The Project Gutenberg eBook of Windmills and Wooden Shoes, by Blair Jaekel

Transcriber’s Note

Today a number of the Dutch spellings for place names, people’s names and specific words have changed but the colloquial spellings of the era have been retained, however where the name has been spelt two or more different ways, the spellings have been altered to the most prolific usage.

CHAPTER XV Utrecht and ’S Hertogenbosch. This chapter is the only one with the word Chapter before it, and this has been retained.

The spelling of the word æsophagus on p. 30, appears to be acceptable in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s, so this spelling has been retained.

Other changes made are noted at the end of the book.

WINDMILLS
AND
WOODEN SHOES

FOREWORD

To put before the prospective visitor the many delights and few disadvantages of a territory with which he may be already more or less familiar; to help him to form a comprehensive idea of the most of Holland within a reasonably short space of travel time; to refocus the lens, to readjust the vernier of his memory, providing he has already been there, so that he may take a truer reading of the country upon a second visit; to recant the praises of a people whose very existence has been and ever will be one perpetual, indefatigable struggle against the most ubiquitous of all of man’s enemies—an element of the universe; to give a brief synopsis of what a vast amount there is to see and learn in a country so rich in accomplishments, so poor in area—these constitute the chief end of this book of travel through the Netherlands. If it fails in its mission it is by no means the fault of the Netherlands nor of whatever of interest is contained therein.

If the text and illustrations inclosed between these covers cause but a single reader to live again a summer’s trip through Holland or prompt him to go there, there will be at least the satisfaction that the work has not been in vain.

The author takes this opportunity to express his appreciation to the editors of Travel , New York City, for permission to reprint as a part of the text of this book, together with the photographs pertaining to the different subjects, certain special articles by the author which have appeared in the pages of the magazine mentioned.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

Windmills and Wooden Shoes

Introductory

Take , if you will, the state of Delaware, something less than half of Maryland and the lower end of New Jersey; turn them upside down; drive Delaware and Jersey and the most of Maryland below the level of the sea; let the waters of the Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay seep in over the low-level territory; dike up the edges at the weak and exposed parts along the coast; pump the country dry, and keep it pumped dry, as far as possible—then, with a little less regularity of contour, you will have almost a geographical counterpart of Holland, both as to acreage and topography, although of but one fifth its total population. The Chesapeake Bay would equal the Zuyder Zee; Baltimore, if shifted to the other side of the Bay, might be substituted for Amsterdam; Wilmington on the Delaware would displace Rotterdam on the Maas; Hagerstown would fit the position of Arnhem; and, with the aid of a little elasticity of the imagination, [2] Cape May might be mistaken for the Hook of Holland.

Such, in brief, are the physical dimensions of, perhaps, the most unique, the most remunerative travel territory, acre for acre, in Europe.

Holland, like ancient Gaul, is divided; but into two parts instead of three. If we draw an imaginary line north and south bisecting the Zuyder Zee, the country on the west side of this line may be designated as the more be-traveled, therefore the more familiar part. Hundreds of thousands of tourists, singly, in groups, in “personally conducted” parties, annually make use of it as a playground. Its unusual below-sea-level scenery, its historical buildings, its marvelous waterways, its sandy bathing beaches, the life in its cities, the poetic costuming of its rural inhabitants, its treasures and masterpieces of art—all combine to fulfill every condition required by the average sight-seer. In no other section of Europe are the distances between places of interest so short; in no other section are the modes and conveniences of reaching these places so varied. If the traveler relies solely upon the railways to carry him from one point to another, he may be compelled to wait two hours in order to ride ten minutes. A happy combination of the steam tram lines, the railways, and the canal packets, will enable him not only to get about without loss of time, but to penetrate curious, out-of-the-way parts of the country which one or [3] the other of the different methods of transportation may overlook.

The surface of the territory to the eastward of the imaginary longitude is barely scratched by the searcher of the picturesque and historical. Many of its towns are as interesting as any of those in the west, but, as a general rule, their peoples have been more easily influenced by German and Belgian methods, and, therefore, their characteristics differ greatly from those of the natives of North and South Holland and Zeeland, for example. What evidences of their history and art these towns still possess they have in a great measure failed to appreciate themselves, and it is this lack of self-confidence, translated into a complete failure so far to advertise their own scenic and historical virtues, that has bred the comparative aloofness with respect to them in the manner of the tourist through Holland. Probably the majority of travelers go to the Netherlands, not for art, nor for scenery, nor even for history, but for windmills and wooden shoes (to epitomize the characteristics of the country and its peoples), and for that reason their wanderings are bound to be confined, for the most part, to the exiguous territory bordered by the North Sea on the west and the Zuyder Zee on the east.

The omnipresent story of Holland is the story of its fight against the waters. Its other conquests pale before it. Its eighty years’ revolution against the [5] Spaniards cannot compare with it. Water is Holland’s perpetual and merciless enemy; so much so that if all the dikes that protect her from the waters of the ocean burst to-night, to-morrow there would be but a third of the country left. How she has conquered would fill a book in itself. Since the Frisian monks first commenced to dike in the country, successive inundations have blotted out the lives of more of her people than all her conquests at arms put together. But still the Dutch fought on, resolutely, unflinchingly, persistently, until they dredged what land they needed from the bottom of the sea and grew grass and flowers and vegetables where kelp and cockle-shells thrived before. After hundreds of years of dredging and diking, by 1833 Holland had attained an acreage of 8,768 square miles. By 1877 she had added another four thousand.

Characteristic of the Dutch perseverance to conquer the menacing waters is a part of the report of the commission appointed to superintend the reclamation of the Haarlemermeer, an inland sea that once lapped the very gates of Amsterdam herself and upon which a fleet of seventy vessels once gave battle. “We have driven forever from the bosom of our country a most dangerous enemy,” said the commission, after its task had been completed; “we have at the same time augmented the means for defending our capital in time of war. We have conquered a province in combat without tears and without [6] blood, where science and genius took the place of generals, and where workmen were the worthy soldiers.”

Previous to 1836 the Dutch had tolerated the Haarlemermeer. In November of that year a violent west wind lashed its waters into a fury and poured them into the streets of Amsterdam. On Christmas day there came an east wind that drove the waters from Amsterdam over into the streets of Leyden. This was too much. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. This was what exhausted even the patience of the Dutch, and they picked up the gauntlet. They contrived a plan of methodical, systematic attack. They diked in the Lake with a high earthen cofferdam, installed a series of powerful pumps that sucked a thousand cubic feet of water at a single stroke of the piston, and they drew 800,000,000 tons of lake water up into the surrounding canals to be carried off to the sea with much the same complacency that you would imbibe a glass of soda through a straw. It took more than four years to complete the process. When it was finally finished the Dutch struck a medal in commemoration which bore in Latin the following matter-of-fact inscription: “Haarlem Lake, after having for centuries assailed the surrounding fields to enlarge itself by their destruction, conquered at last by the force of machinery, has returned to Holland its 44,280 acres of invaded land.” The significance [7] of the Dutch bon mot , “God made the sea; we made the shore,” will never be more apparent than when you look out from the car window across the Zuidplaspolder near Rotterdam, with a minus altitude of more than thirty feet below the level of the ocean at mean tide.

Holland being, as a whole, the lowest country in the world, is protected at the danger zones by the great dikes upon which almost the entire kingdom depends for its safety from disastrous inundation, and which require the annual cost of maintenance of approximately $12,000,000 and the undivided attention of a whole department of engineers. The mileage of the canals which intersect the country in every direction is greater than the mileage of the railroads. First and all the time, these canals, except those constructed for special purposes, serve for conducting the superfluous water from the cultivated areas. Second, they are highways for traffic. Travel on them is cheaper than on the steam tram lines, which is cheaper, in turn, than on the railways, for many of the latter are owned and operated by private companies, as in England. Even some of the lines built by the State are leased to a private concern. But unlike those of England, there can be little doubt that an investment in their stocks is a paying one, because railway building and railway up-keep in Holland are comparative sinecures. Grades are unknown, curves are scarce as the proverbial [8] hen’s teeth, except in the approaches to a city, and I failed to find a tunnel in the whole country.

But touring in Holland is not so cheap as it is either in Germany or France. The unit basis of Dutch coinage is the gulden , of value equal to slightly more than two francs and just less than two marks . There is even an oft repeated but exaggerated saying that a gulden in Holland will only go as far as a mark in Germany. One of the reasons for the expensiveness of travel through the Netherlands is that to stop at any but the so-called first-class hostelries is a rather precarious business. In spite of all the Dutchman’s reputation for cleanliness, the less expensive hotels, unlike their ilk in Germany or Switzerland, are often anything but scrupulous in this matter and sometimes shockingly unsanitary.

The system of Dutch municipal government is almost identical with that of Germany, the Burgomaster, or Mayor, being appointed by the crown instead of being elected by the community, so that a man may follow the profession of burgomastering as he would that of engineering. It is, withal, a system that might well supplant that in vogue in American cities, and if the experimental stages of municipal government by commission—lately tentatively adopted in some few cases as an expedient to do away with political bartering for executive positions—if this form of government proves its [9] worth, the professional mayor may yet become with us a reality.

School attendance for children is compulsory in the Netherlands, but not free. The equivalent of eight American cents is the charge imposed by the State for one week’s tuition for one child in the primary grades, with stipulated increments added to the fee as the pupil advances. All schools are under the supervision of the State, and if a family is found too poor to pay the school taxes on its children, the fees are remitted. The trade school, however, of late inauguration, has revolutionized the old-time classical education to a great degree.

Until the child attains the age of thirty years he or she is subservient to parental authority and must even obtain, up until that age, parental permission to marry—and the matter of marriage in Holland is by no means the least interesting of the customs of the country. Courtship is a protracted affair and follows the engagement indefinitely. Two weeks prior to the date of the wedding the legal declaration of the betrothal takes place, consisting of the “signing on” of both parties involved. The bride, with apt acknowledgment that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, at once proceeds to render herself immune from the usual deluge of cut glass and pie knives by compiling a list of acceptable wedding presents for the consultation of her relatives and friends, so that they may select such gifts [10] as are suited both to her needs and their pocketbooks.

Of the civil marriage ceremonies there are three classes, not at all determined by the social positions of the contracting parties, but by the time required to tie the knot and the corresponding fee imposed. A first-class marriage may be performed on any day of the week, but the second and third-class marriages are conducted upon certain days, the different members of the City Council officiating by turns. Each of the second-class ceremonies is performed separately and the ritual repeated for each couple. A number of third-class marriages, however, may be conducted at one and the same time, and practically at club rates. The ceremony in this case is not altogether an impressive one but it serves its purpose at a cheaper price and is more quickly over with. The methods of procedure are somewhat as follows:

Brides and bridegrooms to be, friends, relatives, and witnesses are ushered into a large room in the city hall. The member of Council in charge takes his position upon the dais, and the clerk calls the names of the contracting parties. They arise to acknowledge their identities, which are duly vouched for by the various witnesses in each case. The officer then proceeds to expatiate upon the duties of man and wife and upon the holy bonds of matrimony, directing his awesome remarks to the standing couples. In closing, he puts forth the question [11] as to whether each, in spite of all he has said, will take the other for better or for worse, abide by the laws, and love and cherish each other until death doth part, so help them. A loud and enthusiastic chorus in the affirmative is followed by a banging of the table right soundly with the official gavel, and the whole company is forthwith pronounced man and wife. Of course it is assumed by the conspirators which maiden the functionary has pronounced the wife of which young man; at all events, there is nothing on record about the wrong husband decamping with the wrong wife. Order comes out of apparent chaos and, as the story books read, they all live happily ever after.

The civil ceremony is all that is required by law, but, possibly to moisten the already well executed knot in the tie that binds, many couples later undergo the religious ceremony in the church. The familiar wedding ring figures in neither the religious nor the civil ceremony. Each member of an engaged couple presents the other with a plain gold ring at the time of “plighting their troth,” as we observe in the novels, which is worn upon the third finger of the left hand until after the marriage, when it becomes a wedding ring and is transferred to the right hand.

Until the advent of the little Princess Juliana Holland realized her danger of being ultimately absorbed by Germany. A German Prince had married [12] the sovereign of the Dutch nation, and German journals were not reticent in suggesting that, in the event of Queen Wilhelmina leaving no direct issue, the succession should revert to the family of the Prince Consort. Moreover, Germany had ever been jealous of Holland’s possession of the mouth of the greatest of German rivers—the Rhine, of which she sought the control from its source to the sea. Germany also had an eye upon Holland’s possessions for her own colonization—possessions that give this little country second place among the colonial powers of the world and which, in the Far East alone, aggregate in acreage fourteen times her own area. But the birth of Juliana precluded all immediate possibility of German usurpation, and the Hollanders didn’t convalesce from the effects of the joyous news for a whole week.

The Dutch are an intensely patriotic people and have made heroic sacrifices to maintain the independence now assured them by the powers of the world—and the birth of Juliana. They are phlegmatic rather than impetuous; stoical rather than demonstrative; impassive rather than excitable. By virtue of their country’s unique maritime position it has bred the naval heroes, navigators, discoverers, and engineers whose names will remain synonymous for indomitable pluck so long as there exists a history of unequal fighting. By reason of the wealth derived from the foreign trade that these men made [13] possible it has fostered conspicuous groups of artists and scholars and scientists who in their times were the leaders of their guilds.

It is with keen appreciation of the characteristics of the Hollander which enable him to offer to the traveling world so delightful a handmade territory, that I turn to the pages of “ The Traveler ” by Oliver Goldsmith and quote a short summary of Holland from the pen of one who traveled and observed, and who, by his enviable powers of description, analysis, and condensation, could epitomize a volume of significance in a single word of syncope.

II
The Island of Walcheren

It must be because the province of Zeeland seems too fearfully close to be interesting that the average traveler through Holland, if he enter by Flushing—one of the little country’s two principal sea gates—hurries from deck to dock like a somnambulist, and fights for his compartment in the four-something a.m. train, bound for Amsterdam or The Hague. Perhaps, after being wakened most unsympathetically, if not rudely, at three-thirty in the morning, he feels disagreeable enough to take the first train out, no matter whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. But in so doing the aforementioned average sight-seer will make his first mistake—and a grave one—with regard to Holland. Part of the best of the country, scenically and historically, is just at the other end of the gangplank.

This business of the arrival at Flushing of the night boat from Folkestone at the unheavenly hour of four in the morning, ought in itself be sufficient excuse to go first thing to the bedroom steward the evening of embarkation and whisper unto him casually but firmly that the odds might run as high as [15] ten chances to one his name would be Dutch for Dennis if he dared to rap you out of your bunk earlier than six. The steamship company reserves the privilege of putting you off the boat at seven, at any rate; so, to arise at six will just give you time to array yourself in the proper regalia, indulge in a hurried breakfast of ham and eggs on board (at a shilling an egg), and climb into the seven-seven train for that capital of quaintness, not to mention the province of Zeeland—Middelburg. The four-something train ignores Middelburg with a passing snort.

And a word here to the wise is sufficient: don’t settle yourself for an all day train ride. Don’t even exert yourself to the extent of hoisting your grip to the baggage rack. If the compartment be crowded—which it never is, going to Middelburg—you might hold your suit case on your lap the entire journey without fatigue or even ennui . Middelburg is four miles from Flushing. If the engineer doesn’t slow down to blow the whistle it will take just eleven minutes to cover the distance.

I have anticipated the fact that the sum total of your baggage will consist of a suit case, because personally conducting a trunk through Holland would be just as incongruous as saddling a Shetland pony with an elephant howdah.

There are two methods of seeing the Island of Walcheren, equally fascinating, and the visitor can [16] avail himself of both in one and the same day. The first is by climbing the two hundred and seventy-odd steps to the top of “Long John” in Middelburg, and the second by a drive around the Island, covering, perhaps, thirty miles, and touching the three principal places of interest: Veere, Domburg, and Westkapelle. To state here that the Island of Walcheren is not an island might seem a bit ambiguous, but it is true, nevertheless, and may be explained away as follows:

Long before our time, perhaps in the distant Paleozoic age, Walcheren was nothing more than shallow water. Along came the Dutch—who have a happy faculty of making their own geography as they need it—and, seeing prospects in its development, built a sort of cofferdam around it, pumped the place dry, and made it into an island. It made a fairly good island, and in later years they grafted it on to the parent land by a long embankment across an arm of the Scheldt, and made it into a peninsula. A peninsula it still remains, but its future is all a matter of conjecture.

“Long John,” or Lang Jan , if the sobriquet be translated into Dutch, is practically the Washington Monument of Walcheren. It is the two-hundred-and-eighty-foot tower of the Nieuwe Kerk in Middelburg, capped with a climax of forty-one bells that chime a quaint fragment of some familiar popular melody every seven-and-a-half minutes. On the [17] hour Long John literally vibrates from foundation to weather vane in a frenzied endeavor to pour forth in toto the accumulation of more or less music administered in small doses during the previous sixty minutes.

It is up the middle of Long John you must climb in a spiral to obtain a first impression of Walcheren. It is a tedious task, and by the time you are halfway up you are blessing the memory of the man who twined the now much worn hand rope along the steep staircase. You may even be about to give up in disgust, when, of a sudden, you stumble in upon the lofty hermitage of old Hendrick Landman, the keeper of the bells.

Hendrick sits serenely in his armchair in an extremely well ventilated room at the top of the spiral and lets people pay a small fee for the privilege of climbing up to have him point out the view and exhibit his mechanical masterpiece a few ladder lengths higher up. Hendrick’s view alone is doubly worth the climb, and, after reimbursing him to the equivalent extent of about eight cents in American coinage, you will also have to admit that he can certainly keep bells. I know nothing of whatever else Hendrick can or cannot do, but he can certainly keep bells; and after all, a man can hope for nothing more than to achieve success in his chosen calling. Hendrick also takes just pride in the condition of the Gargantuan Swiss music box that is responsible [18] for the two or three bars every seven-and-a-half minutes. He oils it and he winds it assiduously twice every day in the year.

After having been duly and visibly impressed with the manner in which Hendrick keeps his bells and his garrulous music box, it might be well to tarry with him for a few moments at the foot of the ladder and attempt a squint or two through the old gentleman’s telescope, which, from the appearance of it, might be a lineal descendant of the first ones ever put together by Zacharias Jansen, all of three hundred years ago and not more than a few feet from the base of the tower you stand upon.

Jansen, the inventor of the telescope and the microscope, and Father Jacob Cats, the humorist-poet-philosopher, were contemporaries in Middelburg for a time, and the town claims them as its two most illustrious sons. The children of Jansen’s genius may still be viewed in the little Museum of the Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Watenschappen (don’t ask me to pronounce the name of that society; it is task enough to spell it correctly) in the Wagenaarstraat of Zeeland’s capital; Father Cats will live in Holland in book form until the end of all things.

If the atmosphere be clear, you would think that a strong wind from the north could topple Long John, including bells, music box, Hendrick Landman [19] and his telescope, and all, upon the bathing beach of Flushing itself—the place seems so close below you. Flushing of to-day is nothing more than a pseudo bathing resort, much patronized by easily pleased Germans, and a handy terminus for ’cross-channel passenger boats. But the name of Flushing also means much in the history of Holland.

