Here's a fine business! It is my uncle who has got into trouble this
time! My aunt Eudoxia has found out everything, and I have just spent
two days in helping my aunt Van Cloth to pack up and get back to Holland
with my long string of cousins, the fat Dirkie, the cooking moulds, and
the barrel-organ following by goods' train.

It was a veritable thunderclap!

I have told you all about this Dutch household and its patriarchal
felicity, its sweetmeat and sausage pastries, and its inimitable
tarts--less appetizing, however, than my aunt's fine eyes. I have told
you about their quiet family evenings with my uncle's pipe and
schiedam, in which domino-parties of three were varied by the delightful
treat of a symphony from one of the great masters, executed in a
masterly style by a pretty little plump hand covered with pink dimples.

Once or twice a week, as became a favourite and affectionate nephew, I
came into the midst of this idyll of the land of tulips; and always
quitted it full of sweetmeats and good advice.

However, the day before yesterday, Ernest, the second of my cousins, who
is five years old, suddenly caught a violent fever; he grew scarlet in
the face, and his stomach swelled up like a balloon.

My poor aunt, having exhausted all her arsenal of aperients and
astringents against what she reckoned to be an indigestion due to
preserved plums, quite lost her head. In the afternoon the child grew
worse. Where in Paris could she find a Dutch doctor? She could only
place confidence in a Dutchman. At the end of her wits with fear, she
thought she would go after my uncle or me; so, without thinking any more
about it, as she knew our address, she takes a cab and gets driven to
the Rue de Varennes, believing in her simplicity that this was where our
shops and offices were.