Page:Augusta Seaman--Jacqueline of the carrier pigeons.djvu/26

4 this tower that a great clump of oak trees had grown up inside of it, and overtopped its walls.

"Art thou tired, Gysbert?" asked the girl, a slim, golden-haired lass of seventeen, of her younger brother, a boy of little over fourteen years.

"No, Jacqueline, I am strong! A burden of this sort does not weary me!" answered the boy, and he stoutly took a fresh grip on some large, box-like object wrapped in a dark shawl, that they carried between them.

Up the steep sides of the hill they toiled, now lost to sight in the grove of fruit trees, now emerging again near the grim walls of the old battlement. Panting for breath yet laughing gaily, they placed the burden on the ground, and sat down beside it to rest and look about them. Before their eyes lay pictured the sparkling canal-streets of the city, beyond whose limits stretched the fair, fertile plains of Holland, and in the dim