Here was born in 1607 that popular idol of the Dutch, Admiral de Ruyter, the son of a rope maker, although his mother, whose name he assumed, happened to be of noble birth. De Ruyter flourished at a particularly favorable time in the middle of the seventeenth century, when the navigation acts passed by Cromwell placed unbearable restrictions on trade with Holland. The ensuing war with England called into play de Ruyter’s talents, and a large majority of the thirteen great naval battles fought within a period of sixteen months were won by the Dutch. It was not, however, until a later war with England that de Ruyter performed his principal and culminating achievement. In 1667, at the age of sixty, he mustered his fleet and forced a fairway up the Thames to the very gates of London herself, demolishing fortifications and shipping as he went, and plunging London into a panic.

Flushing, too, was the scene of embarkation of the unhappy Charles V in 1556, and of Philip II three years later, neither of whom ever returned. As you look out upon the Scheldt from your coign of vantage [20] at the top of Long John you can almost picture the scene on the deck of the vessel when Philip denounced the Prince of Orange as having thwarted his plans, declaring the innocent William an ingrate, and doubtless a host of other names unfit for publication.

It was Flushing that first hoisted the ensign of liberty against the Spaniard, Alva, and it was Flushing, during the Napoleonic wars of 1809, that the English fleet, with the ultimate capture of Antwerp at heart, bombarded so vigorously that the magnificent Town Hall, a couple of churches, and no less than two hundred private houses were razed to the ground.

From Long John one can see plainly the towns on the north and west coasts of Walcheren, and often even the spires of Antwerp are visible, while directly below—a mass of red roofs punctured here and there with patches of trees—stretches Middelburg. To the left is the market place, bounded on the north by the handsome Town Hall begun in the sixteenth century, the embellishment of whose façade by twenty-five ancient statues of the counts and countesses of Holland helps it to hold its place as one of the finest and most interesting late-Gothic edifices in the Netherlands. The tower of the Town Hall has a chime, too, and each time after Long John so insistently proclaims the hour of the day or night—for Long John takes the credit of giving standard [21] time to Middelburg—it must get a bit on his nerves to have “Foolish Betsy” ( Gekke Betje ), up in the Town Hall tower, rattle off her cacophonous contradiction a minute or two earlier, or later, as the case may be.

To the right is the peaceful square inclosed by the famous old Abbey of St. Nicholas, founded as early as 1106, and later, in the sixteenth century, the scene of a memorable meeting of the Knights of the Golden Fleece.

Then, after a last good-by to Hendrick and his companionable telescope, you clatter down the tower steps, ignoring with consummate contempt the twining hand rope which, in the ascent, so forcibly appealed to your avoirdupois.

The road from Middelburg to Veere, a distance of three or four miles, is brick-paved and lined with trees, as is the habit of most highways in Holland; and if it is your first experience thoughts pertaining to the thoroughness of the Dutch will doubtless be in order. It may have taken more time and it may have cost more money to lay brick roads, but then the expense and labor of repair are minimum. The building of roads is but one of the many tasks that the Hollander does not believe in doing over again in a year or two; so he lays them in brick—and the comfort of passengers in vehicles is of no consideration. There is a road from Monnikendam to Edam which might give a horse spavin to look upon. The [22] blame for the wearing out of the road, in this case, is placed upon the poor beast, and down the middle of it they have laid a brick-paved path, the sides being merely macadamized.

The landscape of Walcheren seems set as if for a theatrical performance. There is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. Left, a tree-encircled, thatch roofed farmhouse, built as an addition to the barn in the back, so as to save a wall; right, a line of willows, all twins, that fringe a road along the top of a dike; up stage, a windmill of methodical movements, and, perhaps, a sailboat passing slowly along a narrow canal—too narrow and too high above the eye for the audience to obtain a glimpse of any water at all—giving the effect of a mirage; down stage, a black and white cow. Of course it will be a black and white cow, because, figuratively, you might count the red cows in Holland on your fingers. And such a scene is not typical of the Island of Walcheren alone, but of the Netherlands in general. Any other type of scenery might become wearisome, but possibly the brevity of the train ride or the substitution of a boat or steam tram trip between one point of interest and another has a lot to do with relieving the monotony.

Of all Zeeland, the particular costume of that province can be observed to the best advantage on the island of Walcheren. A milkmaid of Middelburg, for example, is a joy to look upon. Her spotless [23] white cap bristles at the temples with kurkenkrullen like the antennæ of a prehistoric beetle. Her skirts are ankle-high and padded generously at the hips. If she be naturally rotund and the skirts need no padding, circumstantial evidence of the fact is sufficient to stamp her the belle of the community. The sleeves of her bodice are very short and very tight, pinching the arms above the elbows so that they might be mistaken for a pair of aggravated cases of inflammatory rheumatism. Of course the sun in all its glory strikes the backs of these arms, for she always walks with them akimbo, the better to balance the pails which dangle one from each end of a wooden yoke, enameled a vivid robin’s egg blue. But the redder the arms from the rays of the sun and the tighter the pinch of the sleeves, the flatter the chest and the broader the hips, the sooner will she cease to be a mere milkmaid through the medium of a simple marriage ceremony in the village kerk .

The only discordant note in the otherwise harmonious landscape on the road to Veere may be said to be a flitting one. It assumes the distended shape of a buxom village maiden in the full provincial costume—padded skirts and all—astride a bicycle, spinning townward or homeward over the bricks. For the bicycle, be it known, is the natural—and it has therefore become the national—means of locomotion in Holland. Everybody rides bicycles; and since the only hills are the approaches to the dikes [24] or across the humpbacked span of a canal drawbridge, their invention has been no less a boon to the populace at large than it has been a bane to the sight-seer. In The Hague, for example, they have become a veritable pest, and to be constantly dodging them in the streets keeps a person very much on the jump.

By and by you will rattle into Veere. You can tell it is Veere by its church, for Veere’s church is something to remember. It is by far the biggest thing on the island of Walcheren. It is the first building of historical or architectural importance that you will pass on entering the town from Middelburg, and its immensity, so foreign to the Veere of to-day, may be able to convey to you some remote idea of what Veere used to be before the sea leaked in over the cofferdam and blotted out most of the place between suns.

Built in 1348, this church weathered even the terrible encroachment of the sea; but along came Napoleon in 1812. Napoleon, being accustomed to move, lock, stock and barrel, into the most sumptuous quarters of every town he visited, took a particular liking to Veere’s church and promptly made a barracks of it. There is no more complete method of demolishing the interior of a building than to turn it into a barracks, especially a Napoleonic barracks, and since the Little Corsican’s unwelcome visit to Veere the old church has remained ravaged, mildewed, [25] and decayed. In a corner of the east end, however, the people of Veere still gather for spiritual worship. Twelve years ago they started to restore the church, but if the receipt of funds is not a little more prompt in the future they may some day have to restore the restorations.

Several quaint old houses of the sixteenth century; an impressive tower at the mouth of the harbor, whose mate lies buried under the sea; and the Town Hall, containing an unimportant museum save for a few royal documents and a richly enameled goblet, presented to the town in 1551 by Maximilian of Burgundy, the first marquis of Veere—these and the church are the sole relics of Veere’s previous prosperity not claimed by the ocean.

A rapid succession of long, shady, hedge-fringed avenues lead from Veere to Domburg, the curious little bathing resort on the northwest coast of the island. Approximately halfway, at West Hove, there stands a famous old castle, once the residence of the Abbots of Middelburg, which remains in such a perfect state of preservation—although modernized, of course, to a certain degree—that in the summer it is used as a sanatorium for the poor children of the Flushing and Middelburg districts. Just across the road an attractive modern building, more like a country home in design, does duty as a full-fledged hospital.

The town of Domburg gives not the least evidence [26] of being situated on the seaside, as do the most of our Atlantic Coast resorts by their bleakness, but seems rather an inland village, thickly sprinkled with and all but completely surrounded by trees. At its back and just a few steps behind the sand dunes, lies the sea, while a stretch of well formed, sandy beach, which entices to Domburg each summer a goodly number of Dutch people and the few foreigners who know of its charms, slopes away beyond the dunes.

For five miles farther, to Westkapelle, the road lies first behind the dunes and then behind the giant dike for which this, one of the most exposed and at the same time one of the lowest sections of Holland, is famous. Presently you find yourself bowling along on top of the dike, with the sea lapping restlessly at its thick, beveled-stone hide on the right, and the village of Westkapelle, nestling some feet below the water level even at low tide, yet secure behind the backbone of its protector, on the left. This dike, being of necessity one of the largest and strongest along the Dutch coast, receives the tenderest of care in the hands of the Government, for, in case of a break in it, the Island of Walcheren would be reduced to its former state of shallow sea water in less time than it would take to set the type of the “scare-head” in the newspapers to tell of the catastrophe. The laborers who are constantly employed at work upon it are supposed to be the direct descendants [27] of the Danish fishermen who dragged these waters with their nets far back in Norman times.

Aside from its dike the most conspicuous object in the vicinity of Westkapelle is the lofty, square, Gothic tower, belonging originally to a fifteenth-century church burned down in 1831. This tower the Dutch have aptly turned into practical service by making a lighthouse of it. The powerful reflectors at its top have a radius of twenty-five miles or more and, even in the daytime, the tower is as much of a landmark along the west coast of the island as the church at Veere is along the north.

Driving from Westkapelle back to Middelburg you scarcely pass out from the throes of one tollgate until you are enmeshed in those of another. You are assumed to be honest in Zeeland and expected to march right up to the door of the tollhouse, pass a cordial time of day with the character who keeps it, and pay your little five or six Dutch cents without even so much as giving vent to the time-honored conjecture that the farmers thereabouts must be too well off to work out their taxes on the roadway.

Nor is it only the tollhouse keeper who has a pleasant word of greeting for you, but every native you pass, man, woman, or child, will have a nod and a smile and a cheery “Good evening”—although you may not recognize the verbiage. The sturdy truck farmer, with gold earrings and cropped hair, trudging homeward in the wake of his push-cart; the [28] thickly padded maiden with her dangling milk pails; the tiny boys and girls, diminutive counterparts of their parents as regards a costume which wavers not with the change of fashion—all seem to think it their especial assignment to treat the tourist on Walcheren as a visitor and not an invader.

III
From Middelburg to Dortrecht

If the American traveler expects to stop off along the line from Middelburg at a little place called Goes, he will undergo his first operation with the Dutch language. Should he fail to catch sight of the signboard that proclaims in print the name of the station, or to compare his watch with his timetable in order to ascertain in this manner the exact bearings of the point of stoppage, he will probably be carried on through, for it will not occur to him that he had planned to detrain when the tin-horn-girdled conductor rattles up and down the platform shouting, “Whose.” But “Whose” is the way Goes is pronounced—and this is simply introductory.

Some there be who try to insist that we have nothing to brag about in the way of euphonic orthography, which is more or less of a cold fact. But then, we are used to it. The same may be said of the Dutch language, and it is to be hoped that the Dutch are used to it . They seem to get along with it passably well, at all events. But their ability to master the impossible does not alleviate our troubles in the least. Any nation that can spell “ice” y-s [30] and i-j-s with equal complacency, and gather the same meaning from both methods, deserves to be misunderstood.

The Dutch letter g , to come back to Goes, strikes terror to the vocal organs of the most versatile linguist. It is treated with somewhat the same disrespect that the Spanish treat their j , only more so. The Dutch pronunciation of a word beginning with g is started somewhere in the anatomical vicinity of the diaphragm and allowed to percolate up through the æsophagus, gathering harshness and strength until it comes in violent contact with the larynx, whence it is finally ejaculated with about the same sound as a bad attack of hay fever. I quote a passage from a certain work on Holland, the author of which infers that if any person not of Dutch descent can repeat the sentence correctly as to sound and emphasis, to him the mastery of the remainder of the language will seem like child’s play. The sentence follows: “ Grietje, gooi geen goeje groente in de gracht. ” The interlinear cribbing of it would be in English, “Gretchen, do not throw any good vegetables into the canal.”

But since the Dutch have made so many brave attempts to discover a goodly portion of the east coast of the United States, there may be found in any geography of America a number of proper names, originally of Dutch origin, but now Anglicized to meet our requirements. They thought so [31] much of the beauties of the lower end of New York Bay that they promptly applied to it the term, “Beautiful Outlet,” or, in Dutch, Helle Gat . “Hell Gate” must obviously be a deal less difficult, although scarcely more poetic. For the same reason does the Americanized Cape Henlopen supplant the correct name of the Friesland town of Hindeloopen from which its discoverer hailed. The name of a certain street in lower Manhattan must also be of Dutch derivation, for our word “Bowery” may be found as bouwerij , which means a “peasant’s dwelling” in the vocabulary of the Netherlands. And these are but a few of the numerous words and syllables heard in America that may be attributed to Dutch influence.

Hard by the town of Goes the tourist will obtain a comprehensive idea of what a real polder looks like, although it is scarcely distinguishable from the fact that all of the scenery along the route from Flushing east is typical, below-sea-level Dutch, lavishly cut by canals into triangles, trapezoids, and parallelograms.

A polder , by way of explanation, is the reclaimed bed of a sheet of water; and since the greater part of Holland lies below the level of the sea, the most of it is polder . Land thus reclaimed is of extraordinary fertility by reason of the fact that the water under which it was once submerged, having been pumped into surrounding canals, is readily available for irrigation purposes in event of a dry season.

The initial move in this really marvelous process of making land while you wait consists of building a dike around the prospective polder to fortify it against future inundations. Next, they literally kick the water out of the inclosed area by means of a peculiarly constructed water wheel, formerly driven by a windmill, but latterly—the Dutch having become inoculated with twentieth century impatience—by the adaptation of steam or gasoline power to the task. Often, however, the bed of the marsh or lake to be reclaimed lies too deep to admit of its water being at once kicked into the main canals to be carried off to the ocean. Such a condition of affairs will necessitate the lake being surrounded with a veritable series of dikes, each higher than the one before, like the amphitheater of a clinic (a slightly exaggerated simile), and each with a canal on its farther side from the polder . The water is then pumped from a lower level to a higher one until, finally, it is forced to admit the utter uselessness of trying to compete with the Dutch. The polder near Goes, known as the Wilhelminapolder, is something like 4,000 acres in extent and was reclaimed from the sea the same year that Napoleon was undoing the history of ecclesiastical architecture in Veere.

Polder making is a specialty with the Dutch engineers, and the end of their ingenuity is not yet in sight. Even now they are making gigantic preparations to spend upwards of $80,000,000 in the reclamation [33] of the whole lower half of the Zuyder Zee, two thirds of which is to be constructed into a polder having an area of 1,400 square miles. The dike will stretch across the Zee from the village of Ewyksluis in North Holland to Piaam in Friesland, the cost of which alone is estimated at about $18,000,000.

On any other day but Tuesday there can be no excuse for the traveler to take the least heed of the train conductor’s garglings and stop off at Goes; but the costumes of Zeeland, as seen at a Tuesday’s market, are well worth a break in the journey.

A few miles beyond Goes the train crosses the Zuid-Beveland Canal, which intersects the long, straggling island of that name and of which Goes is the capital. The canal was cut through by the Dutch engineers in 1863–66 as a sort of apology to nature for their having deliberately closed up an arm of the Scheldt called the Kreekerak—a body of water that the Dutch never trusted since its contribution to the inundation of the east coast of Flemish Zeeland. Previous to 1532 that east coast was fertile farm land and populated by peace-loving peasants. But in that year the dike burst. Three thousand inhabitants are alleged to have perished, and the locality is still under water, it being known to-day as Verdronken Land, or “Drowned Land.”

A little later your train will cross the Kreekerak on the embankment they built, and Bergen-op-Zoom is the next stop.

They say Bergen-op-Zoom used to be one of the most flourishing towns in the Netherlands. Doubtless that is true. The only flourishing parts to be found about it now are its thousand and one rags flourished by its thousand and one housemaids scrubbing its thousand and one doorsteps. The latter are [35] incessantly being cleaned and recleaned by the former in the hands of the intermediate; so much so, indeed, that it appears as if each maid were trying for a record. Bending double or down on their knees—in every conceivable attitude they attack their front doorsteps as many times a day as they think necessary, which is rather more than often. I have never read a consular report that speaks of Holland as a territory open for trade in mops. They may be on sale, but I have yet to see one in action. For one cause or another the Dutch seem to cling to the hand method of wringing the cloth over the bucket, then bending double and sloshing it from side to side across the pavement with a movement akin to that of a nervous captive elephant; but perhaps for the reason that this Dutch method is not and never can be thorough, do they deem it exigent to repeat the operation with such frequence.

The lesson gleaned from all this is how the Dutch have beaten their lifelong enemy, water, at its own game, ousted it, and then turned round and made of it an humble and subjected medium for keeping the country clean.

Most towns west of the Zuyder Zee are so notoriously clean that even walking over the pavements is not encouraged. For reasons of his own a householder will continue his property line out across his two or three feet of pavement with the help of a chain or iron railing, more or less decorative, so [36] that the pedestrian, when he comes to the barrier, must side-step into the street in order to pass it.

There are four or five other features of Bergen-op-Zoom that I remember no less distinctly. One was the imposing old Gevangenpoort with its massive brick archway. It dates from the fifteenth century and constitutes one of the few remaining relics of the ancient town fortifications. Another was the accomplished female at the railway station, who served liquid refreshments to warm and weary travelers and, by way of diversion for the sake of accumulating a few extra absurd little ten cent pieces, handled the baggage of arriving and departing visitors to the town with the ease and strength of a full-blown dientsmann . If there happened to be too many pieces of luggage to carry at once, she invariably remembered where someone had hidden a wheelbarrow conveniently near the station. This she would fetch, often without the knowledge or consent of its owner, load the luggage upon it, and march off with a dignified, “what-do-you-think-of-me” sort of an air.

Another feature was the glaring heat of the place—the day of my visit being a rather humid one in July; and still another—the most important of all—was a quiet, shady nook on the low portico of a little café just back of the Groote Kerk, from which sheltered position I looked up more than once over the tops of the trees and admired the lofty steeple of [37] the old house of worship through the bottom of a tall, slender glass.

But a short ride from Bergen-op-Zoom brings you to Rosendaal, which, from the apparent activity about the station, might be by long odds the most important town in all Holland. It is the seat of the Dutch customhouse and therefore the junction of many railway lines, north, south, east, and west; or vice versa . All roads lead in the Netherlands, not to Rome, but to Rosendaal. To explore the town is scarcely worth the trouble, but the railway station itself deserves especial notice. If you enter Holland from the Belgian frontier it will be impossible not to notice it, for the train will stop long enough at Rosendaal for the customs officials to question each and every passenger personally about cigars, perfumery, and other dutiable articles. If you come from the east or the west it is eleven chances to one you will have to change cars at Rosendaal, in which latter predicament you will at least enjoy a stroll up and down the long station platform.

This Rosendaal station struck me as being about the cleanest, shiniest place, for a railway station, at which I had ever changed cars. Not a speck of soot or dust was visible to the naked eye, and it is possible that one of old Zacharias Jansen’s microscopes wouldn’t be able to find any either, although a certain few, larger and more grotesque than their fellows, might be brought to notice under the lens [38] of an instrument of later model. Every doorway was guarded by a pair of little boxwood or bay tree sentries, and flowers filled the boxes under the windows. The leather tables and chairs in the waiting-rooms and restaurant all but suggested a Spanish Renaissance influence, and their great brass-topped tacks glittered as if they had never known what it was to be tainted with stain or smirch—and this in a railway station.

