in Amsterdam, didn't it?"