Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/172



, I would give anything to know exactly how long I could let a heroine float in the air, while I described a castle, without exhausting your patience, and causing you to look wearily aside, before the poor creature reached the earth? If my tale demanded such a caper, I should prudently choose a first storey for my point de départ, and a castle of which but little could be said. Once for all, however, I will make you easy on that head:—Havelaar’s house had no storeys at all, and the heroine of my book,—the lovely, faithful, ansprüchlose Tine, a heroine!—never jumped out of the window.

When I ended the foregoing chapter, with a reference to some variation in the next, it was rather a rhetorical artifice, and to make a good ending, than because I meant that the next chapter should only be valuable as a change. A writer is vain as aman. Slander his mother, or ridicule the colour of his hair, say that he has an Amsterdam accent, such as no Amsterdammer ever had,—perhaps