But then, a Dutch locomotive is not nearly so offensive, I might say, as one of the American breed; and if the proper legislation is forthcoming we shall be sending experts to Holland soon to take notes on how they do it. All railway locomotives in Holland are under the supervision of an arm of the government service, and although the most of them bear the shop-plate of Glasgow or Manchester, they must be equipped with an apparatus, not only for consuming the smoke but for the prevention of the emission of sparks and other combustible matter. Descriptions and drawings showing the details and workings of these contrivances must be submitted to the Supervising Board of Railways before each new type of locomotive is purchased. Upon its delivery every newly purchased locomotive must undergo a thorough test and be approved by the inspector of the Board before it may be placed in service.

The same regulations apply to stationary engines burning bituminous coal, which would otherwise emit [39] great clouds of black smoke, gases, and soot. Restrictions, in some localities, are even placed upon the particular kind of fuel locomotives may burn. The province of Zuid-Holland, for example, has issued the eikon that only coke may be used upon the locomotives that traverse its railway lines.

A few miles before you come to Dortrecht the railway crosses a long bridge that spans an arm of the North Sea known as the Hollandsch Diep. The actual breadth of the Diep is a mile and five-eighths, but its projecting stone piers cut the length of the bridge down to slightly less than a mile. This, the longest bridge in Holland, was completed in November, 1871, after being more than three years in the building, and its fourteen arches, with a span of 110 yards each, rest upon stone buttresses, the foundations of some of which are sunk fifty or sixty feet below low water mark. From the center of the structure you may look out over the Hollandsch Diep on the left and, on the right, the eastern end of the Biesbosch, or “reed forest”—a great, watery district more than forty square miles in area and lately reclaimed. It was formed in 1421, at the same time and under the same conditions as the Hollandsch Diep, by a terrific overflow of the sea that blotted out seventy-two towns and villages and the lives of 100,000 people.

Dortrecht, called Dordt by the Dutch, is practically a survivor of that calamity. The town was [40] founded away back in 1008 and, four hundred years later, made an island by the obstreperous Merwede—the name given to a short part of the river formed by the confluence of the Maas and the Waal, which, beyond Dortrecht, is called De Noord and, by the time it approaches Rotterdam, known as the Maas again.

By reason of a special privilege called The Staple—pure and simple “graft,” plainly speaking—Dortrecht in the Middle Ages was the most prosperous town in Holland, for the workings of The Staple were far-reaching and marvelous. The Staple allowed Dortrecht, by royal warrant, be it remembered, to act in the capacity of a kind of clearing house for all goods, whether wines, grains, metals, or fabrics, that entered the domains of Holland by way of the Rhine. Now the territory punctured by these hundred and one apparently different and distinct rivers that so muddle the geography of the southern part of Holland for the tourist, is nothing more nor less than the wide-spreading estuary of the one river, Rhine. As every cargo that came down the river had necessarily to be unloaded at Dortrecht, municipal and private money chests burst their stout iron hoops in their efforts to contain the duties and taxes imposed. And in this kind of business buccaneering the place reveled for centuries, until Rotterdam, overcome with jealousy in 1618, stopped the procedure at the point of the bayonet.

If Wilmington, Delaware, although just twice as large in point of population, could boast of a windmill or two and a few odoriferous canals, bordered with numerous sixteenth century façades that slanted out over them as if in imminent danger of toppling into them; and if she had a narrow street of rather serpentine proclivities, like the Wynstraat, down which the rolling stock of the local traction company, in the shape and vintage of an ancient horse car, clanged its weary way, she might be taken, dot and tittle, for Dortrecht. Since the forced abolition of The Staple, the most of Dortrecht’s 40,000 inhabitants have gone into the more legitimate business of shipbuilding. But Wilmington, to achieve this, would also have to level off her hills to a certain depth below the sea, which might then necessitate the diking of the Delaware. It would be a mighty task and, after all is said and done, she would gain little but history.

Here in Dortrecht were born the brothers De Witt, Cornelius and John, whose equal as councilors and statesmen Holland has not been able to reproduce. The dome of the ancient Groothoofdpoort, one of the town gates of the sixteenth century that stands at the harbor end of the Wynstraat, contains, among other relics, a collection of medals, many of which were struck in commemoration of the tragedy of the Binnenhof at The Hague. Nicolas Maes, Albert Cuyp, and Ary Scheffer are the three most famous [42] Dutch painters that Dortrecht takes pride in claiming as her own.

Like Leyden, Dortrecht experienced her period of siege in the hands of the Spaniards, although of not nearly so long duration, and relief was effected in much the same manner. Her coat of arms, consisting of a milkmaid couchant under her docile bovine on a field of—garlic, we’ll say, strikes forever the keynote of the town’s relief.

It seems that a milkmaid in the employ of a certain wealthy farmer living near the city, having gone into the fields in pursuit of her daily duties, discovered the Spaniards hidden behind the hedges. Probably out of pure reticence, bashfulness, timidity, downright scared-to-death-ness—what you will—she took no notice of the ambushed members of the opposite sex, but went as gleefully as possible at her task, and, having completed it, shouldered her yoke and started homeward. It cannot be held against her if she did hasten a bit, for a consultation of the records will prove that a thunderstorm was gathering on the horizon.

Arriving at the farmhouse, she told her employer of what she had seen, and he told the Burgomaster. The Burgomaster dispatched a spy, who, in turn, discovered that the milkmaid related no myth but a cold and brittle fact. Soldiers were mustered forthwith, and the dikes were cut, allowing the merciless river to rush in and catch the cruel Castilians unawares [43] at their bloody job. It is alleged that Spaniards galore were drowned in the raging torrent, and many were “utterly disappointed in their design.” At all events, the town was saved and the States issued orders to the effect that the farmer be reimbursed for the loss of his cattle, real estate, and personal property, and that the milkmaid’s likeness, together with that of her faithful and nonplussible cow, be impressed upon the new coinage of the city. “And she had, during her life, and hers forever,” according to a medieval historian, “an allowance of fifty pounds per annum—a noble requital for a virtuous service.”

The first glimpse of Dortrecht that you get as you emerge from its railway station will put you at once in sympathy with it. Prefaced by an open, sunny, brick-paved space, a long avenue of great trees stretches away directly in front, while back in their shade stands the peripatetic horse car, as if loath to attempt the transfer of passengers in the heat of the day. On either side of the avenue are beautiful residences, their lawns encircled, not by the inappropriate and unsightly fence, but with a narrow canal, like a miniature moat, which is bridged only at the front and the rear entrances to the grounds. Everything seems so peaceful, so conducive to comfort and leisure, that you will wish you had the time to stay in Dortrecht indefinitely and take up your abode near the station—a wish that even in your [44] wildest flights of fancy would never apply to Wilmington, Delaware.

Import a treacherous-looking Italian in a vivid pink shirt and let him stir up the aroma by poling his mournful gondola up and down a certain canal in Dortrecht, and you will have a scene in Venice itself. This canal, spanned at intervals by narrow bridges and bordered with three-story houses that hang over it menacingly, is obviously the reason why so much good stout canvas and so many tubes of excellent paint have been used up by Dutch artists in picturing Dortrecht; for a little of Venice, they must have thought, is better than none at all. In view, therefore, of the length, tediousness, and expense of a trip to Venice in those days, many of the best of the Dutch painters stayed home and exercised their talents on that canal in Dortrecht. All of which we may consider a boon to the art of the Netherlands as well as to the picture-loving public.

IV
Rotterdam

He who says the romance of the West is dead has never mingled much with the “eight-section man” down in the southwestern corner of Texas. He who avers that the romance of steel is played out and defunct has never straddled an I-beam of a New York skyscraper in the building high above the vortexes of street traffic, above the flirt of a housemaid hanging out clothes on a lower roof. He who claims that the romance of shipping has succumbed under the pressure of modern methods has never been to Rotterdam.

They have a pretty park in that San Francisco of Holland that fringes the bank of the Maas. On its river side, near the entrance, there is a café, where, in the evening, the less romantic Rotterdamer basks and imbibes in the throes of a virulent orchestra. Farther along under the trees, past the café and overlooking the river, numerous benches invite the lover of the sea and its ships to sit him down and gaze upon the great steel hulls—and wooden ones, too—that have just returned from, or are about to depart for, [46] a lengthy and uncertain argument with Father Neptune.

The view from here is several times more magnetic than it is from the neighborhood of the café, and so here, about dusk, come those wizened warriors upon whom the sea has cast her spell once and for all time, to sit and smoke their pipes upside down and dream, perhaps, of other days, of other ships, of other seas. Three or four may occupy a single bench, but it will be an hour before a word is passed between them. It is their only method of rejuvenation, and they are loath to be reminded that their day is almost done. A certain sort of reverence pervades the place; it would seem a blasphemy even to speak aloud.

On one of these wooden benches I sat one evening at sunset, looking out across to the docks on the opposite side of the river. Busy little motor boats were sputtering hither and thither between the shipping, bent upon the fulfillment of their last missions of the day. A few hundred yards farther up, a couple of gloomy-looking steam ferries, built like Rhine river tugs, transferred their deck loads of workmen from the different docks and machine shops on the Feijenoord to the Westplein landing in Rotterdam. From out in the stream came the rattle of chain through hawse pipe, as a Portuguese tramp, having entered the harbor too late for a stranger to dock, was preparing an anchorage for the night. Close by lay a Norwegian “wind jammer”—so close [47] that the two of them might easily have rubbed figure-heads. A big cargo boat, bound out, preceded by a tiny tug to herald her approach and followed by its twin to help keep her straight while passing, an exact fit, through the draw to one of the many “havens,” bayed sonorously for the less conspicuous craft to get out of her way; while alongside the Wilhelminakade the upper decks of a great passenger-carrying leviathan, already electric lighted, showed through the rigging of the intermediate vessels. Out of respect for the tide, she was to sail at three the next morning, and her passengers, when they awakened, would find themselves well down the English Channel on their way back to New York after a summer in Europe.

Presently, two young women, pushing a baby-coach between them, came strolling along, and took up positions at the railing just in front of me. Plainly they were English, and, although I strained every nerve to overhear their conversation (which was mean of me), but could not, I divined the reason for their coming. The same thing occurs a dozen times a day in Liverpool, in ’Frisco, in Sydney, in Valparaiso, in every port of any consequence in the world. One was the wife, and the other perhaps the sister, or her sister, or maybe a close friend. And there was also the kiddy.

Their vigil was not long in being rewarded, for during the three weeks’ absence—three months’, more [48] likely, if the voyage had been a long one—they had perused the Lloyd reports daily and diligently, and with the additional aid of a letter or two, had calculated the time of arrival to a nicety.

Soon a great black hull appeared far down the river. Darkness was gathering fast, but they knew the lines of that ship as they knew their little gardens at home. They un-reticuled their handkerchiefs and waved and giggled and giggled and waved. For full twenty minutes they waved and giggled, and then they held the kiddy up. The ship turned off to enter a dock on the opposite side of the stream and, as she turned her port beam to us, someone—it would not have been difficult to guess whom—on her bridge held up a navigator’ s three-foot telescope, it having been doubtless already very much in hand, and waved a brief but significant, “All’s well; see you in two hours”—or waves to that effect.

Yes, there is still romance in shipping, and Rotterdam, being first, last, and all the time a shipping town, there is romance in Rotterdam.

The most satisfactory way of approaching Rotterdam is by water, and the most satisfactory water way is from Dortrecht. By this route you obtain not only the most characteristic views of Rotterdam and the bustle and business about her water front, but you get also the glimpse of Dortrecht that Albert Cuyp availed himself of so often, for the water front of Dortrecht doesn’t seem to have changed much, [49] according to Cuyp, except in the item of steam for sail.

It is a pleasant trip of an hour and a half duration down the Maas, past numerous shipyards that are capable of building anything from a canal boat to an ocean-going cargo carrier; past great suction dredges assigned to the perennial duty of keeping the river conquered; past fishers for salmon, who, by treaty, may lower their nets only upon certain days in order to give the German fishers, higher up the stream, an equal opportunity to make a living; past little hamlets whose river docks and picturesque dock tenders serve in lieu of railway stations and the more prosaic red-capped and frock-coated station masters.

But Rotterdam, by reason of her trade, does not coincide with the general idea of Holland. She is more or less cosmopolitan, to be sure, but this phase strikes the traveler less forcibly than her ardent activity. What with her electric cranes and machine shops and sugar refineries and tobacco factories and shipbuilding yards and distilleries, she gives one the impression of a thriving German seaport. The home port claimed by the greater number of the seven hundred or more steam and sailing vessels that make up the merchant marine of Holland, is Rotterdam, and through this port passes at least one-half the country’s total imports by sea and almost as much of her exports, together with four-fifths of Holland’s [50] trade with the Rhine. But Baltimore, in the matter of population, would make two of this, the most active, the most important seaport of the Netherlands.

Still, Rotterdam is essentially Dutch, in fact if not in first appearances. She has her Groote Kerk, the Church of St. Lawrence, begun in 1412; she has her Town Hall, without which, it seems, no town in Holland could survive; she has her picture gallery, although a mediocre one, in the Boymans Museum; she has her old market and her new church; and she has her fish market, where women of the most uncertain antiquity sit and gossip and knit and sell sole between stitches. Here and there, too, she has her old windmill, thatch covered, browbeaten by the weather, massive and ponderous-looking, that, in the very midst of twentieth century hurry and scurry, waves its stiff arms as if depicting in pantomime a scene of other days. And then, in striking contrast, right at the very edge of the old harbor, stands the tallest building in the Netherlands. It must be as sky-scraping as eight or ten stories, and high up under its eaves it displays the advertisement of an American breakfast food. Its builders probably thought that a photographer would be the only mortal who could be induced to rent the top story, so they made the building’s sloping roof into one glorious skylight, under which rural Holland might sit and have its picture taken for the family album.

It was while waiting for a car at the beginning of The Oosterkade and just across the old harbor from this Metropolitan Tower of Rotterdam that the more nearly general of all Dutch customs was brought home to me.

The car had approached its terminus and I was about to mount, when the conductor, more forcibly than politely, requested that I discontinue the attempt and take up my position where I belonged, with the rest of the crowd, in the vicinity of a certain lamp-post a few steps beyond—the Dutch being most precise and systematic. I ambled thither and was standing in the more or less protecting umbrage of the lamp-post, with sarcastic but not envious mien, watching the traction company partake of a large slab of black bread and cheese (until the disappearance of which the car refused to continue) when I was accosted by a small street urchin of about the tender age of seven, who was armed with an immense cigar. I happened to be smoking at the time, and this was what brought the boy in my direction. He wanted a light and wasted no words in asking for it. Being somewhat shocked that a youth of such tender years should be so faithful a slave to the vile, pernicious weed, I submitted to his plea under mental protest. But he seemed not in the least embarrassed, for he saluted and marched off, apparently enjoying the thing as if it had been his fifth since breakfast.

Before I was through with Holland, however, I came to know that every able-bodied male in the kingdom acquires the cigar habit as early in life as his physical condition permits, and I have yet to see the adult Dutchman who doesn’t use tobacco in some form. Holland, by virtue of her colonial holdings in Sumatra and the Straits Settlements, is the paradise of smokers, and tobacco stores in every town, be it large or small, are as thick as saloons in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. If you pay more than the equal value of two American cents for a cigar in Holland you are branded as a foreigner or an extravagant roué. Of course foreigners who unfurl their native colors full in the face of the tobacconist are expected to and do pay more, but a cigar equal in flavor and composition to the best of our ten cent brands can be bought in Holland for five Dutch cents, and often less, if you go about it in the proper manner. The age at which boys learn to smoke in Holland has never been correctly computed, but in the country I have seen lads of five or six serenely eliminating all possible chance of being rewarded the oft-referred-to gold watch at the age of twenty-one, and handling their cigars with as much real enjoyment as their paternal grandparent.

Perhaps at this point it might be opportune to tell the story of old Herr van Klaes of this same town of Rotterdam, who consumed a five-ounce package [53] of tobacco daily and died in action at the age of ninety-eight with his pipe actually in his mouth. In his will he expressed the wish that every smoker in the kingdom be invited to his funeral “by letter, circular, and advertisement,” and all who took advantage of the invitation should be presented with ten pounds of tobacco and two pipes, the name of van Klaes, his crest, and the date of his demise to be engraved upon the latter. Every poor man in the neighborhood who accompanied the bier was to receive a large package of smoking mixture on each anniversary of the death of his champion. The will stipulated further that all who wished to partake of its benefits must smoke “without interruption during the entire ceremony.” The body was to be placed in a coffin lined with the wood of his old cigar boxes, and at the foot should be placed a package of French tobacco and one of the Dutch blend. At his side in the coffin was to be laid his favorite pipe and a box of matches, “For,” he said, “one never knows what may happen.” And all persons in the funeral procession were requested to sprinkle the ashes of their pipes upon the bier as they passed it while taking their departure from the grounds.

It is said the funeral of Herr van Klaes at least enjoyed the distinction of being the largest seen in Rotterdam in many a day. It must have been a busy time for the aanspreker . Indeed, it must have [54] taken the concentrated efforts of all the aansprekers in Holland to help advertise the funeral. But here a few lines as to the solution of the word “ aanspreker .”

The Dutch aanspreker is he of the mourning robes whose duty it is to go about from house to house, wherever even the flimsiest ties, whether social or business, exist, and announce the saddening news of a death; or it is he of the more gaudy apparel who gives the gladsome tidings of a birth in the family—and the degree of his mournfulness or jocundity in appearance bespeaks the mournfulness or jocundity of his employers.

In earlier times the services of the aanspreker were augmented by those of the huilebalk , a kind of a professional mourner, who, in the case of a death, accompanied the aanspreker on his rounds and wept more or less fluently after the completion of each doleful message. His coat was long-tailed and his hat wide-brimmed and the extent of his sorrow in each case depended wholly upon the receipts for his services; the more money, the more tears. Both must have been depressing professions at best, but this manner of announcing the news constituted an essential factor of every funeral. The aanspreker is often seen to-day, but the huilebalk has wept himself out of existence, probably on account of a simple dearth of apprentices.

The patron saint, almost, of Rotterdam is Gherardt Gherardts, better known by the more poetic [55] name of Erasmus Desiderius—meaning “beloved and long desired”—scholar, critic, philosopher, intellectual fly-by-night, born in Rotterdam in 1466. A bronze statue of him by Hendrik de Keyser decorates the Groote Markt of his birthplace. Known best by his immortal satire, “The Praise of Folly,” and for his being, in 1516, the first to be so bold as to amend the text of the Greek New Testament, Erasmus was undoubtedly the “intellectual dictator of his age.” He entered the order of the Brethren of the Common Life, first at ’S Hertogenbosch and later at Delft, and the year America was discovered saw him acting as secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai. He studied in Paris, in Orleans, in Oxford, in Rome, and then returned to England to accept a professorship at the University of Cambridge. He died in Basle in 1536.

