"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!"
Author
Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and the creator of the Lost World literary genre. His stories, situated at the lighter end of the scale of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential. He was also involved in agricultural reform and improvement in the British Empire. His breakout novel was King Solomon's Mines (1885), which was to be the first in a series telling of the multitudinous adventures of its protagonist, Allan Quatermain. Haggard was made a Knight Bachelor in 1912 and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1919. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Conservative candidate for the Eastern division of Norfolk in 1895. The locality of Rider, British Columbia, was named in his memory.
