Excerpt from The Bodley Grandchildren: And Their Journey in Holland One afternoon in February, 1881, a carriage loaded with trunks drove up to the door of a house in Second Avenue, New York. There were two houses, in fact, side by side, and their doors being next each other, it was hard to say before which door the carriage stopped. Moreover, both the doors opened at the same moment, and in each doorway stood a child of the same age, yes, born on the same day of the same year, and this was their birthday. The chief difference between them was that one was a boy and the other a girl, and they had different names. But they had the same grandparents and the same aunt, and it was these who got out of the carriage, and came up the broad flight of steps which led to the doors of the two houses. The steps were wet with a recent snow, and as the children wore their slippers, they waited at the two thresholds, but their tongues rattled on. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.