Rotterdam cannot be said to be noted for its cleanliness; in fact, it crowds Amsterdam for first place as the dirtiest city in Holland. But still Rotterdam as well as Amsterdam has its beauty spots. Some of the residence streets in the newer part of the city are veritable gardens in themselves. The Parklaan, with the Park at one end and the Grooteveerhaven, the latter crowded with private motor boats and yachts that gleam in their innocence of dirt, at the other, is lined with beautiful homes. It and the Mauritsweg and the Eendragtsweg are tree studded and kept swept and sprinkled quite as thoroughly and as frequently as any of the streets [56] in The Hague. The canal that borders these two latter streets is banked with lawns and crossed here and there by artistic rustic bridges, for in Rotterdam, as in the German municipalities, they pay more attention to the details of city beautification than do we in America. The community at large seems to take a personal interest in such affairs. Can you imagine the linemen for a telegraph company or an electric light corporation coming along the streets of a German city, exercising the right of eminent domain by ripping up the pavements of the property holders and digging holes big enough to bury a horse, in which to plant the unsightly wooden poles that seem to them, on account of their comparative cheapness, the only known method of carrying wires? The Germans wouldn’t stand it for a minute. They use steel wire carriers over there—a more businesslike looking trestle work in the shape of an elongated truncated pyramid, set slightly above the ground on a concrete foundation. And I noticed that these “trestle” telegraph poles in Rotterdam, when the conditions permitted, were planted in the center of a little bed of geraniums, while some even had vines climbing upon them.

The Dutch, too, are sticklers for coziness and they try to make their living quarters as habitable as possible. In the congested harbors of Rotterdam, where, sometimes, you can step from one side of the stream to the other upon the flat decks of the [57] swarms of canal boats, it is doubtful if you will see an uncurtained cabin window, and pots of flowers will be displayed in most of them. The train shed of the Beurs railway station in the heart of the city has an outside cornice of flower boxes filled with pink geraniums. But then, you will remember about the Dutch locomotives—which accounts for much.

As you enter Rotterdam or Amsterdam on the railway you pass row after row of what we please to call tenement houses. Even these are not devoid of a cozy, homelike aspect that our tenements and even reasonably inexpensive apartment houses know not. Each apartment can boast of a balcony in the rear that is partitioned off from its neighbors. In many cases these balconies are shaded with awnings from the glare of the sun and decorated with flowerpots in profusion. This serves the city dweller in lieu of a garden, and here he eats his meals and spends his evenings after work. In the daytime the family use the balcony as an improvised sewing room. Many of the back yards of the smaller houses consist of a tree lined canal over which the family looks from the seclusion of a flower girdled, awning covered veranda.

The Dutch not only keep themselves cozy but they take a tender sort of interest in the well-being of their birds and dumb animals. True, they train their dogs to help their masters pull the milk carts or vegetable wagons, but the dogs look husky and [58] well fed and seem to take pride in their accomplishment. A spare-ribbed stray canine prowling around the neighborhood is an unknown quantity in Holland.

In the center of some of Rotterdam’s canals which are barred to traffic and made, instead, to assist in the beautification of the city, you will see little wicker duck nests, like empty market baskets turned on their sides. They rest on piles driven into the bottom of the canal, and the entrance to each is approached from the water by means of a wooden incline about the size of a shingle. This is not only a convenience for the ducks but features as an artistic break in the monotony, I might say, of the canal.

And these are but a few of the reasons why a visit to Rotterdam, although barren of the types and characteristics that Holland is noted for, is well worth the trouble; if only to study the city and its inhabitants from a psychological point of view it is well worth while.

V
Delft and Her Tragedy

Nineteen minutes in the train from Rotterdam, and you are in Delft—such are the distances between towns in South Holland.

The population of Delft amounts, numerically, to some 32,000, but this is an item that is farthest from your thoughts. It is one of the quietest, quaintest cities in the Netherlands. Up and down its narrow, lime shaded canals the boatmen of Delft pole their barges laboriously, yet noiselessly, walking along the decks from stem to stern against their padded means of propulsion and literally pushing their craft out from under them. In the spring these watery highways are covered with a fragrant layer of fallen blossoms; in the fall, with leaves of variegated colors. The houses that stand behind the trees have been well built and are well preserved, adding to the place an impression of comfortable solidity.

My first visit to Holland brought me to Delft from “The Hook” at a very early hour in the morning, when the housemaids were about to commence the first concentrated assault of the day upon their pavements, doorsteps, front doors, and the brass-work [60] pertaining thereto in the shape of knobs and knockers. “Scrub” seemed to be the housemaids’ slogan, and they were certainly living up to it. Pail after pail of water was hoisted from the canals and splashed over everything in reach, until it flowed across the streets and pavements, and fell back whence it came originally. If I had appeared upon the scene a little later I might have concluded that a cloud-burst had struck the town. And all this brackish water, that, in the canals, comes within an ace of being absolutely stagnant, being poured so recklessly over the town, gave to it a kind of antique odor, anything but pleasant to inhale. It gave every evidence that that same water had been hoisted, put to its task, and allowed to drip back into the canals again since medieval times.

Now, for some reason, psychological or otherwise, the housemaids of Delft don’t seem to take the same interest in the scrupulousness of their doorsteps on a Sunday that they do on a week day. Sunday is the day that everybody in Delft dons his or her best bib and tucker and goes to church, or leans over the railings of the canal bridges and chats with a friend, or walks about the town under the shade of its trees, contemplating, perhaps, upon the exigencies of life. And a housemaid is but human.

To come upon Delft, therefore, during this weekly [61] interruption in the perennial polishing of the town, whatever the reason for it, offers the traveler a different and vastly more agreeable impression. He will see Delft and her people at their best, the latter more congenially courteous, the former more serenely stolid. Instead of the boatmen being continually in the act of disturbing the bottoms of the canals with their poles, so that the housemaids can skim off the most graveolent of it with which to scour and rinse their pavements, they assume for the day the rôle of flower sellers. Boats bearing fragrant burdens of potted plants of every variety, and cut flowers as well, as if to try to make amends for the mal-odor of the previous week, will be drawn as close to the sidewalks as the banks of the canals permit, in order to tempt the frailty of the Delft housewife—if an inherent love of flowers may be termed as such—on her way home from church.

Delft is old and she show’s symptoms of the fact in spots. Down at the southern end of the city, near the Rotterdam gate, stands a venerable building, once one of the numerous warehouses scattered over the country belonging to the Dutch East India Company—that most famous and wealthiest of all Dutch trading concerns, founded in 1602, when the power and wealth of the Republic had attained their high-water marks under the stadtholdership of Maurice, one of the sons of the ill-fated Prince William of Orange. The place has long since been put to use [62] as a military storehouse. Directly opposite is the ominous-looking city arsenal, bearing above its arched entrance a massive copy of the arms of the old Dutch Republic, carved in stone. Another of the old buildings is the Gemeelandshuis van Delftland, showing in sandstone a rich Gothic façade of the beginning of the sixteenth century.

With us, Delft’s principal claim to notoriety lies in the manufacture of its faience, commonly called “Delft ware,” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its composition and design at first copied from the Chinese and Japanese porcelain, this faience became celebrated throughout the world. Dutch designs were soon substituted for the Oriental, and the industry prospered proportionately. Later it lapsed into decay and the true process has been revived in Delft only within comparatively recent years. A large plant for its manufacture now operates on the Oosteinde, not far from the New Church.

But in the heart of the Hollander, Delft will ever be revered as the scene of the tragedy that cut short the life and terminated the praiseworthy deeds of that eminent founder of Dutch liberty, “William the Silent,” Prince of Orange, the George Washington of the Netherlands.

Born of noble German parentage at Dillenburg in the Duchy of Nassau in 1533, William, curiously enough, became the favorite of Philip II of Spain, who appointed him, in 1559, when but twenty-six [63] years of age, stadtholder or governor of the provinces of Zeeland, Holland, Friesland, and Utrecht. Two years later William found himself in bad odor with Granvella, the Bishop of Arras, whom Philip had appointed as counselor to his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, the then regent of the Netherlands. William finally effected the enforced relinquishment of this post by the Bishop in 1564.

The subsequent unrest in the Netherlands, provoked mainly by the atrocities of Spanish soldiery, led to the sanguinary assignment of Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, to command an army of 10,000 picked men, mustered from Lombardy, Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples, to quell the possible insurrection. This move was bitterly resented, not only by her subjects, but was opposed, although without success, by Margaret of Parma herself; for the name of Alva was as odious to her as it was to them.

A man of brilliant military attainments and the most experienced general in Europe at the time, but bubbling over with avarice and revengefulness, cruel and overbearing, Alva accepted the assignment with alacrity. “I have tamed people of iron in my day,” he was reported to have said contemptuously; “shall I not easily crush these men of butter?”

When Alva, with his army, entered the Netherlands and took it upon himself, after much intrigue and conniving, to supersede the half-sister of his [64] sovereign as governor of the province, the Prince of Orange retired to Dillenburg. Continued oppressions by the Spaniards later called him to arms with the French Huguenots as allies, and he set out betimes upon an unsuccessful campaign to liberate the southern provinces from their yoke of Spanish tyranny. Since that time he was ever an active revolutionist. In 1571 he championed the “Water Beggars,” by which name those insurgents who assisted their compatriots by sea were known, and one year later, having been invited by the provinces of Zeeland and Holland to command their troops against the Spaniards, he captured Middelburg, and later came to the successful rescue of the besieged town of Leyden. Soon after the formation of the famous defensive league known as the “Utrecht Union,” William was condemned to exile by Philip. The fact that the States-General defied the sovereign’s authority in this matter was the percussion cap that exploded the general uprising and the throwing off of Dutch allegiance to Spain in 1581.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears”—the helmet of revolt, and from the time of his first attempt to achieve the success of his ambitious project, the life of no medieval ruler was ever more in jeopardy than was that of William of Orange. Within a period of two years five separate and distinct attempts to take his life had been perpetrated, and a sixth, albeit an abhorrently successful one, was about [65] to follow—all of which were undoubtedly at the initial instigation of the Duke of Alva.

Just across the canal from the Old Church at Delft still stands the house of William the Silent, now known as the Prinsenhof, where the tragedy took place. It is a low, two-story building with a red-tiled roof, formerly a cloister, but fitted up in 1575 as the residence of the Princes of Orange. Here came William, in the summer of 1584, to join his fourth wife, Louisa de Coligny, at the christening of their son, born in Delft the previous winter, who later became the celebrated governor, Frederic William. The door marked Gymnasium Publicum , opposite the tower of the church, leads through a courtyard to the staircase where the murder was committed; and in a dark corner of the wall at the foot of the steps the custodian will show you a hole made by one of the bullets that killed the Prince. The dining-room beyond, from which William had come to his death, is now a museum containing reminiscences of him.

The Czolgosz of the occasion, the perpetrator of the dastardly act, was Bathazar Gérard, alias Francis Guion, the self-alleged son of a martyred Calvinist, a religious fanatic who had long cherished an insane desire to murder Orange.

“The organization of Bathazar Gérard,” says Motley, [66] “would furnish a subject for profound study, both for the physiologist and the metaphysician. Neither wholly a fanatic nor entirely a ruffian, he combined the most dangerous elements of both characters. In his puny body and mean exterior were inclosed considerable mental powers and accomplishments, a daring ambition, and a courage almost superhuman. Yet those qualities led him only to form upon the threshold of life a deliberate determination to achieve greatness by the assassin’s trade.”

After long and exasperating delays, Gérard had finally succeeded, on account of his ambitions, in nursing himself into the good graces of Alexander of Parma, the Spanish governor of the Netherlands at that time. On the other hand, “Parma had long been looking for a good man to murder Orange, feeling—as Philip, Granvelle, and all former governors of the Netherlands had felt—that this was the only means of saving the royal authority in any part of the provinces. Many unsatisfactory assassins had presented themselves from time to time, and Alexander had paid money in hand to various individuals—Italians, Spaniards, Lorrainers, Scotchmen, Englishmen, who had generally spent the sums received without attempting the job. Others were supposed to be still engaged in the enterprise, and at that moment there were four persons—each unknown to the others, and of different nations—in the city of Delft, seeking to compass the death of William the Silent.”

Upon the death, at this time, of the French Duke [67] of Anjou, Gérard was recommended to Parma by various parties as a capable messenger “to carry this important intelligence to the Prince of Orange.” Concerning the outcome of this mission, I can do no better than to quote John Lothrop Motley from his “ The Rise of the Dutch Republic ,” as I have done elsewhere in this chapter:

“The dispatches having been intrusted to him” (Gérard), “he traveled post-haste to Delft, and to his astonishment the letters had hardly been delivered before he was summoned in person to the chamber of the Prince. Here was an opportunity such as he had never dared to hope for. The arch-enemy to the Church and to the human race” (that is, the Prince, so called), “whose death would confer upon his destroyer wealth and nobility in this world, besides a crown of glory in the next, lay unarmed, alone, in bed, before the man who had thirsted seven long years for his blood.

“Bathazar could scarcely control his emotions sufficiently to answer the questions which the Prince addressed to him concerning the death of Anjou; but Orange, deeply engaged with the dispatches, and with the reflections which their deeply important contents suggested, did not observe the countenance of the humble Calvinist exile, who had been recently recommended to his patronage by Villers. Gérard had, moreover, made no preparation for an interview so entirely unexpected, had come unarmed, and had [68] formed no plan for escape. He was obliged to forego his prey when most within his reach, and after communicating all the information which the Prince required, he was dismissed from the chamber.

“It was Sunday morning, and the bells were tolling for church. Upon leaving the house he loitered about the courtyard, furtively examining the premises, so that a sergeant of halberdiers asked him why he was waiting there. Bathazar meekly replied that he was desirous of attending divine worship in the church opposite, but added, pointing to his shabby and travel-stained attire, that, without at least a pair of new shoes and stockings, he was unfit to join the congregation. Insignificant as ever, the small, pious, dusty stranger excited no suspicion in the mind of the good-natured sergeant. He forthwith spoke of the wants of Gérard to an officer, by whom they were communicated to Orange himself, and the Prince instantly ordered a sum of money to be given him. Thus Bathazar obtained from William’s charity what Parma’s thrift had denied—a fund for carrying out his purpose!

“Next morning, with the money thus procured, he purchased a pair of pistols or small carabines from a soldier, chaffering long about the price because the vender could not supply a particular kind of chopped bullets or slugs which he desired. Before the sunset of the following day that soldier had stabbed himself to the heart, and died despairing, [69] on hearing for what purpose the pistols had been bought.

“On Tuesday, the 10th of July, 1584, at about half-past twelve, the Prince, with his wife on his arm, and followed by the ladies and gentlemen of his family, was going to the dining-room. William the Silent was dressed upon that day, according to his usual custom, in very plain fashion. He wore a wide-leaved, loosely-shaped hat of dark felt, with a silken cord round the crown—such as had been worn by the Beggars in the early days of the revolt. A high ruff encircled his neck, from which also depended one of the Beggars’ medals, with the motto, ‘ Fideles au roy jusqu’ a la besace ,’ while a loose surcoat of gray frieze cloth, over a tawny leather doublet, with wide, slashed underclothes, completed his costume. Gérard presented himself at the doorway, and demanded a passport. The Princess, struck with the pale and agitated countenance of the man, anxiously questioned her husband concerning the stranger. The Prince carelessly observed that ‘it was merely a person who came for a passport,’ ordering, at the same time, a secretary forthwith to prepare one. The Princess, still not relieved, observed in an undertone that ‘she had never seen so villainous a countenance.’ Orange, however, not at all impressed with the appearance of Gérard, conducted himself at table with his usual cheerfulness, conversing much with the burgomaster of Leeuwarden, [70] the only guest present at the family dinner, concerning the political and religious aspects of Friesland. At two o’clock the company rose from table. The Prince led the way, intending to pass to his private apartments above. The dining-room, which was on the ground floor, opened into a little square vestibule, which communicated, through an arched passageway, with the main entrance into the courtyard. This vestibule was also directly at the foot of the wooden staircase leading to the next floor, and was scarcely six feet in width. Upon its left side, as one approached the stairway, was an obscure arch, sunk deep in the wall, and completely in the shadow of the door. Behind this arch a portal opened to the narrow lane at the side of the house. The stairs themselves were completely lighted by a large window halfway up the flight. The Prince came from the dining-room, and began leisurely to ascend. He had only reached the second stair, when a man emerged from the sunken arch, and, standing within a foot or two of him, discharged a pistol full at his heart. Three balls entered his body, one of which, passing quite through him, struck with violence against the wall beyond. The Prince is said to have exclaimed in French, as he felt the wound, ‘O my God, have mercy upon my soul! O my God, have mercy upon this poor people!’

“These were the last words he ever spoke, save that when his sister, Catherine of Schwartzburg, immediately [71] afterwards asked him if he commended his soul to Jesus Christ, he faintly answered, ‘Yes.’ His master of the horse, Jacob van Maldere, had caught him in his arms as the fatal shot was fired. The Prince was then placed on the stairs for an instant, when he immediately began to swoon. He was afterwards laid upon a couch in the dining-room, where in a few minutes he breathed his last in the arms of his wife and sister.

“The murderer succeeded in making his escape through the side door, and sped swiftly up the narrow lane. He had almost reached the ramparts, from which he intended to spring into the moat, when he stumbled over a heap of rubbish. As he rose he was seized by several pages and halberdiers, who had pursued him from the house. He had dropped his pistols upon the spot where he had committed the crime, and upon his person were found a couple of bladders, provided with a piece of pipe, with which he had intended to assist himself across the moat, beyond which a horse was waiting for him. He made no effort to deny his identity, but boldly avowed himself and his deed. He was brought back to the house, where he immediately underwent a preliminary examination before the city magistrates. He was afterwards subjected to excruciating tortures; for the fury against the wretch who had destroyed the father of the country was uncontrollable, and William the Silent was no longer alive to intercede—as he had often done before—in behalf of those who assailed his life.”

The tortures that the man endured prior to his speedy execution are unmentionable.

“William of Orange,” continues Motley, “at the period of his death, was aged fifty-one years and sixteen days. He left twelve children. By his first wife, Anne of Egmont, he had one son, Philip, and one daughter, Mary, afterwards married to Count Hohenlo. By his second wife, Anna of Saxony, he had one son, the celebrated Maurice of Nassau, and two daughters, Anna, married afterwards to her cousin, Count William Louis, and Emilie, who espoused the pretender of Portugal, Prince Emanuel. By Charlotte of Bourbon, his third wife, he had six daughters; and by his fourth, Louisa de Coligny, one son, Frederic William, afterwards stadtholder of the Republic in her most palmy days. The Prince was entombed on the 3rd of August at Delft, amid the tears of a whole nation. Never was a more extensive, unaffected, and legitimate sorrow felt at the death of any human being.”

So passed the greatest man that little Holland ever did or ever will produce. His ashes lie in a vault in the Nieuwe Kerk of Delft, together with those of thirty-five other princes and princesses of the House of Orange, the last being King William III , father of the present Queen, who died on November 23rd, 1890. Above the vault stands the handsome [73] and imposing marble monument to William the Silent, worked by the de Keysers, begun by the father in 1616 and finished by the son. A translation of the Latin epitaph of the Prince reads as follows:

In honor of God Almighty and for an eternal memorial of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, father of his fatherland, who valued the welfare of the Netherlands more than his own interests or those of his family; who twice, and principally at his own expense, collected powerful armies and led them into the field under the command of the States; who averted the tyranny of Spain; called back and restored the true religion and the ancient laws; who at last left the nearly regained liberty to be confirmed by his son, Prince Maurice, heir to the virtues of his father; the truly pious, prudent and invincible hero, whom Philip II , King of Spain, that terror of Europe, feared, but could neither subdue nor intimidate, but killed with gross perfidiousness by the hand of a hired murderer, the United Provinces have ordered this to be erected as an eternal memorial of his merits.

