Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of quiet rectitude which appealed to Phil, and without a word she allowed our luggage to be taken off the cab. When we came to pay, it appeared that our driver hadn't made us acquainted with every secret of Rotterdam, purely in a spirit of generosity. We were called upon to part with almost all the gulden we had got in exchange for shillings on board the boat, and Phil looked volumes as it dawned on her intelligence that each one of these coins (with the head of an incredibly mild and whiskered old gentleman upon it) was worth one and eightpence. "At this rate we shall soon be in the poorhouse," she said. " If it comes to that, we can stop the motor-boat at villages and solicit alms," I suggested. After all, the Back had had some method in its madness, for on showing the caretaker's address to a giant hall-porter, it appeared that the place was within ten minutes' walk of the hotel. We refused to decide upon rooms until our future plans had shaped themselves; and our luggage reposed in the hall while we had cups of tea and a Dutch conception of toast in a garden, whose charms we shared with a rakish wandering Jew of a tortoise. Many times since I induced Phyllis to join me in becoming an adventuress, have we vaguely arranged what we would do on arriving at Rotterdam. The program seemed simple enough from a distance — just to go and pick up our boat (so to speak) and motor away with it; but when we actually started off, pioneered by a small boy from the hotel, to take possession of our property, I had a horrid sinking of the heart, which I wouldn't for many heads of whiskered old gentlemen on gulden have confessed to Phil. I felt that "something was going to happen." The "ten minutes'" walk prolonged itself into twenty, and then there was a ferry over a wide, brow...