Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/263

 lying down, and that is through a gate. One day Josephine, who is something of an artist, and I went through one of these gates in order to give her an advantageous location from which to make a sketch of a tower. She made her sketch. While we were so engrossed one of the farm boys locked the gate and we discovered that we were held as prisoners. I would have enjoyed caning the Dutch scamp, but instead I was compelled to pay a ransom while he and some companions laughed with glee.

On another day my Brother Isaac and I went to Utrecht and there hunted up Jan Pannebakker, a goldsmith and jeweler with whom I had corresponded. The earliest of the name of whom I have knowledge was burned to death by the Spaniards as a heretic at Utrecht in 1568, and these cheerful Christians likewise drowned his wife. We took Jan, whom we found to be an agreeable black-eyed man with a pleasant wife and a family of well-educated children, to Gorcum or Gorinchem with us in order to make some investigations and to see the church in one of whose windows the arms of the family at an early date had been painted upon glass. He did not know a word of English and such conversation as was maintained throughout the day had to be conducted in Dutch. We crossed the North Sea from Flushing to the mouth of the Thames and spent a week in London. While there we visited the British Museum with its immense collections of literature and art, and the Kew Gardens with their many varieties of flowers and shrubbery. We stood on London Bridge, rode on top of the omnibuses and saw again on the Strand the tangle caused by the vain effort of the Englishman to solve modern transportation by the extension of the old method of cab service. With all of his capacity, the Englishman is a little stiff in his mental joints and, therefore, slow in his movement. I saw outside of Coventry a woman, born in the house in which she lived, who had never seen the nearest village only three miles Rh