Motley’s phraseology with regard to the Prince’s attributes and ambitions cannot be improved upon.

“His firmness was allied to his piety. His constancy in bearing the whole weight of a struggle, as unequal as men have ever undertaken, was the theme of admiration, even to his enemies. The rock in the ocean, ‘tranquil amid raging billows,’ was the favorite emblem by which his friends expressed their sense of his firmness. From the time when, as a hostage in France, he first discovered the plan of Philip to plant the Inquisition in the Netherlands, up to the last moment of his life, he never faltered in his determination to resist the iniquitous scheme. This resistance was the labor of his life. To exclude the Inquisition, to maintain the ancient liberties of his country, was the task which he appointed to himself when a youth of three-and-twenty. Never speaking a word concerning a heavenly mission, never deluding himself or others with the usual phraseology of enthusiasts, he accomplished the task through danger, amid toils, and with sacrifices such as few men have ever been able to make on their country’s altar.”

VI
The Hague and Scheveningen

A Dutch saw has it that you “make your fortune in Rotterdam, consolidate it in Amsterdam, and spend it at The Hague.” I am not so sure about the veracity of the first two clauses, but you can certainly spend it at The Hague.

The Hague is at once the most beautiful and the most expensive city in Holland. It is the Paris, the Washington, the Berlin of the Netherlands all in one. Like Paris, it is so overflowing with history and art that it would take a small book to tell of it all in detail; like Washington, it is beautiful, and the official residence of the chief executive of the nation and the diplomatic corps, but not half so expensive; like Berlin, again it is just as beautiful and twice as expensive. It is the magnetic pole of the American tourist in Holland, and it takes pains to cater in many ways to his whims and fancies, not to mention his pocketbook, and thus hold his patronage. Half the town speaks English and most of the remaining half understands it. Its people are obliging and courteous and seem to take a personal interest in making your stay one of pleasure and instruction [76] as they do in no other city in Europe. In The Hague I have tried to explain to an obtuse conductor, in smatterings of German, Dutch, and English, where I wished to get off the car, and half a dozen fellow-passengers, finding a stranger in difficulty, have chimed in without the least solicitation and untangled my knots of pantomime with real Dutch verbiage.

But, being the tourist center that it is, it has naturally developed the old familiar nuisance to be found in all cities of its ilk in Europe: the piratical parasite who stands in ambush behind the hotel porter as you start out in the morning and tags along halfway to your destination, shouting an incessant “Do you vont a guite, sir? Do you vont a guite?” You will find him in almost every part of the town, but his particular lair is in the lee of the picture galleries. Either by instinct or by abnormal powers of observation he knows that the average tourist whose time is limited will make a bee line for the nearest picture gallery before he has even had an opportunity to unpack his grip. So here near the galleries the guide awaits the coming of his prey. If you succumb to his prattle, all is lost, save the hope that he may soon run out of things to show you. But an excellent entertainment for a party of, say, four or five is to club together and hire a guide, let him take you whither he will, and, during the process, keep him under a rapid fire of questions [77] so foolish and insipid that it will tax his ingenuity even to answer them incorrectly—as, you may remember, Mark Twain and his friend overwhelmed their guide in Genoa. This is the only way to obtain value received with—more often, without—respect to the guide, for his sense of humor is proverbially null and void and affords a vulnerable target.

And a wonder it is to me that some of these “old master” centers do not consider us Americans the most appreciative of art of any people in the world. They must think that we are picture and cathedral crazy—and I have no doubt they do, and snicker up their sleeves in lieu of a less ill-mannered outburst. Granted that in itself it is an education to see the famous pictures—I admit that there are other things in the world just as wonderful as old paintings, many of which are of notoriously poor draughtsmanship but have become famous merely from the fact that the paint still retains its luster after three hundred and some years. We pay too little attention to the life of the cities and the traits of their peoples as they are found to-day.

The site of The Hague was originally a hunting-park owned and operated by the Counts of Holland who used to come over frequently from Haarlem to hunt their deer. From this fact it derived its Dutch [78] nomenclature, ’S Graven Hage, meaning “the Count’s inclosure.” The allurements of the place must have been to the detriment of official business in Haarlem, for they felled most of the trees with which it was overgrown and transferred thither the seat of government about the middle of the thirteenth century. Beginning with Maurice of Nassau in 1593, it became the official residence of the stadtholder of the Republic.

Having been thus honored as the capital of Dutch statesmanship in the early days, the main historical curiosity in The Hague is the Binnenhof, a group of ancient buildings where the stadtholders lived and worked and had their being and tried to dissolve frequent plots for their own extermination. Here William II , Count of Holland and afterward elected Emperor of Germany, built a castle in 1250, which, forty years later, was enlarged and fitted up for a permanent residence by his son, Floris V . At the east of the Binnenhof stands the old gabled and turreted Hall of the Knights, erected at the time of Floris and recently restored and put into use for legislative purposes.

But those days, however glorious from the point of view of national advancement, were also the days of plot and intrigue, and there is scarce an historical building in Holland but might tell its tale of a tragedy. On the 13th of May, 1619, the seventy-two year old prime minister of the nation at the time, [79] Jan van Oldenbarnevelt, was put to death on a scaffold erected in the Binnenhof “for having conspired to dismember the States of the Netherlands, and greatly troubled God’s church,” according to Maurice of Orange, whose displeasure he had incurred. The learned Grotius, scholar and statesman and the then senator from Rotterdam, who was arrested at the same time as Oldenbarnevelt for alleged conspiracy with him, was sentenced to prison for life in the castle of Loevenstein, near Gorinchem. Happily, however, with the help of his wife, he effected means of escape ere he had been confined a full year.

Hard by the Binnenhof stands the old Gevangenpoort, now containing a morbidly interesting collection of guillotine blocks that have seen their grewsome service, neck twisters, back breakers, and other such unhappy instruments of torture, which recall, all too vividly, perhaps, the days when they were wont to be put into actual and frequent use in that same tower. In the tower, too, they will show you some of the dark, musty old dungeons, used for the former incarceration of political prisoners. Their names, written in blood by many of the victims, can still be traced upon the walls. Here also is where, in 1672, Cornelius De Witt, falsely accused of plotting against the life of William III , and his brother John, who had unwisely hastened to the tower to intercede in his behalf, were put to their [80] horrible deaths by the gullible mob of citizens, who, believing in the guilt of Cornelius, had assembled in the neighborhood to make a demonstration against him. The remains of the brothers De Witt rest in the Nieuwe Kerk.

The Willem’splein, a large square a hundred yards or less to the east of the Binnenhof, is the center of gravity of The Hague’s traffic and street railway service. From here you may take an electric car to almost any part of the city, and to the suburbs as well. In the center of the plein stands the bronze statue of William the Silent, done by Royer and erected in 1848, with the Prince’s motto, “Tranquil Amid Raging Billows,” inscribed in Latin on the pedestal.

Facing the square on the west side stand the Colonial Offices and the Ministry of Justice, while just off the northwest corner is the Mauritshuis—the Louvre, the Corcoran Gallery, the Kaiser Friedrich’s Museum of The Hague. Built in the early half of the seventeenth century as a residence for the Dutch West India Company’s Governor of Brazil, it now shelters what is probably the most notable collection of paintings gathered under one roof in Holland, the gifts to the nation of the different stadtholders .

The reputed gems of this collection are Rembrandt’s rather morbid of subject, but admirably executed, “School of Anatomy,” and a large animal [81] painting by Paul Potter, known as “The Bull,” in which Potter presents a collection of farm animals. Their owner, standing nearby, appears to be nearly as large as the bull, which is the central figure, and the bull, in turn, is just a shade smaller than the tree under which the owner stands. Taken individually, the animals are painted in a most marvelous manner, but with regard to composition I should think the accomplished Potter would rather have been known by his smaller animal pictures and his landscapes; eight of the best of the latter now hang in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. “The Bull” was carried off to the Louvre by the French at the time of the flight of the Dutch stadtholder in 1795, where it was awarded fourth place in point of value. Originally purchased in 1749 for something like $300, Napoleon restored it to the Dutch nation at a handsome profit for about $25,000.

The Mauritshuis also contains masterpieces by Holbein, Jan Steen, Rubens, Van Dyke, Terburg, Vermeer, and other famous Dutch artists, together with a Madonna by Murillo and some interesting royal portraits by Velasquez.

Backing upon the Mauritshuis is the picturesque Vyver, a broad sheet of water punctured here and there by the divings of ducks and swans. Near the center of its south side it reflects the walls and towers of the ancient Binnenhof, while on its north it is lined with many rows of trees.

Not far from where the lofty spire of iron openwork of the Groote Kerk—the scene of the wedding ceremony of Wilhelmina and Duke Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin on February 7, 1901—serves as a conspicuous landmark for strangers in the city, and facing a continuation of the busy Hoogstraat, rises the unimposing royal palace, from the front windows of which the Queen may look out upon an equestrian statue of the father of her country, William the Silent. It is a palace that gives the impression of having been built for comfort rather than ostentation, and when the Queen is not in residence you may obtain tickets of permission to be taken through by a servant, from a little tobacco store near by.

None of the rooms of the palace is particularly striking as to decorations and furniture, save one, and that is about the most remarkable apartment of any palace on the continent. Floor, walls, and ceiling, it is one solid mass of the most exquisitely carved teakwood, given by the colony of Java as a wedding present to the Queen. You will wonder little that it took upwards of thirty-five men seven years to complete the job. There are gold and inlaid pieces of wonderful workmanship in the cabinets that border the walls—presents from the Javanese to the little Juliana—which add to the whole impression of unalloyed richness welded together in perfect taste, without so much as giving the hint of a “gingerbread” effect. In beautiful gardens at the rear [83] of the palace the Queen walks every morning with Juliana after déjeuner at eleven.

Farther along to the northwest is the fashionable residence section of The Hague, with the Willem’s Park as its principal focus. In the center of this park, in an open space called the “Plein 1813,” rises a handsome national monument, unveiled in 1869 to commemorate the restoration of Dutch independence by the expulsion of the French in 1813 and the return of the pristine exile, Prince William Frederic of Orange, who landed at Scheveningen and ascended the throne of Holland as king. Not far from here and still to the northwest, is the finest modern picture gallery in Holland, the Mesdag Museum, presented to the State by the modern Dutch artist, H. W. Mesdag, and his wife, in 1903.

The shopping district of The Hague comprises the Hoogstraat and its immediate vicinity, the Spuistraat and the Wegenstraat. The narrow Spuistraat is always the most congested. Like the Hoogstraat in Rotterdam and the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, it is so thickly patronized from four-thirty, say, until dark that vehicular traffic through it is self-suspended for the sake of saving time; even the pitiless Hague bicyclist is compelled to dismount and push his wheel through it. At this late hour of the day the cafés are given over to the cordially inclined and the coffee drinkers, who fill their favorite rendezvous to the bursting point. As in Berlin, the Zoological Garden [84] at The Hague, with its café-concerts, is also a much frequented spot for recreation, but, unlike the Berlin garden, the less said about its zoology the better.

The beautiful old forest called the Bosch, lying just to the east of The Hague, intersected with disused and, therefore, rather stagnant canals, is the Versailles of Holland, and the “House in the Wood” is its Trianon. But the Bosch is much more accessible to The Hague than Versailles is to Paris, for an electric car will take you there from the plein in fifteen or twenty minutes.

Erected in 1645 by Prince Frederic Henry of Orange for his consort, the Princess Amalia of Solms, “The House in the Wood” latterly became famous as the seat of the international peace conference which the representatives of twenty-six different world powers held here in 1899. The conference convened in the so styled “Orange Room,” an octagonal hall lighted with a cupola, its walls and ceiling embellished with allegorical scenes from the life of Prince Frederic, done in oils by Dutch and Flemish artists. It is by far the most important apartment in the palace. The other rooms contain some wonderful Japanese embroideries, cabinets of elaborately and minutely carved ivories, rice paper tapestries, porcelains, and other exquisite objects of Oriental handcraft. It was here that the American historian, John Lothrop Motley, wrote a greater part of his [85] “ The Rise of the Dutch Republic ” and a portrait of him hangs upon the wall of one of the rooms.

A short distance to the north of the forest will be erected the much talked of Peace Palace for the International Court of Arbitration, toward the cost of which Mr. Carnegie has promised to contribute a million and a half.

But two miles from The Hague lies Scheveningen—Holland’s most fashionable, most expensive, most diverting seaside resort—the Atlantic City of the Netherlands. It may be approached by divers means: by railway train, by electric car, by omnibus, or on foot. The two principal and most popular routes served by the electric cars from The Hague are the Old Way and the New. Both are tree shaded and attractive, but the more tree shaded and attractive is the Old Way. The clinkers with which the most of it is paved were put down as early as 1666. Lined on the left with handsome summer residences and on the right with a pretty park, the Old Way to Scheveningen, with its geometric rows of stately trees, is undoubtedly the finest avenue in Holland.

Scheveningen, besides being a watering place of many merits and numerous shortcomings, is a town of no mean importance as a fishing port. Its fleet numbers two hundred or more pinken , or small fishing boats, and their catch is sold at auction at the fishing harbor upon arrival, as at Ostend.

The name of the place is a hard one for the English-speaking tourist to pronounce, but he will not be far wrong if, in his apparent eagerness to get there, he inquires of the genial head porter at the hotel in The Hague the number of the car line that will take him to “Shave agin.” He may slur over a syllable or two in the abbreviation, but the head porter will make due allowance for at least a brave attempt to master the word—which is something—and will direct him accordingly.

Instead of the old familiar seaside board walk, Scheveningen has its stone paved Boulevard, a mile and a quarter long and eighty feet wide. This is the promenade of the international hodgepodge of holiday makers, augmented on a Sunday and in the evenings by giggling girls and sober countenanced fishermen from the village. Invariably dressed in their best Sunday-go-to-meetings, the most conspicuous feature of the feminine attire is a wide shawl, often suggesting the Persian in design, worn tight about the shoulders and reaching down to the waist in the back. Of course the skirts are padded voluminously about the hips, and the girls display at the temples many varieties of gilded antennæ to hold their white caps securely.

About midway of the Boulevard and back of it, stands the ever present Kurhaus, although what they profess to cure in that house may simply be a reluctance on the part of the holder to diminish his [87] letter of credit. It is three hundred feet or more in length, this Kurhaus, and its commodious hall, in which are held some very excellent symphony orchestra concerts, can seat as many as 3,000 people. On the side of the Kurhaus overlooking the sea there is a large stone terrace where the band plays in the afternoons, and, underneath this, a very expensive café.

Just opposite the Kurhaus is the pier—a real old-fashioned ocean going steel pier, terminating in a concert pavilion and built right out into the water for almost a quarter of a mile, having a plate glass partition down the middle, so that there is a lee and a weather side to it. At intervals along its sides are fish nets, which may be raised from or lowered into the water by means of a crank and spindle attached to the pier railing. These are rented to the public on the time basis, and there is ever a group of persistent people vibrating between one net and another in the hope that its operator may bring to the rail a real denizen of the watery depths. I contracted the fever one day myself and fell in with this flitting crowd for an hour, more or less, only to be unrewarded in the end, but I am told that if anything piscatorially larger than an adult white-bait inadvertently becomes enmeshed in any of the nets and is brought to the surface the successful fisher receives round after round of enthusiastic applause.

And Scheveningen is in no sense of the word a philanthropic institution. Everything in the place has its price mark tagged securely on. You have to pay to walk on the pier, concert or no concert; you have to pay to listen to the band from the Kurhaus terrace; you have to pay to sit in one of the yellow mushroom chairs that make the beach resemble a fungus growth; you have to pay even to take a bath in the ocean, and are then restricted to the hours of from seven in the morning until sunset. On Sundays they close up the ocean for bathing purposes at 2 p.m.

But sea bathing is a different proposition in Europe from what it is in America. At Scheveningen it is a matter of the most serious import, and the necessities for its success—I almost said “enjoyment”—are many. To go about it in the proper manner, you first approach the ticket window on the Boulevard in front of the Kurhaus and apply to the cashier for a permit, varying in price according to the class of bath selected. Providing you have brought your own bathing suit, this will be the only payment necessary, for the permit graciously entitles you to the use of two towels, obviously for drying purposes. In case you have come unprepared with regard to bathing apparel, you will have to pay for a suit, although, judging from those I have seen personally, the wearer should be the one to be rewarded. [89] To avail yourself of the use of a “bath-sheet”—whatever that may be—necessitates additional expenditure, and there are various other alleged indispensable articles that the cashier may try to inflict upon the unwary at face value.

The next step is to repair to the beach and await the calling out of the number shown on your ticket, whereupon you are assigned to a striped kind of house on wheels, of the same kith and kin as an English “caravan” wagon. In this you must wait until the attendant sees fit to hitch his horse to it and haul you, wagon and all, into the surf. During the voyage you will have finished changing your costume and the minute your wagon is backed into the water you are ready to commence your amphibious performance. A high sign to the attendant will be the signal that you have survived the operation of bathing, and, presto! his horse will haul you out upon dry land again.

Doubtless on account of the expenses incurred in taking the proper precautions for bathing there are more waders at Scheveningen, especially among the thrifty Dutch, than there are bathers. Human snipe, ducks, and storks, according to their respective builds, with trousers rolled to their knees or petticoats pinned up to a similar altitude, daily patrol the edge of the ocean for a mile or more.

Surf riding is another favorite method of spending a half hour’s time at Scheveningen, the game being to suffer oneself to be bobbed up and down at the [90] mercy of the breakers in a tethered fishing boat, only to be ultimately carried ashore again on the backs of the crew.

An obelisk at the southern end of the Boulevard commemorates the landing of Prince William Frederic of Orange, but the victorious naval achievement of Admiral de Ruyter in defeating the combined French and English fleets off the coast of Scheveningen in 1673, remains unhonored.

VII
Leyden and Haarlem

If you happen to have penetrated Holland as far as The Hague without having availed yourself of the steam tram method of conveyance between one town and another the trip by this means from The Hague to Leyden might be suggested as an excellent one with which to commence to develop the habit.

The tram that operates on regular schedule between the Schenkweg in The Hague and the Groote Ryndyk in Leyden pierces a delightful country checkered by a labyrinth of canals, long and short, wide and narrow. Even every patch of humble cabbages appears to be surrounded with one, along which the truck gardeners pole their boats that bear the vegetables direct from soil to market. Tree crested dikes, straight as the shortest distance between two points, stretch away into the perspective in every direction. Villas and cozy country cottages come quickly into view and fade away again behind their groves of trees, giving the traveler just a flitting suggestion of the comfort their owners must find in them. In passing through the neat little brick-paved villages [92] of Voorburg and Voorschoten the tram engine careens around through the streets as if it had developed a first-class state of intoxication. It aims directly for a kitchen door here and the walls of a church there, only to miss them by a few feet while making a dexterous turn to the other side of the road, twisting its diminutive train of two or three cars in its wake. Then out beside the dikes again it puffs and sputters on its seemingly remonstrative way to Leyden.

Leyden is a quiet, curious old town, rich in history and effervescent with learning. With due respect to art, it was the birthplace of a dozen or more of the most illustrious Dutch painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Jan Steen, Gerard Dou, and last, but by no means least, the celebrated Rembrandt; but, strange to tell, it cannot boast of a single masterpiece of any of them. At its university, then renowned throughout the world, the future savants of the age came to pore over their books. Hugo Grotius was one of its earlier sons, and later, in 1755, at the age of twenty-seven, Oliver Goldsmith aspired in vain to the degree of Doctor of Medicine, afterwards conferred at Louwain, giving Leyden the first opportunity of being its donor. The town’s many museums—of ethnography, of natural history, of comparative anatomy, of physiology, of archeology—bespeak its hobby: the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Even many of the signs one reads in the town are in Latin.

