But inside these cube-shaped spaces are outrageously beautiful miniature rooms. Parlors, bedrooms, kitchens, storage rooms, music rooms, nursery rooms, making each cabinet into a perfect replica of the interior of an elegant old-fashioned canal house. Here, for instance, is a sitting room. The windows against the cabinet’s back wall are draped with perfect tiny velvet curtains, tied back with tiny golden braided ropes. Between the windows stand the fireplace, a marble mantelpiece, and then bookshelves, lined with row upon row of tiny, leather-bound volumes. Do they have real words inside them? There is no way to tell from Willem’s side of the glass. In the dining room the tiny banquet table is set for a grand dinner. Each place is set with delicate blue and white china, complete with dinner plates, soup bowls, wine goblets, and tiny coffee cups. The cutlery is silver, and the ends of each tiny utensil are engraved with someone’s monogram. Silver bowls of fruit, just like the ones in the museum portraits, sit in the middle of the table, their rims engraved with initials and dates. On the mantelpiece are silver candelabra. Ivory inlaid end tables stand like sentinels in the corners, holding tiny jewelry boxes. Upstairs, canopy beds with perfectly arranged pillows lie waiting for someone’s miniature dreams.

Willem presses his nose against the glass until he almost feels as if he lives in one of the rooms. Suddenly he wishes that he could shrink, shrink, shrink down until he was the right size to fit in one of those velvet-covered chairs. Then he could step into one of the houses and run through all of it—sitting on all of the plush sofas, eating off the blue and white china with the silver forks, sitting by the fireplace and reading all of the tiny books on the tiny shelves, undisturbed. Or searching for keys in secret places, and then opening the house’s countless secret drawers. Suddenly Willem notices something moving inside the room and shudders in fright. In a moment, though, he realizes that what has moved are his own eyes—his face is reflected in the gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace.

The real problem with Willem’s plan to shrink himself down into the tiny rooms, of course, is that they are already occupied. Each of the houses is populated by little dolls, dressed in strange costumes, as if they are going out to a masquerade. But then Willem understands that the dolls are a few centuries behind the times. The men wear black trapezoidal hats and shoes with big metal buckles on them, dark enough to blend into the upholstery except for their starched white collars. The women wear little white covers over their hair, and big dresses with lace bodices.

Yet there aren’t quite enough dolls around. Each house seems occupied only by a few dolls each, perhaps four or five at most. But the bedrooms can accommodate more than that, and the banquet tables are set for many more. There must be more people living in these houses, Willem thinks, who are simply off on a journey somewhere. After all, these are the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which means that Dutch people have places to go. Willem thinks of the merchants of the house going off on their ships to—where?