'Een Beytie Hollansche'

Dutch Compositions

[p. 22]

10: c. 15 February

Het is derdtig Jaaren zeedert myn vaader te Leyde heeft studeerd. Het hollandsche taal hy met veel benyvering geleer'd en in een cleyd [sic] tyd hy het zoo weel verkreegen dat hy magtig was henzelven voorstaan te doen.

Hy kameren in een hollansche huys genoomen. Zyn Huysvrow was een Weduwe een hat een Zuster dat by har bleeven. De weduwe was vryen door een Kleermaaker, mar zyn zuster was niet de vrind van de liefhebber, welke de Weduwe grootelyks qualyk noomen. Eeenige morgen te Vier heuren zy heeft myn Vaader in een waanorde verwaken.

‘A Mynheer’ zeyd zy ‘Zuster 's doode.’

‘Wat zeg u vrow?’ antweerde hy, ‘Bin zy doode?’

‘Ja weel Mynheer’ zeyd de huysvrow, ‘Zy heeft een vlas Brandewyn alle avond in zyn camer houden en ik vreeze dat zy heeft te veel gedronken.’

Myn Vaader opsteenen anstiglyk en beneeden trap gingen, en hy heeft zuster zekerlyk dood gevonden. Maar hy was achterdoghtig dat de Weduwe had har uyt t' waerld gehelpen, als zy de kleermaaker terstond daarnaar getroude heeft.

[p. 23]

10: c. 15 February

It is thirty years since my father studied in Leiden.^16. He learned Dutch with great diligence, and in a short while he had acquired it so well that he was able to make himself understood.

He took rooms in a Dutch house. His landlady was a widow and had a sister living with her. The widow was courted by a tailor, but the sister was no friend of the lover, which annoyed the widow. One morning at four o'clock she woke my father in a frenzy.

‘Ah Sir,’ she said, ‘Sister's dead.’

‘What are you saying, woman?’ he replied, ‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes indeed, Sir,’ the landlady said. ‘Every evening she had a bottle of brandy in her room, and I'm afraid she drank too much.’

Anxiously my father got up and went downstairs, and certainly he found the sister dead. But he suspected that the widow had helped her out of the world, as she married the tailor soon afterwards.^17.

16. On 29 December 1727 the 21-year-old Alexander Boswell had registered in Leiden as a law student. He lived on the Rapenburg at the house of a widow, Mrs Boen: see Archief van Senaat en Faculteiten: Inschrijvingsregister 14 (1727-1755), 15, no. 273, in Leiden University Library.

17. In the Yale typescript there is a note on this anecdote: ‘The Leiden archives do not support Lord Auchinleck's story. The four sisters Schaaf(sijpen) of Solingen settled in Leiden before 1701: Angenita, who married Jan van Koedijk, sheep-shearer, in 1701 with her sister, Anna Margaretha, as a witness; Anna Maria, who married Cornelis Soetert (d. 1717), widower with three children, in 1712, with Anna Margaretha as a witness, and died in December 1729; Anna Margaretha; and Maria, Lord Auchinleck's landlady, who as the widow of Steven Boen, married Philip Ramack in 1728, with Anna Margaretha as a witness. The presumably murdered sister would seem to have been Angenita, the others being still alive at Maria's marriage with Ramack, but there is no record of her death in Leiden. The Anna Schaap, wife of Dirk Turk, who was coincidentally buried between 18 and 25 September 1728 was unfortunately not a sister.’