Four hundred years ago Leyden could brag about its 100,000 population without treading on the toes of any city in Holland. To-day it contains little more than half as many souls as it did then. Since its “revision downward” from its pinnacle at the top of the Dutch textile industry, it has seemed a sacrilege to conduct business in the place. Its university sustained for a time the reputation that its weaving enterprises relinquished, but now we go to Vienna, instead of to Leyden, to glean the fine points in the science of medicine. Using Discovery for a fulcrum, Time undermines methods with the infallibility of the sun’s attraction, and brands them as obsolete forever.

The historical bench mark of Leyden is the siege it survived at the point of the Spanish bayonet in the sixteenth century. Lasting, in the aggregate, from October 31, 1573, until October 3, 1574, this siege may be considered as one of the longest and most persistent in the annals of history, and its ultimate relief was as characteristic, picturesque, and ingenious as if it had been the plot of a tale by Dumas.

At the expense of the lives of 4,000 patriots, himself included, Count Louis of Nassau effected a partial relief of Leyden five months after the siege commenced; but, encouraged by the butchery of this Dutch commander and his comparative handful of soldiers, the Spaniards continued to hold on so tenaciously that William the Silent concocted the daring [94] scheme to flood the intervening country with water from the sea so that his fleet might sail in to the rescue.

Having already reduced Leyden to the point of starvation, Valdez, the Spanish general, in glowing phrases offered pardon to the citizens if they would but open the gates of the beleaguered city and surrender. But the people would have none of it, placing renewed confidences in their leader, William of Orange, and consoling themselves as best they could with the firm belief that he was listening to their prayers and would ultimately devise some means of raising the blockade.

As time dragged wearily on, the sorties of the Dutch became less frequent and, finally, it was announced by the din of clanging church bells that the gates should henceforth be kept closed and no man should venture outside the city.

Even at this time, William, unbeknown to the people of Leyden, was appealing to the States to allow him to open the flood gates of Rotterdam and Schiedam and to pierce the dikes along the Meuse and the Yssel in order to inundate the country and give his fleet a fairway to the very watchtowers of Leyden. After much debate, his proposition for effecting the relief, although a most destructive one to the surrounding country, was accepted; bonds were issued by the States to help defray the expenses of the task, and patriotic Dutch housewives disposed [95] of silver plate and jewelry as their contributions to the financial furtherance of the scheme.

It was not until some days after the Prince had supervised in person the unlocking of the gates at Schiedam and Rotterdam on August 3rd and the rupture of the dikes at sixteen different places along the Yssel, that the starving prisoners of Leyden commenced to grow impatient and appealed by letter to Orange, telling him that their bread was gone and that the supply of its only substitute, malt cakes, would last but four days longer. To their letters the Prince, having unfortunately and most untimely contracted the fever, answered reassuringly from his sick bed in Rotterdam to the effect that the dikes had been cut, that water was already pouring in over the land, and that as soon as its depth was sufficient to float the fleet an attempt at rescue would be made. The message was read by the Burgomaster, Van der Werf, to the people assembled in the market place, and the welcome news was received with great rejoicings.

Although the water about Leyden had by this time reached a depth of ten inches, the Spaniards, at first confused, later became confident that the thing could not be accomplished. When, from the lack of a breeze, the water failed to rise higher; and because of the inability of the prostrate Prince, which neither the besiegers nor besieged had heard of nor even imagined, curtailed additional attempts to flood the [96] country; the Spaniards began to taunt the valiant citizens. “Go up to the tower, ye Beggars,” they cried, “go up to the tower and tell us if ye can see the ocean coming over the dry land to your relief.”

But the citizens did go up to the tower, and, after bravely having withstood the siege until early in September, by which time a gale of wind had risen and the Prince had recovered in a measure from his illness, they did see the ocean coming over the dry land to their relief, and with a vengeance. Not only that, but they also saw a welcome fleet of two hundred vessels coming in on the crest of the ocean; they saw this fleet come up from the south, steadily and undisputed, to within five miles of Leyden; they saw it demolish the Spanish forts—a navy of surgeons cauterizing the festering sores on the face of fair Holland. Then, to their consternation, they saw the gale die out and the waters recede, leaving the entire fleet stranded at North Aa, just beyond cannon’s shot of its goal.

Despair took the place of hope in the hearts of the besieged. They implored, and then threatened the life of Burgomaster Van der Werf if he refused to surrender to the Spaniards. He came out into the little square just opposite the old church of St. Pancras, waved his felt hat as a signal for silence, and delivered himself of a short but pithy address that turned despair into faith, animosity into pride, and fired the hearts of his countrymen with renewed [97] patriotism. What he said on that occasion has gone down in history as one of the most superb proclamations ever uttered by a brave man for a national cause.

“What would ye, my friends?” he said. “Why do ye murmur that we do not break our vows and surrender the city to the Spaniards?—a fate more horrible than the agony which she now endures. I tell you that I have made an oath to hold the city, and may God give me strength to keep my oath! I can die but once; whether by your hands, the enemy’s, or by the hand of God. My own fate is indifferent to me. Not so that of the city intrusted to my care. I know that we shall starve if not soon relieved; but starvation is preferable to the dishonored fate which is the only alternative. Your menaces move me not. My life is at your disposal. Here is my sword; plunge it into my breast and divide my flesh among you. Take my body to appease your hunger, but expect no surrender so long as I remain alive.”

How the populace of Leyden, after listening to this, rushed to the ramparts with renewed courage engendered within them and hurled defiance in the teeth of the bloodthirsty Spaniards; how as many as 8,000 died in the streets from the plague alone, germinated by the foulness of the beleaguered city; how the frantic people stripped even the leaves from the trees to relieve their hunger and fought over the [98] garbage pits for every possible morsel of food; how at last a violent equinoctial gale on the first two days of October filled the lowland with water and floated the stranded fleet; how this fleet sailed in between the trees and the chimney pots of submerged farmhouses, putting the Spaniards to flight as it advanced; and how, on the morning of the 3rd of October, the Dutch ships, under Admiral Boisot, paddled up the canals of Leyden while the stricken citizens gathered on the banks and tried to shout with wild delight, but could not on account of their emaciated condition—are all matters of historical fact that may be perused in detail in the pages of any authoritative work on the rise of the Dutch Republic.

It is also an historical fact that on the very next day after the relief of Leyden the gale shifted and blew with all its fury from the northeast, driving out the waters before it, so that within a few days the country was as it had been before and the labor of repairing the dikes commenced forthwith.

As a reward for the sufferings of the people of Leyden the city was granted an annual fair of ten days with exemption from taxes and the States caused the university to be established.

The University of Leyden doesn’t look much like our idea of a university, for the professors, except those in the department of medicine, teach their classes at home, the nine hundred students live in the [99] town, and, as a result, dormitories and classrooms are things that may be dispensed with. The old “university building,” however, originally a nunnery, maintains in its connection one of the finest libraries in Holland.

Not far from where the lofty perpendicular Gothic windows of the church of St. Pancras overlook the square in which the Burgomaster extemporized with such eloquence at the time of the siege, a shipload of gunpowder exploded in 1807. After removing the débris of the buildings which it razed, the Leydeners planted the site as a public park and erected a statue of the valiant Van der Werf in the center of it. Backed by two or three handsome new buildings belonging to the university and facing a wide, clear canal, this Van der Werf Park vies with the Botanical Gardens behind the old university building, as peaceful a spot in which to spend a moonlit evening pondering over the history of the old place as may be found in Leyden; while from the Morsch Gate, a well preserved remnant of earlier fortifications, many temptingly shaded walks twist and twine through the immediate neighborhood.

In Leyden, and not in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, as one might suppose, I came across a beggar for the first time in Holland, although technically, he came across me. The atmosphere of book learning was probably what launched him on his career, for he certainly seemed able-bodied enough to make a [100] more honest living by the sweat of his brow; but the people of Leyden are not given much to fluent perspiration. And it might be here mentioned that one of the reliefs of travel in Holland, compared with Italy, for example, is its dearth of mendicants and beggars. Cripples and the poverty stricken are to be found in Holland as in any other country, but, as a rule, they do not submit their complaints to the sympathies of the tourist. Wherever possible, one of Holland’s world famed charitable institutions gets hold of them and sends them from the congested city to the pauper colony in the country. Three such colonies, founded in 1817, are situated near the railway line from Meppel to Leeuwarden, while in the one city of Amsterdam there are more than a hundred benevolent institutions. The Society for the Public Welfare, or, in Dutch, Maatschappij tot Nut van’t Algemeen , with headquarters in Amsterdam, was founded in 1784 and has made its influence felt throughout the entire kingdom.

Katwyk and Noordwyk, three miles apart, the particular seashore resorts that cater especially to the people of Leyden and Haarlem, are both connected by steam tram with Leyden. Both are insignificant and expensive, and neither is so attractive as Domburg nor so gay as Scheveningen. Their wide beaches of fine sand would seem to us their only assets.

But if you would have further evidence of the Dutch mastery of the element of water, take the tram [101] to Katwyk aan Zee and walk up the beach a half mile or more to where they have harnessed the mouth of the old Rhine and curbed its outlet to suit their convenience.

A hurricane having thrown up the sand before the mouth of the river in the year 839, thus causing its flow into the ocean to be blocked, its backed-up waters created a swamp which all but covered the entire territory known as Rynland, and which, in the subsequent diversion of the river’s course, was largely responsible for the formation of the vast delta in the south. In 1807 the Dutch conceived the project of draining this swamp and making polders of it by pumping its water into especially constructed canals. Later they relieved the congestion of sand at the old Rhine’s mouth and built a series of flood gates across it. By closing these gates at high tide they were enabled to exclude the inrush of water from the ocean, and by opening them again at low tide, they permitted the accumulated waters of the river to flow out into the ocean at the rate of 50,000 cubic feet per minute. Thus was the Haarlemerpolder, seventy-two square miles in extent, reclaimed from what used to be the Haarlemermeer.

The tram line from Leyden to Katwyk passes first through the village of Endegeest, the home and workshop of Descartes for a number of years, and then through Rynsburg, the former residence of that grandfather of modern philosophy, Spinoza, born of [102] Jewish parents in Amsterdam in 1632. The little places are so shady, so peaceful, so still, that anyone having been brought up within their solitudes might very naturally develop the pastime of philosophizing without half trying.

The latter part of April or the first part of May is the proper time of year to visit Haarlem and its vicinity. Then the tulips, crocuses, lilies, and hyacinths are in the halcyon days of their bloom, swaying languidly to and fro in the gentle breeze and diffusing a delicious perfume that is wafted over the country for miles. Fields and fields of them there are—a sweetly scented “crazy quilt” of superlative sheen and luster; for Haarlem, the greatest flower garden in the world, exports bulbs of all varieties to every civilized country.

Whether the Dutch or the Portuguese became the first European tulip fanciers is a moot question. The flower originally came from the East, its name being derived from the Persian toliban , or turban. Suffice it to say that by 1636 bulb culture in general and tulip culture in particular had developed into a veritable mania in and about Haarlem. Bulbs became then as much an item of speculation as shares of mining stock are at the present day—and just as uncertain. Fortunes were made and lost in the open market. Generally speaking, everybody in Haarlem, whether or not he professed to be anything of a floriculturist, dickered through the brokers in bulbs. [103] One speculator in Amsterdam netted almost $35,000 in four months. Prices went up steadily until, at the height of the boom, the bulb of a “Viceroy” brought $2,000, an “Admiral Liefkens” slightly more, and a “Semper Augustus” was sold for $6,000.

Then came the panic. The bottom dropped out of the bucket of bulbs. The government forbade the gambling, and between suns the price of an offshoot of the “Semper Augustus” dropped to fifty florins, or approximately twenty-two dollars.

After a century of quiet, somebody started a short-lived palpitation in hyacinths, but the highest price paid for a single hyacinth bulb was not more than $800.

To-day the Dutch make more of a serious business of bulb raising, and the rather inconspicuous offshoot has become a recognized article of trade and commerce. Almost all of the 2,000 Dutch varieties of tulips have been developed by patient and thoughtful culture from the Tulipa Gesneriana , which Conrad Gesner purchased in Constantinople and brought to Augsburg in Germany in 1559.

In Holland the tulip is propagated both from the seed and from the offshoots of the bulb. The offshoots may be expected to reproduce their true variety as to colorings and markings, growing to a flowering size in three or four years. Seedlings, on the other hand, are less vain and more reticent. No matter what the complexions of their parents might [104] have been, the first flowers of a seedling, appearing after it has had four or five years’ growth, are of a single color. A tulip in such a state is called a “breeder,” and remains so until, after several years, its flower suddenly “breaks” into the gorgeous colors of the “flamed” or the “feathered” tulip. It is then classified according to color and variety and placed upon the market. To hasten this period of “breaking” in the career of the tulip—for no man can compute with any degree of certainty the year in which it will take place—the growers resort to various means, even sending the bulbs away sometimes for a change of climate. “Breeders” that have taken on the desired markings and colors are said to have become “rectified.” But the problem of chance that the seedling tulips will “break” into a new variety is one that the Dutch have been pondering over for centuries, and, as has already been said, they have been rewarded to the extent of 2,000 varieties. Much care is devoted to the preparation of the soil and, after fertilizing thoroughly, the grower will first plant it with potatoes for a couple of years in order to diminish its strength and adapt it better to the cultivation of tulips. The bulbs are taken up each summer, their offshoots detached, and then replaced in fresh soil.

The year before the siege of Leyden, Haarlem suffered a siege under Frederic of Toledo, the son of the Spaniard, Alva; but Haarlem was not so [105] fortunate as her sister city. After bravely maintaining the place against the enemy for a period of seven weary months, with odds of seven to one against them, the Prince of Orange, with heavy heart, sent a message asking the commandant to make the best terms he would with the Spaniards and surrender, the many attempts of the Prince to rescue the city having proved futile.

The massacre that followed the surrender was too shocking to bear the telling of in detail. The garrison and its commandant, the Protestant clergy, and 2,000 or more burghers were cruelly butchered by the Spaniards. Alva himself, however, was forced to admit to Philip that “never was a place defended with such skill and bravery as Haarlem”; not only the men of the town, little accustomed to arms, but the women also had taken an active part in Haarlem’s defense, and Kenau Hasselaer, “a widow of distinguished family and unblemished reputation, about forty-seven years of age, who, at the head of her amazons” (some three hundred or more) “participated in many of the most fiercely contested actions of the siege, both within and without the walls.”

As the birthplace of a number of Holland’s celebrated painters, including Franz Hals and Jacob van Ruysdael, Haarlem holds as her most cherished possession a handsome percentage of the works of the former, numbering among which are his ten famous corporation and regent canvases, arranged in chronological [106] order in the museum of the old Town Hall. To know these will mean that you know the jovial Franz.

Across the market place from the Town Hall rises the Groote Kerk, and, just beside it, the old meat market, erected in 1602, and said, by those who know, to be the quaintest brick and stone Renaissance building in the Netherlands. The Groote Kerk is of a graceful cruciform shape and around the edges of its buttresses, like chicks peeping from under the protecting wings of the mother hen, are built a number of curious little one-story houses whose interiors suggest the last word in coziness and cleanliness, and where the much maligned Dutch decorative taste may be seen at its best. The church contains what was long considered the largest and loudest pipe organ in the world, possessing three keyboards, sixty stops, and 5,000 pipes of varying lengths and diameters up to thirty-two feet in the case of the former and fifteen inches with respect to the latter. A cannon ball, imbedded in the wall of the south aisle of the church, was allowed to remain undisturbed during the restoration as a reminiscence of the siege of 1572.

At the side of the church, in the market place, stands a bronze statue of a Dutchman of the name of Coster, erected in 1856 upon rather fictitious evidence of his having been the inventor of printing. Nothing in the way of printed matter having been proven to have been done by Coster prior to or even [107] shortly after 1447, when Gutenburg of Mayence developed the art, the palm for this distinction was finally, but reluctantly, relegated to the latter.

Instead of Spanish encampments, Haarlem is now surrounded with a beautiful forest, a prominent collection of attractive residences, municipal playgrounds for the children, and lives in an atmosphere of peace and comfort. The old Amsterdam Gate at the east end of the city serves as the only reminder that the place at one time possessed strong fortifications.

VIII
The City of Ninety Islands

From all practical points of view, if, indeed, it is stretching the metaphor a bit with regard to smells and scenes (to preserve the alliteration), Amsterdam may be considered the Venice of the Netherlands. Like Venice it seems to have as many canals as there are blood vessels in the human body; like Venice it is the home of the damp cellar, for the city is built upon piles.

In the erection of a new building in Amsterdam the first thing they do is to pump out the site, and, after they have it fairly dry, keep on pumping to prevent it from filling up again; when the structure is completed they celebrate the event by the installation of a permanent pump in the basement which they must needs start running at stated intervals to diminish the volume of water that has seeped in through the cracks. The driver of piles takes the place of our stone mason, for of piles is the city’s foundation. A foot at a whack, these piles are sunk into the sand. They are then morticed with mud, girders are strung between them, and behold! the house on stilts commences to assume its architectural [109] design. By and by the mud loses its adhesive properties to a certain degree, and the building commences to lean dangerously forward or backward, although without the dire results that one might imagine.

Amsterdam is the largest and most commercially important city in Holland. Founded in 1204 by Gysbrecht II , who built a castle here, and choked the flow of the river Amstel by throwing a dam across it—from which more or less momentous event the town derived its appellation,—Florins V , of Binnenhof fame, favored the place to the extent of granting its exemption from the taxes imposed by Zeeland and Holland. In 1311 it was formally absorbed by the latter province. From that time on Amsterdam gathered greater importance as a commercial center, until, in the early years of the seventeenth century, after the Dutch had finally succeeded in beating off the Spaniards, the establishment of the Dutch East India Company added its might to raise Amsterdam to the rank of the foremost mercantile community in the world. Later she commenced to gravitate slowly down the incline of trade and her cogs refused to take hold again until the latter half of the nineteenth century, although at the time of the dividing of the Dutch Republic, when King Louis Bonaparte took up his residence in Amsterdam in 1808, she was considered the third greatest city in the French Empire. To-day she has advanced well past the half million population mark. Although as regards her [110] foreign trade she does not profess to compete with Rotterdam, as a money market and clearing house for colonial products she is preëminent in the Netherlands.

The Dam—a large square that owes its name to the fact of its being the eastern boundary of Lord Amstel’s embankment across the river—is the axis around which Amsterdam revolves. It is literally the hub of the Dutch universe. Every electric car in the place starts from the Dam, and in due course of time will wind its way back again. The principal edifices adjacent to it are the Royal Palace, the Nieuwe Kerk, or New Church, and the imposing post and telegraph offices.

