Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates / Серебряные коньки. Книга для чтения на английском языке

While skating along at full speed, they heard the cars from Amsterdam coming close behind them.

“Halloo!” cried Ludwig, glancing toward the rail track, “who can’t beat a locomotive? Let’s give it a race!”

The whistle screamed at the very idea – so did the boys – and at it they went.

For an instant the boys were ahead, hurrahing with all their might – only for an instant, but even THAT was something.

This excitement over, they began to travel more leisurely and indulge in conversation and frolic. Sometimes they stopped to exchange a word with the guards who were stationed at certain distances along the canal. These men, in winter, attend to keeping the surface free from obstruction and garbage. After a snowstorm they are expected to sweep the feathery covering away before it hardens into a marble pretty to look at but very unwelcome to skaters. Now and then the boys so far forgot their dignity as to clamber among the icebound canal boats crowded together in a widened harbor off the canal, but the watchful guards would soon spy them out and order them down with a growl.

Nothing could be straighter than the canal upon which our party were skating, and nothing straighter than the long rows of willow trees that stood, bare and wispy, along the bank. On the opposite side, lifted high above the surrounding country, lay the carriage road on top of the great dike built to keep the Haarlem Lake within bounds; stretching out far in the distance, until it became lost in a point, was the glassy canal with its many skaters, its brown-winged iceboats, its push-chairs, and its queer little sleds, light as cork, flying over the ice by means of iron-pronged sticks in the hands of the riders. Ben was in ecstasy with the scene.

Ludwig van Holp had been thinking how strange it was that the English boy should know so much of Holland. According to Lambert’s account, he knew more about it than the Dutch did. This did not quite please our young Hollander. Suddenly he thought of something that he believed would make the “Shon Pull” open his eyes; he drew near Lambert with a triumphant “Tell him about the tulips!”

Ben caught the word tulpen.

“Oh, yes!” said he eagerly, in English, “the Tulip Mania – are you speaking of that? I have often heard it mentioned but know very little about it. It reached its height in Amsterdam, didn’t it?”

Ludwig moaned; the words were hard to understand, but there was no mistaking the enlightened expression on Ben’s face. Lambert, happily, was quite unconscious of his young countryman’s distress as he replied, “Yes, here and in Haarlem, principally; but the excitement ran high all over Holland, and in England too for that matter.”

“Hardly in England, I think,” said Ben, “but I am not sure, as I was not there at the time.”[115]

“Ha! ha! that’s true, unless you are over two hundred years old. Well, I tell you, sir, there never was anything like it before nor since. Why, persons were so crazy after tulip bulbs in those days that they paid their weight in gold for them.”

“What, the weight of a man!” cried Ben, showing such astonishment in his eyes that Ludwig fairly capered.

“No, no, the weight of a BULB. The first tulip was sent here from Constantinople about the year 1560. It was so much admired that the rich people of Amsterdam sent to Turkey for more. From that time they grew to be the rage[116], and it lasted for years. Single roots brought from one to four thousand florins; and one bulb, the Semper Augustus, brought fifty-five hundred.”

“That’s more than four hundred guineas of our money,” interposed Ben.

“Yes, and I know I’m right, for I read it in a translation from Beckman, only day before yesterday. Well, sir, it was great. Everyone speculated in tulips, even bargemen and rag women and chimney sweeps. The richest merchants were not ashamed to share the excitement. People bought bulbs and sold them again at a tremendous profit without ever seeing them. It grew into a kind of gambling. Some became rich by it in a few days, and some lost everything they had. Land, houses, cattle, and even clothing went for tulips when people had no ready money. Ladies sold their jewels and finery to enable them to join in the fun. Nothing else was thought of. At last the States-General interfered. People began to see what dunces they were making of themselves[117], and down went the price of tulips. Old tulip debts couldn’t be collected. Creditors went to law[118], and the law turned its back upon them; debts made in gambling were not binding, it said. Then there was a time! Thousands of rich speculators were reduced to beggary in an hour. As old Beckman says, ‘The bubble was burst at last.’”

“Yes, and a big bubble it was,” said Ben, who had listened with great interest. “By the way, did you know that the name tulip came from a Turkish word, signifying turban?”