Page:The black tulip (IA 10892334.2209.emory.edu).pdf/260

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256
The Black Tulip.

girl, the former being called Cornelius, the other Rosa.

Van Baerle remained faithfully attached to Rosa, and to his tulips. The whole of his life was devoted to the happiness of his wife, and the culture of flowers, in the latter of which occupations he was so successful, that a great number of his Varieties found a place in the catalogue of Holland.

The two principal ornaments of his drawing-room were those two leaves from the Bible of Cornelius De Witte, in large golden frames; one of them containing the letter in which his godfather enjoined him to burn the correspondence of the Marquise de Louvois, and the other, his own will, in which he bequeathed to Rosa his suckers under condition that she should marry a young man of from twenty-six to twenty-eight years, who loved her, and whom she loved, a condition which was scrupulously fulfilled, although, or rather because, Cornelius did not die.

And to ward off any envious attempts of another Isaac Boxtel, he wrote over his door the lines which Grotius had, on the day of his flight, engraved on the wall of his prison,—

“One has sometimes suffered enough to have a right ever afterwards to say, I am too happy.”