Completed in the year 1655 at a total cost of more than $3,000,000, this Royal Palace was originally the Town Hall, but when Louis Bonaparte came upon the scene the Dutch made him a present of it for his use as a royal residence. At a later date King William I of Holland handed it back to the city, whose property it still remains, instead of that of the Crown; so that when Wilhelmina makes her annual ten days’ visit to Amsterdam she comes more as a private citizen and is the guest of the city for the period of her stay. With its 264 feet of length and its 207 of width it seems rather a strain upon the imagination to picture the Royal Palace as standing upon stilts; but such is actually the case, for its foundations consist of 13,659 piles (to be [111] absolutely accurate) driven from forty to sixty feet into the sand.

The difference in ages between the Nieuwe Kerk, just around the corner from the palace, and the Oude Kerk, or Old Church of Amsterdam, is that the Oude Kerk was erected in 1300, whereas they didn’t commence work upon the Nieuwe Kerk until a hundred and eight years later. Both were doing their religious duties before America was discovered. Successive conflagrations destroyed different parts of the Nieuwe Kerk and the first service in the building as it stands to-day was not celebrated until 1648. The church contains the tombs of three of Holland’s famous fighting admirals, that of Admiral de Ruyter included, in addition to the hermes bust of another, and the mausoleum of a Dutch lieutenant of marines, van Speyk by name, who, during the revolution of Holland, “maintained on the 5th of February, 1831, before Antwerp, the honor of his native flag at the cost of his life” by blowing up his gunboat in the harbor of Antwerp to prevent it from falling into the possession of the enemy. Since 1814 four kings of Holland have taken the oath of the constitution in the Nieuwe Kerk and here, on September 6, 1898, Wilhelmina was formally inaugurated Queen of the Netherlands—an event recently commemorated by the installation of a handsome stained glass window in the church. Well might the Nieuwe Kerk be said to be the Westminster Abbey of Amsterdam.

[112] Connecting the Dam with the central railway station is the wide Damrak, part of which was at one time a canal. In the opposite direction wiggles the narrow Kalverstraat, Amsterdam’s principal shopping street, thronged in the late afternoon and evening with that part of the population of the city that isn’t sipping coffee in the windows of its cafés.

Once I had the misfortune to be stopping in Amsterdam upon the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, the 31st of August. This not being sufficient unpremeditated self-punishment, I was provincial enough to have chosen as headquarters what appeared from across the street to be a clean, quiet little hotel in the Kalverstraat. The two blended most harmoniously. Between the unmelodious patriots who paraded the Kalverstraat from sunset to sunrise, and the battles royal participated in with the ambidextrous entomological specimens among the bedclothes, I did anything but enjoy a refreshing night’s rest. To which tale there are two morals: avoid Amsterdam on the Queen’s birthday, and little Juliana’s as well, and eschew the hotels in the Kalverstraat (one especially, which shall be nameless) as you would the nest of the subtle hornet.

At the southeastern terminus of the Kalverstraat stands the old Mint Tower of 1620, and still farther to the east is the Rembrandtplein, a small, park-centered intersection of streets named in honor of [113] Holland’s painter par excellence , who lived for sixteen years at No. 4 Joden-Breestraat in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, the house having been since marked with a small memorial tablet.

Here bordering the Rembrandtplein are the larger sidewalk cafés, jammed of a summer’s evening with pleasure-seeking Amsterdamers, each with a cup or a glass of something in front of him. Like those found in the ordinary German cafés these crowds seldom change. Here you may find the same people at eleven that you have seen at seven, and in exactly the same positions. A cup of coffee followed by a cordial is the usual evening’s refreshment programme, the consuming time of which the Amsterdamer will expand into a couple of hours by the assiduous perusal of every newspaper and periodical he can inveigle the waiter to bring him, interrupted only by an occasional sip of his beverage. Even the persistent street singers, who come one at a time to prolong the agony and stand but a few feet away from his table, yelling triumphantly into his ear, fail to disturb him in the least. If, unthinkingly, he finishes his refreshment before he considers the time has arrived to go home to bed, he will calmly smoke out the remainder of the engagement. The expenditure of half a gulden or less will buy his contentment until the following evening.

Many of the indoor cafés charge a small admission fee for the privilege of listening to a “lady orchestra.” In each of these that part which is adjacent [114] to the street will be partitioned off by a dark curtain, so that the patrons of the place may choose, if there be any choice, between the crowds on the street and the vaudeville turns that may be scheduled to follow the sufferings of the musicians.

On the Rembrandtplein stands also the Rembrandt theater, Amsterdam’s principal playhouse, which, by way of information, is closed in summer. But, by way of further information, there are in the city a number of vaudeville theaters that cater to the less exacting in the matter of histrionic art and are open throughout the year, offering more or less respectable performances.

To one of these near the Rembrandtplein I wended my way upon a certain evening, desirous of being amused, no matter what the consequences. I obtained my money’s worth, and more. It cost me one and a half gulden to get in, and it might have cost me an ear, or other projecting appendage, to get out if I had not slipped through a side exit as inconspicuously as I could during the height of the mêlée and commenced forthwith to accelerate my gait toward the hotel. I think the disturbance was inaugurated by an American protégé of His Pugilistic Highness, John Johnson, but I did not consider it exactly safe at the time to tarry longer in order to ascertain definitely.

It so happened that this particular vaudeville house was in the habit of concluding its performance [115] each evening with a series of international wrestling matches, offering a considerable monetary reward to the winner of the finals. The first bout of the evening of my visit was between an Englishman and a Dutchman, which terminated satisfactorily for the latter and with no casualties. The crowd went rampant; whereupon I became imbued with the spirit of the thing, ordered another cup of coffee—which, by the way, was served gratis by the management—and settled myself more comfortably to enjoy the next tilt between a Frenchman and a Swede. The gougings and hair-pullings resorted to by the Latin were not received with complacency on the part of the audience, and when he lost the match, he made his exit with ruffled temper, together with his full share of hisses and catcalls. Then the promoters of the scheme made a managerial mistake. They pitted a bloated Belgian wrestler against the champion of Amsterdam. A brief reference to the pages of any volume reciting the incidents of 1830–31 will convey the correct impression that the Belgians and the Dutch are not the intimate playmates they used to be—a fact which in itself precluded the possibility of any amicable settlement of the forthcoming athletic imbroglio.

The Belgian proved to be a past master in the science of hair-pulling and eye-gouging. When the even tempered Dutchman finally turned him on his back he felt called upon to challenge the referee, the [116] score keeper, the orchestra, the audience, or any other single individual or group of them that happened to be within reach. The crowd hooted the villain and applauded the hero.

Just at this inopportune moment a dark, ominous cloud, of African parentage, wrapped in a true Alabama grin and peg-top trousers, blew in from the wings and commenced to congratulate the victor hilariously. In order that the peace respecting reputation of the house might be preserved, a brigade of stage hands and ushers rushed in double phalanx upon the scene, and, with rather generous turn of mind, attempted to distract the negro’s attention and keep him from maiming the Belgian. Ultimately they tried to put the negro out—an inconsiderate procedure, to say the least. I once saw the same thing attempted during fair week in Albuquerque, to the demolition of several plate glass windows and the necessary services of half a dozen local surgeons.

The last I remember they were enticing the negro toward the front door in a none too gentle manner, while the more enthusiastic half of the audience was making for the stage, and the other half, among whom was the writer, for the exits. On my way to the hotel there passed two police vans loaded to the gunwales with a blur of arms and legs.

The Rijks or Royal Museum stands in a prominent location to the south of the Old Town, surrounded by the more fashionable residence section and the [117] Vondel Park. From street floor to gables it is filled with objects of historical and technical interest. It would take just as long to “do” it thoroughly as it would the British Museum in London or the Metropolitan in New York. But the tourist in Holland, usually of limited time allowance, contents himself with a hurried inspection of the different collections in the Rijks Museum and a view of the pièce de resistance of its picture gallery, namely, the world renowned painting by Rembrandt erroneously styled “The Night Watch.” Many having been led to believe, on account of the very marvelous chiaroscuro of the picture, that Rembrandt intended it to represent a street scene at night, its present title has been given universal usage; but in reality the scene depicted takes place in daylight. It is the largest and most justly celebrated work by Rembrandt, being fourteen and a quarter feet long, and eleven and three quarters feet wide. It was painted in 1642, and represents a small company of arquebusiers under Captain Franz Cocq emerging from their shooting gallery, or doele —a name so commonly given to Dutch hotels that you will find a “Hotel de Doelen” in almost every town in Holland. The supposed night shadows in the picture are in truth cast by the lofty vaulting of the gallery. The portraits of the sixteen members of the guild were done from life, and each member represented in the picture paid the artist one hundred gulden , which remunerated [118] him to the extent of something less than $800 for his labors. To-day the painting could not be purchased at any price.

Not the least interesting—nor most fragrant—section of Amsterdam is its Jewish Quarter, situated in the eastern part of the Old Town. The quarter is a typical city in itself, for of Amsterdam’s total population more than 60,000 are Jews. It possesses ten synagogues, the largest of which, erected as early as 1670 by the Portuguese Jews and said to resemble as far as possible the ancient Temple of Solomon, stands in the Muiderstraat. Freedom of religion was accorded these persecuted peoples early in the history of Amsterdam, and to Amsterdam as an asylum they flocked, first from Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a little later from Portugal, then from the Spanish Netherlands, from Germany, and from Poland. In the administration and the commercial enterprises of the city their wealth wielded much influence.

Amsterdam is indebted to those Portuguese Jews who emigrated from Antwerp in 1576 for the introduction of its most widely known industry, that of diamond polishing—an art utterly unknown in Europe prior to the fifteenth century. To-day there are more than seventy diamond polishing establishments in and about the city, employing some 10,000 men, and they are building a new diamond exchange to cost in the neighborhood of $240,000. The cut [119] diamonds exported to the United States from the Amsterdam district alone in 1909—the latest figures at my elbow—were valued at $13,319,417, in addition to more than a million dollars’ worth in the rough.

The rules of the London syndicate from which every Amsterdam diamond polisher must purchase his uncut stones are equally strict with the regulation of the diamond workers’ organization.

In the former case, a diamond polisher must procure an introduction to the London merchant through the de Beers syndicate in order to obtain a “sight.” If a polisher is buying diamonds of one class, say Kimberly, he may not under any circumstances obtain a “sight” of diamonds of any other class, say Jagerfontein. He may examine the parcel of diamonds offered to him for a “sight” for fifteen minutes, no longer. If they do not suit him his trip to London has been of no avail. He must take what is offered or nothing, and at the price quoted. Until five years ago a polisher was punished by not being able to obtain a “sight” for a year if he refused to accept a parcel offered for purchase, and he would often pay a premium of $4,000 for another man’s packet without seeing a stone.

With regard to the worker, no one in Amsterdam may learn the trade of diamond polishing without the consent of the organization and unless he be the son of a diamond worker or jeweler. He must be [120] under eighteen years of age, he must pass a rigid examination, and if he desires to become a cleaver—the highest salaried artisan in the diamond industry, whose wages often amount to $120 a week—he must pay sometimes as much as $2,000. There are special schools in Amsterdam for turners and polishers which charge an instruction fee ranging from $120 to $150.

The rough diamond is first cleaved by hand, or, if thought more profitable, it is set in a bar of hot lead which, after having cooled, is placed in front of a phosphor-bronze saw and sawed in half. Whether or not this saw may be used a second time depends upon the crystallization of the stone sawed. Some stones that, after being sawed, are considered too hard to polish, are pulverized and mixed with emery dust to be used in making the saws. The two halves of the original stone are then handed over to the cutters who cut them round, or nearly so, and remove the flaws. The polishers then polish the stones and make their facets, which, in the case of a gem of the first class, number from fifty-eight to sixty-four.

Amsterdam is also the home of a peculiar institution into the workings of which some of our own municipalities might delve to their advantage. It puts the predatory money-loan shark out of business as effectually as a hydrochloric acid bath would a potato bug. This institution is the municipal pawnshop, known as the Bank of Leening, of which there are fifteen branches in the city. It has been in [121] successful operation for centuries, the first pawn ticket showing the early date of April 29, 1614. Loans are made for six months, and all articles not redeemed at the expiration of that period are sold at public auction. It is interesting to note that among the articles disposed of in this manner in 1909 were 3,427 sewing machines, 1,325 bicycles, and 106 pianos and organs. The maximum loan allowed on a single article is approximately $201, while the low rates charged have been the cause of much anxiety on the part of the independent pawnbrokers, and with the desired results. You may pawn with the Bank of Leening anything from a hair comb to a hair mattress, but it is an acknowledged fact that forty per cent. of its business is derived from that well-meaning Dutchman addicted to the habit of wearing his best suit only on Sunday. This he pawns on Monday and redeems on Saturday, until the suit wears out from being passed over the counter.

One item more to the credit of Amsterdam: all the slaughtering of animals for food must be done in the municipal abattoir, and meat which is brought in from the country must be inspected there before it is offered for sale. The dealers do their own slaughtering and must pay for the use of the abattoir sixty-four, thirty-four, or ten cents, according to the size of each animal slaughtered. Especially constructed vans then transfer the meat to the shops [122] of the different dealers. Inasmuch as horseflesh is found on the daily menu of many families in Amsterdam, 5,444 horses were numbered among the 150,000 or more animals slaughtered in the municipal abattoir in 1909. Mutton, not being in particular favor with the Dutch for some unknown reason, cannot be bought in many of the meat shops, and there is a large central market in Amsterdam that carries only mutton as its stock in trade.

The Bank of Amsterdam antedates the Bank of England by almost a century, being founded in 1609. Under the administration of the Amsterdam Corporation, whose executives examined its specie annually in order to verify the statements of its managers, the business world became so confident of its solvency that its guaranteed certificates were usually offered at a premium, and as much as $180,000,000 in coin has been held against these certificates at one time. Ever since its establishment it has retained its place as one of the strongest financial institutions in the world.

IX
Excursions About Amsterdam

It is doubtful indeed if any other city in Holland than Amsterdam can tempt the tourist with a greater number of pleasant day’s excursions. Lying at the very feet of North Holland—a travel territory no larger in area than the state of Rhode Island, but replete with picturesque nooks and corners, congested with types and abounding in peculiar customs—every part of the province is readily accessible to Amsterdam by rail or by water. Back of its central railway station there is a long line of docks which berth the boats that only await your patronage. Here you may board the large river steamer that takes you to Zaandam in half an hour for the price of one-half of one Dutch cent a minute; here you may take the little excursion boats for ports along the Zuyder Zee; here you may engage passage to Alkmaar or to The Helder or even to Leeuwarden or Groningen or Zwolle, situated in that unpenetrated part of the kingdom which may be termed the hinterland of Holland; and here you may hire a private yacht or motor boat, master and all, to carry you whither you will and for as long as you wish for as little as five dollars a day inclusive. [124] If you cross the arm of the Zuyder Zee they call the Ij—much easier spelled Y—by ferry to the Tolhuis you have only to board the steam tram to be rattled across country to Alkmaar, Edam, or Volendam. To Haarlem is but fifteen minutes’ ride by rail, while The Hague itself is only an hour’s trip in the schnell zug . Zandvoort, on the North Sea, is served by electric train direct from Amsterdam, stopping at Haarlem to break the short journey.

A favorite excursion for a summer’s evening is from Amsterdam by steamer to Zaandam, the most typically Dutch of all Dutch towns. The course of the steamer leads up the North Sea Canal to a point a little beyond the Petroleum Harbor and then turns off into the river Zaan.

It is in the North Sea Canal that Amsterdam places her only hope of ever being able to compete with Rotterdam as a shipping port. With its fifteen miles of length, its sixty-five to one hundred and ten yards of width, and its thirty feet of depth, this canal pierces the one-time peninsula of North Holland from the Zuyder Zee to its western boundary, making an island out of part of the province and placing Amsterdam in direct and easy communication with the North Sea. An “A.P.” gauge along its bank would prove its water level to be about twenty inches minus, that is, twenty inches below the mean level of the water at Amsterdam—the bench mark of all water levels throughout Holland. [125] To cut such a canal across country from one sea to another and to protect it at either end with immense breakwaters and lock gates has cost the government in the neighborhood of $18,000,000 and consumed eleven years of patient labor. Since 1895 its western terminus has been divided into two outlets, the older being protected by a lock of three openings, while the more recently completed branch, diverging a little to the northward from the main canal, has but one opening, 245 yards long, 27 yards wide, and 33 feet deep.

Zaandam being the home and breeding ground of the windmill, a bird’s-eye view of it would give the effect of four inverted centipedes kicking in their death throes. It is the center of the Dutch lumber trade, and since the windmill is the cheapest method of generating the power that any lumber trade requires in order to operate its sawmills, Zaandam draws from the breeze what we conjure from steam. There are upwards of four hundred windmills in its immediate vicinity. Its houses, brightly painted with green, red, or white, and surrounded with pleasant little gardens, gayly reiterate the Dutchman’s delight in contrasts, harmonious or otherwise.

Another of Zaandam’s claims to the consideration of the tourist is a little old house near the harbor, that belongs, not to any resident of the town, nor to any man in Holland, but to the Czar of all the Russias personally. It is the house which Peter [126] the Great made his domestic headquarters for a brief week in the year 1697 while, as tradition has it, he studied shipbuilding incognito in Zaandam. If the villagers had not made themselves so pestiferously inquisitive and penetrated his disguise a few days after his arrival he might have learned a lot from Mynheer Kalf, under whose competent tutelage he apprenticed himself as a ship carpenter; but the idlers about town became too importunate for Peter. He gave up his position at the end of a week and returned to Amsterdam.

Volendam, on the west coast of the Zuyder Zee, and the little Island of Marken, just opposite, are the two most advertised and, therefore, the show places in the tourist territory of Holland and enjoy the highest patronage. Both are being rapidly and ruthlessly spoiled in consequence. However, as these are the towns easiest of access from Amsterdam that have retained the costumes and customs which prevailed hundreds of years ago, embellishing both to a certain degree as the signs of the times dictate, one feels it his solemn duty, almost, to go there. If the gentle reader has been to Amsterdam and has weathered the many appeals to make a day’s trip to Volendam and Marken we should like to have him raise his hand, please, so that we may inquire as to the cause and effect of his superb indifference. It would be worth noting in the minutes of any travel club.

The head porter of your hotel in Amsterdam—a sort of unproclaimed passenger agent himself—will try to sell you a round trip ticket to Volendam and Marken in one of the many parties, each attended by a conductor, which leave every morning and return every evening during the season. But, if you will bear a personal opinion, that which is interesting under the guidance of the prosaic conductor is twice as interesting to explore by yourself. Start as early as you choose, if you can, and get back when you can, if you choose, is the best advice I am able to utter with regard to travel through any country in the world—and, on account of its many facilities for getting about and the comparative meagerness of the territory involved, it is especially applicable to Holland.

Except to obtain a comprehensive view of the great dam at the mouth of the Y, a mile and a quarter in length, which protects the more delicate construction of the North Sea Canal from the ravages of the Zuyder Zee, the trip to Marken made by this route offers little compensation. The same view can be had if you will take the electric car from in front of the station in Amsterdam to the St. Anthonis Dyk and walk a short distance across to the locks at the Oranjesluizen near the north end of the embankment. The five openings at this point of the great breakwater permit the entrance and exit of vessels and regulate the depth of water in the canals. Out [128] of a total of fifty-six lock gates twenty-two are constructed of iron.

Then, too, there seems to be no stability about the weather in Holland, and a voyage up the Zuyder Zee in a cold, drizzling rain does not encourage a pleasant afterthought of the excursion. Upon one trip I made up the Zee in the middle of summer the climate was of about the same temperature as that of a Christmas in Spitzbergen.

