"It means that at that time," answered Kate, "Philip II., called Philip the Prudent, had possession of the better portion of Italy, with other territory that he had gobbled up, and so, of course, he made use of Italian soldiers."
"Who was Lewis William?"
"He was the stadt of Friesland,—Friesland was part of the Netherlands."
"Oh, and what became of the dare-devil skipper,—Van der Berg,—your ancestor?"
"Oh, he didn't come to anything wonderful,—he 'fought and bled' in freedom's cause like most of those Dutchmen, I suppose."
"But there was a family of Van den Bergs who were cousins to Maurice," here spoke up Hope. "Were these any relations to Van der Berg, the skipper?"
"Oh, no,—we didn't descend from princes and counts," laughed Kate.
"I don't believe but that it is the Van den you belong to, anyway," said Anna.
"Nonsense," cried Kate; "if we 'belong,' as you say, to a family of that early day, it is to the dare-devil Van der Bergs, and that's good enough for me. My brother Schuyler ought to hear you give preference to the Van den Bergs. He would be ready to fight a duel with you; for, from a little boy, he has been perfectly enchanted with that story of the dare-devil, and when we were all at home five years ago,—little things of ten and eleven and twelve,—we used to play the story, and we called it 'The Siege of Breda.' It was when we were up at our summer place on the Hudson. It was such fun. We had a queer little cottage on the place, that had a lot of gables and turrets. It was unoccupied, except as a sort of storehouse for fruit; and this cottage we called 'the castle.' A rather wide stream of water runs through the grounds, and broadens out into a sort of miniature lake at the foot of the garden. It was just across this broader part, where it was also quite deep, that the cottage showed its turrets and gables, and we got the gardener and one of the stable men to build up a sort of palisade of bricks and stones and boards all about it. Inside this we made a guard-house, and the arsenal was in the castle itself. Then we knew an old sailor who fixed up our little yacht, made a cabin and hold, where the boys crept in,—the boys who represented the attacking party, the seventy Hollanders,—and we packed around them a lot of dry moss we had prepared, to represent turf. Mr. Brown—our old sailor—also fixed up something that did duty for a water-gate. Well, when we had got everything as near to our minds as possible, we dressed ourselves up in our costumes,—oh, yes, we had regular costumes. My uncle Schuyler said it was a real history lesson for us, and he should do all he could to help it along; and so he hunted up some books that had the illustrations of the costumes of that time, and we got mamma and a seamstress we had to help us make up suits for us."
"And did you take part?" asked Myra.