“I’m counting,” was the reply.  “Now there are nine.”

“Nine?”

“I’ve met nine dead bodies so far; the rector sent us home.  Master Dirks is dead, and there were only thirteen of us to-day.  There are some people bringing another one.”

Maria drew her kerchief tighter and walked on.  At her left hand stood a tall, narrow house, in which lived a cobbler, a jovial man, over whose door were two inscriptions.  One ran as follows: 

“Here are shoes for sale,
Round above and flat below;
If David’s foot they will not fit,
Goliath’s sure they’ll suit, I know.”

The other was: 

“When through the desert roved the Jews,
Their shoes for forty years they wore,
Were the same custom now in use,
’Prentice would ne’er seek cobbler’s door.”

On the ridge of the lofty house was the stork’s nest, now empty.  The red-billed guests did not usually set out on their journey to the south so early, and some were still in Leyden, standing on the roofs as if lost in thought.  What could have become of the cobbler’s beloved lodgers?  At noon the day before, their host, who in March usually fastened the luck-bringing nest firmly with his own hands, had stolen up to the roof, and with his cross-bow shot first the little wife and then the husband.  It was a hard task, and his wife sat weeping in the kitchen while the evil deed was done, but whoever is tormented by the fierce pangs of hunger and sees his clear ones dying of want, doesn’t think of old affection and future good fortune, but seeks deliverance at the present time.

The storks had been sacrificed too late, for the cobbler’s son, his growing apprentice, had closed his eyes the night before for his eternal sleep.  Loud lamentations reached Maria’s ear from the open door of the shop, and Adrian said:  “Jacob is dead, and Mabel is very sick.  This morning their father cursed me on father’s account, saying it was his fault that everything was going to destruction.  Will there be no bread again to-day, mother?  Barbara has some biscuit, and I feel so sick.  I can’t swallow the everlasting meal any longer.”

“Perhaps there will be a slice.  We must save the baked food, child.”

In the entry of her house Maria found a man-servant, clad in black.  He had come to announce the death of Commissioner Dietrich Van Bronkhorst.  The plague had ended the strong man’s life on the evening of the day before, Sunday.

Maria already knew of this heavy loss, which threw the whole responsibility of everything, that now happened, upon her husband’s shoulders.  She had also learned that a letter had been received from Valdez, in which he had pledged his word of honor as a nobleman, to spare the city, if it would surrender itself to the king’s “mercy,” and especially to grant Burgomaster Van der Werff, Herr Van der Does, and the other supporters of the rebellion,