Poor Relations Stories of Dutch Peasant Life (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Poor Relations: Stories of Dutch Peasant Life
The whole hamlet effervesced with delicious perturbation. Every one was telling every one else that Jan Hunkum lay murdered in his bed.
The Hemel is one of the dirtiest spots in a country where no spot is very dirty. The appearance of the place is against it: some few dozen disorderly hovels lie pitched across a field, their builders having allowed them to fall as they chose. Some, abusing this permission, lurch heavily, looking as if, like many of the people inside them, they had frequently taken a drop too much. Others bend backwards, propped up with the pride that cometh before a fall, and the general crookedness, and the old age that accentuates it, give the tumble-down dwellings a disreputable leer such as many of the indwellers have developed for themselves. Our conceptions of heaven - which is "De Hemel" - must inevitably remain inadequate at the best: perhaps the angels up yonder, in cloudland, cannot properly distinguish the gulf which, in our appreciation, sinks a pool of poverty and wickedness like this little Dutch hamlet beneath a favoured nook of our deteriorated Paradise such as, say, Monte Carlo.
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