Lysbeth A Tale Of The Dutch

"Light the candles, for this place grows dark -- and in its gloom I see the ghosts of all my dead!"

On this day of the ice-f�te, smartly dressed skaters fill the frozen canals off the Rhine. Lysbeth van Hout speeds happily down the canal, surrounded by the lovely winter landscape of Leyden with its lofty churches of St. Peter and St. Pancras in the near distance, windmills spotting the snow-covered landscape farther away.

Then someone stops her -- Martha the Mare, with a harrowing look, to give Lysbeth this warning: "Listen! -- that unless they cast out the cursed Spaniard, a day shall come when the folk of Leyden must perish by thousands of hunger behind those walls!"

Stephen Coan is an assistant editor of The Natal Witness.