A much more satisfactory route by which to tap these towns is the steam tramway line through Monnikendam and Edam, the method of procedure in this case being to take the ferry from the end of the Damrak near the station in Amsterdam to the Tolhuis, or old customhouse, across the Y.

Here near the Tolhuis is the southern entrance to the North Holland Canal, with its great lock gates—a channel which simplifies the boat voyage between Amsterdam and The Helder, penetrating almost the entire length of the province of North Holland, a distance of forty-five miles or more, and dividing into two the island already made by the North Sea Canal. A hundred and thirty feet in width and sixteen feet in depth, it was constructed a half century before its North Sea predecessor at a cost of about $4,000,000, and its water level at Buiksloot, the first little station on the tram line, about a mile from the Tolhuis, is as much as ten feet below that of the sea at half tide.

Broek, a little farther along near the tram line, is reputed to be the cleanest town in the world, and I have not the least doubt that its reputation is well deserved. But its motive is ill chosen: it is clean for a purpose. By its cleanliness it attracts visitors, and so it can scarcely be reckoned as a criterion by which to judge the other towns of Holland. No doubt it was clean long before it ever had any visitors, but since the tourists commenced to hear about its hypertrophied spotlessness, they began to visit it; now the more visitors it has the cleaner it becomes. Like a duck, it is preening itself continuously from dawn till dark.

From Monnikendam you may take steamer direct for the Island of Marken, but it will be more to your comfort to join the steamer in Marken and return through the canals to Amsterdam by way of Monnikendam. Such a procedure, however, is dependent upon the steamer captain’s consent to the proposition; for the boats that ply this route carry excursionists exclusively, so that even if the captain can be induced to accept you as a passenger you may have to pay the full fare for the trip from Amsterdam to Marken and return.

Once—about three and a half centuries ago—Monnikendam was included in the list of the most important towns in Holland. In its halcyon days its money chests contained enough bullion to provide for the outfitting of a fleet which it sent [130] under spreading canvas up the coast to Hoorn, to demonstrate to the skeptics that a Spanish admiral could be captured in battle, if only the scheme were handled in the proper manner. Long since has Monnikendam been relegated to the so-called “dead city” class. It is almost too sleepy to keep awake in the daytime, arousing but once a year from its perennial slumber: when Amsterdam comes on skates to hold an ice carnival.

Back somewhere in the fourteenth century, when the only maritime means of access to Amsterdam was down the Zuyder Zee, Edam held the strategical position of being its picket port. Since those good old days its 25,000 population has depreciated four-fifths in numbers. Were it not for its brand of cheese, flourishing before the gastronomic world a perpetual advertisement of the place, Edam would soon find itself mentioned in the same breath with Broek and Monnikendam. It has a fourteenth century Gothic Groote Kerk, tremendous in comparison with its population, and a Town Hall in which are preserved the portraits of four or five erstwhile citizens of Edam, the respective virtues of whom its present inhabitants still like to mention as if they bore some weight upon the town’s past prosperity.

One of these local celebrities was a man of the name of Osterlen, who, in the 1680’s, could boast about a merchant fleet of his own numbering ninety-two sail. Three of the others were Trijntje, Peter, [131] and Jan. Trijntje (the diminutive in this case must have been merely a matter of irony) was said to have been nine feet in height and of proportionate width; Peter grew an ambiguous beard the dimensions of which required it to be tied into a knot in order to save it from being stepped on by its master; and Jan, an immigrant from Friesland who later procured papers of naturalization in Edam—a “ringer” we should have called him in small town baseball parlance—Jan’s net tonnage was four hundred and fifty-four pounds on the date when he launched himself into the forty-second year of his life.

At Edam you will scramble into a little sailboat to be propelled by the breeze down the canal for a mile or more to Volendam. Each side of the ditch—it isn’t much more, if judged by its width; neither is its odor any sweeter—is bordered by low-lying fields populated with the black and white bovines directly responsible for the principal industry of that section. They look docile enough at a distance, these cows of North Holland, and they probably are at close range, when it comes to showing the proper deference due an unmolesting human being, but they are notorious for their biased aversion to dogs. The dog seems to be their time-honored and ancient enemy, and the mere presence of one in the field can cause a deal of agitation. If its owner accompanies the dog he may be expected to commence a Dutch Marathon almost any minute, because, at sight of him, the cow [132] will foreclose with the canine and open speedy negotiations with the owner. I have been told that it is unsafe even to walk along the canal bank with a dog, for only during last summer one staid old burgher of Volendam, in so doing, was hooked to death, and two ladies of Edam, while taking an evening walk, had to be hustled into a passing sailboat and pushed out from shore to escape a similar fate.

Every ten feet or so, it seems, someone will be fishing, for fishing, more than any other, appears to be the national sport of Holland. No self-respecting fish would live in some of the canals they fish in, but certain species must be able to survive their density else the proverbial Dutch patience would be soon exhausted.

The most odoriferous point along the canal from Edam to Volendam is in the immediate vicinity of a duck farm just near the journey’s end. These ducks are the amphibious flies in the amber of what is otherwise transparently picturesque. They are farmed throughout Holland, but only for their eggs, which, being too strong even for the Dutchman to relish, are sent to the more cosmopolitan cities or exported into the foreign pastry kitchens.

Volendam, by reason of the curious costuming of its inhabitants, its quaint, narrow main street, high above the doorsteps of the bordering brick houses, and its picturesque fishing fleet, is the haven of [133] artists of all nationalities. One of the most interesting picture galleries in the Netherlands comprises the public rooms of the Hotel Spaander, hung with sketches, more or less frivolous, and finished works, more or less serious, done spontaneously by the hands of such illustrators and painters as Phil May, Will Owen, Edward Penfield, William Chase, and Burne-Jones. The back yard of the hotel, which, without the least excuse, it advertises as an “attractive garden,” is fringed with old buildings, each roof exchanged within the comparative recent development of the town as an art center for the skylight of the unmistakable studio.

Sunday, by all odds, is the most advantageous day of the week to visit Volendam. Then are the dresses of its women folk and the breeches of its men, copious as meal sacks, garnished with the jewelry and the silver buckles respectively which have been handed down as heirlooms from mother to daughter, from father to son, even unto the third and fourth generations. Then is the fishing fleet jammed together in the little harbor to spend its accustomed week end of lethargy, each masthead flying its long, narrow pennant—a sight which from a distance might be mistaken for a hibernating flock of wild fowl. You would have to use a rifle with an elbow in its barrel to be able to shoot through this patch of pine forest with its top cut off without puncturing one mast at least. On other days of the week Volendam’s [134] citizens are preoccupied with whatever they have to attend to, but on Sunday they stand around and pose gracefully and easily for the commendation of the visiting public.

The garb of the male Volendamer is about as characteristic as any regalia in Holland. His round, flat-crowned cap permits the exposure of its owner’s bronzed and finely cut features. He wears a loosely tied scarf about his neck, and his shirt or jersey usually displays a large patch cut from another shirt or jersey regardless of any probable ambition to match the patterns. Whenever and wherever the garment wears out, then and there it is patched, and by their patches ye shall know them; that is, you can come within measurable proximity of telling the daily duties of every man by the position of his patches. One will have a livid green patch down the collar bone of a dark maroon jersey; another will display a different colored sleeve from the elbow down. The Volendamer’s trousers extend in a southerly direction to the tops of the ankles only, and are built with a voluminously exaggerated peg-top effect, so much so that each cavernous side pocket must hold at least a peck, and to be able to find with any degree of proficiency such an insignificant article as a penknife in its depths, the wearer would have to go into early training as a contortionist. Week days he wears klompen , or the ordinary poplarwood shoes, which may be used for as many different [135] and distinct purposes as the owner’s ingenuity may contrive—such as amusing the little tots by sailing a klomp across the canal as a boat, or tying one on the end of a rod and offering it to the canal boat master as a receptacle in which to drop the toll as he poles his barge through the locks. The vrouw sees that her “man” removes his klompen before he dares enter the house, and upon each doorstep you will invariably behold one or more pairs, including, perhaps, those of a visitor in the kitchen paying his respects in his stocking feet. On Sundays, however, the more fastidious Volendamer will break the monotony by changing the klompen for the more genteel-looking low, leather, pump-like slippers.

The most distinguishable feature of the Volendam feminine attire from that found on the Island of Walcheren or at Scheveningen, for example, is the immaculate white cap, somewhat of the shape of a miniature miter, terminating at the sides in two stiffly starched points that curl out from the ears like the horns of a water buffalo. The hair is cropped close and, according to the prevailing rules of decorum, only a fringe of it is allowed to be visible. Never under any conditions should a man see an unmarried member of Volendam’s gentler sex with her head uncovered.

Over in Marken the proper thing to do to complete the delusion is to allow one of the many children [136] who pester the passengers upon landing from the boat to lead you to his home, reimbursing him financially to the extent demanded—not a very vast sum, in any event. It will be a scrupulously clean little place of one, and not often more than two rooms. It will contain the usual amount of brass-work and a nondescript collection of Delft ware. The floor will be brick, the fireplace will have its ingle nooks, and its pot of whatever-it-is suspended over the fire from a crane, will be simmering gently. In the side walls will be built the sleeping accommodations, like bunks on a ship, draped with curtains at night and closed to view—and air—in the daytime by means of paneled wooden doors. This will be about all to see in Marken, and you will be happy enough to be led back to the boat to escape further mercenary moves on the part of the populace.

The shirt of the male Markener can show as many patches as that of the male Volendamer, but instead of the little round cap he sees fit to favor a sort of derby hat having a two-inch crown. His breeches are of the knickerbocker type, but still very much peg-topped, and his klompen are sometimes varnished yellow and carved in more or less delicate tracery. Unlike those of Volendam, the women of Marken let the hair grow, plaiting it into two braids which hang down, one from each ear, in defiance to any custom that may obtain across on the mainland.

X
Alkmaar and The Helder

It is as imperative that the traveler through Holland should journey from Amsterdam to Alkmaar by canal as it is that he should not overlook the steam tram trip between The Hague and Leyden.

The twenty-four and a half miles between the commercial metropolis and the cheese capital of North Holland is made in a little less than three hours. Taking all things into consideration, it is one of the most enjoyable steamboat excursions in the kingdom. Bearing up through the North Sea Canal and the River Zaan, the packet makes its first stop at Zaandam; then on up the river it winds between the bristling windmills, turns from one canal into another, crosses a small lake, and finally negotiates the waterway that leads eventually to Alkmaar. The polders on either hand are far below the level of the water you are steaming over, so that you see no more than the tops of the farmhouses. Although the wake of the passing boat rattles the reeds along the banks, the fishermen concealed here and there among them seem not the least perturbed, but continue to fish with all their might and main, allowing [138] the steamer to play what havoc it will with the movements and inclinations of their prey.

Alkmaar, and not Edam, is the geographical and industrial center of the cheese trade of North Holland, and the cheese market is the geographical and industrial center of Alkmaar. To give some idea of the length of time they have been marketing cheeses in Alkmaar you will be told upon inquiry that the town weigh-house was constructed in 1582, and for no other purpose than to weigh the cheeses bought and sold at the weekly market. To give some idea of the town’s importance as a cheese center, the astonishing number of forty-odd million pounds of round, golden cheeses are bargained for at the side of the weigh-house in every twelve months.

In addition to the weigh-house the town boasts of but few historically remunerative objects of interest. There is the old Church of St. Lawrence, built in 1470, the surrounding walls and buttresses of which protect a part of the eminent remains of Floris V , Count of Holland and builder of the Hall of the Knights at The Hague, although why they were interred at such a distance to the north of the scenes of his activity is a matter of some conjecture; there are a few relics and mediocre paintings on show in the Municipal Museum; and there is the old water gate that seems to forbid any farther penetration into the town on the part of the packet from Amsterdam. In history Alkmaar played its solemn [139] rôle by making a stubborn and ultimately successful resistance against the besieging Spaniards in 1573. Five to one were the odds against which the burghers fought and, as at Leyden, the water of the ocean was the all-powerful lever that rewarded the besieged and routed the besiegers.

As early as daybreak the Friday visitor—for Friday is cheese day in Alkmaar—will find plenty of activity in the vicinity of the town weigh-house. It is therefore advisable to reach the place the previous Thursday evening, because the unloading of the cheeses and the stacking of them upon the stone pavement of the market square during the early hours of the following morning are among the most interesting phases of the whole proceeding. And so, by daylight on Friday, gayly painted farm wagons from the surrounding country already fringe three sides of the market, and every one of them is disgorging, two at a time, its load of golden cheeses. On the canal that bounds the fourth side of the square lie berthed a double row of long, narrow boats, also loaded from keel plate to hatch cover with the product of the district. From every point of the compass cheeses are being tossed through the air from the wagons and boats, only to have their flight checked with a smack by the men who catch them and pile them upon the pavement in long, double-decked rows, ten cheeses in width. Later, canvas is thrown over the piles to protect the cheeses from

the rays of the sun until it is time for the cheese makers and the wholesale commission merchants from the cities, soon to descend upon the scene, to commence their dickerings. All through the early morning this unloading continues, its accompanying smacks to be heard half a block away, until perhaps 250,000 cheeses have been piled up in neat rows with alleyways between them, across the market square from one edge to the other.

At half-past nine, half an hour before the market opens, the weighmen, all garbed in immaculate white, meet in executive session in the weigh-house and absorb a ceremonious talking-to by the superintendent of the market—probably upon the subject of honest weights and the penalties to be imposed upon the unfortunate man caught trifling with the rules and regulations of the game.

These weighmen constitute a distinct feature of every cheese market in Holland. Their dress may seem ludicrous and their duties a bit undignified, but they go about their calling with all the seriousness of statesmen. Until recently they were divided, one might say, into four colors: red, blue, green, and yellow, as distinguished by their hat bands. Latterly, a fifth color, orange, has been added. In the weigh-house there are five pairs of scales, each pair painted a different color corresponding to the colors of the weighmen. The “red” weighmen must weigh their barrowfuls of cheeses upon the “red” scales; the [141] “blue” weighmen, upon the “blue” scales, and so on. An Alkmaar cheese weighman holds a life position, is elected by the community, and receives in commissions a certain percentage, determined by the value of the cheeses, of each hundred kilos weighed, or fraction thereof.

At ten o’clock promptly the heavy sheets of canvas are dragged from the piles. The market is thus officially opened, and for the ensuing two hours the visitor will be treated to some of the shrewdest of shrewd Dutch bargaining. The stolid, unemotional makers of cheeses stand doggedly by their respective piles, while the crafty wholesale merchants flit hither and yon testing. Not a word passes between them other than a surly “how d’ y’ do” in Dutch. The merchant selects a cheese at random, jams into it an instrument that any competent housewife might mistake for an apple corer, gives it a twist, pulls it out slowly, and tastes the end of the sample thus taken. What remains of the sample is drawn from the instrument, slipped back into the parent cheese, and the tester moves along to attack another pile.

At the end of an hour every merchant on the ground will have tested and tasted every pile of cheeses—in itself no small saporific achievement. Not only will he have used the taste test on the different piles, but he will have called upon his other four senses to confirm or countervail its decision. He will have examined cheeses by sight; he will have [142] held them to his ear and shaken them, as we might an egg; he will have felt of the weight and solidity of them; and he will have taken long, knowing whiffs of their fragrance. At the end of an hour, then, he is qualified to approach this or that particular dealer and offer him so much per hundred kilos for his cheeses. Then it is that Greek meets Greek. In a moment’s time the dull-looking, uncommunicative, apparently unconcerned provincial maker of cheese seems to be transformed into a cunning, canny, clear-headed man of business. The two of them, merchant and maker, stand for a full minute with their right hands outstretched, like a picture of Captain John Smith sealing a treaty with the Indians. Suppose the maker finally agrees to the price offered: without uttering a syllable he grips the hand of the merchant, and the bargain is closed. If he does not agree, he slaps the merchant’s hand a whack that resounds across the square. By eleven-fifteen the walls of the surrounding houses reverberate with what a stranger around the corner might easily suppose to be the premature explosion of a number of toy balloons—for cheese makers are but human and would rather wait in the hope of being offered more for their stock. Competition is the essence of trade, even in Holland.

When a bargain is negotiated, they call a pair of weighmen who load the cheeses upon a barrow—a queer kind of barrow that resembles more a stretcher [143] on sled runners—and carry them to the scales to be weighed. After being weighed and their sale recorded upon the books of the superintendent, the cheeses are loaded back into the wagons and boats to be transferred to the warehouse for shipment.

The cheese goes through no further preliminaries if intended for native consumption. If destined for export, however, it must needs undergo a peculiar, yet withal a simple process: it must be well scraped and painted over with a thin aniline dye which rapidly turns as it dries to a glorious vermilion. The scraping is done by machinery, but the dyeing is done by hand and with almost incredible swiftness by the men employed in some of the establishments in Alkmaar.

The question was asked if the dyeing assisted in the preservation of the cheese or helped to keep it immune from mould or corrodings. Not at all. The ultimate consumer across the seas would turn up his nose at an un-dyed cheese and snub it as a cheap imitation. The foreign public demands that the genuine North Holland cheese bear a distinctive hall-mark. That hall-mark is its coat of red dye. Since this province probably supplies a good three-fifths of the 55,000 tons of cheese exported in a single year the reader can imagine what a deal of red dye it takes to satisfy a foreign fancy.

A distance of thirty miles or more north of Alkmaar lies The Helder, figuratively the top of the [144] kingdom. Geographically, it is only in the same latitude as the most northerly point of Newfoundland at the Straits of Belle Isle, and so there are plenty of towns over in Friesland and Groningen that lie still farther to the north, but these do not have the conditions to contend with that does The Helder. Surrounded on three sides by the waters of the Zuyder Zee and the North Sea, The Helder assumes much of the responsibility of protecting the whole province of North Holland from a general and disastrous inundation. More than any other part of the province, indeed of all Holland, it is exposed to the ravages of the most violent winds, which kick the sea into a maelstrom and pound it with relentless fury upon the coast line.

Here at The Helder may be found the finest fruits of that “big story” of Holland: the constant battle of mere man against an all but omnipotent element—water; the romantic, persistent, patient strife of the Hollander to insure as much as possible his own safety and that of the land which he has weaned from the sea from utter and inexorable annihilation. If for nothing else, it is for this “big story” that one should go to The Helder. If the traveler through Holland has not been already duly impressed with the silent, continuous fight of the Dutch for mere existence, he will return from this northernmost promontory of North Holland with augmented faith in the ingenuity and dogged perseverance of the men [145] who have made a country out of what once was sea bottom.

The foregoing preamble is meant to prepare the traveler to appreciate The Helder. If it fails in its mission, it may be all for the best, because the unanticipated often strikes with the greatest degree of accuracy and forcefulness and brands the experience upon the mind, never to be obliterated.

Disembarking from the train, you will turn instinctively to the north through a wide avenue—a veritable tunnel through the trees. After crossing the drawbridge that spans the canal at the end of the avenue, you must turn abruptly to the left. The first cross street—little more than an alleyway between the houses—is barricaded at its farther extremity by a steep, grass-grown embankment that towers almost to the same altitude as the chimney pots of the house tops below. A flight of thirty-one steps ascends to the top of this peculiar embankment and you scramble up, expecting to behold on the other side a view of—you scarcely know what. You are surprised to discover that the view is a sea-scape, for, if you have failed to observe The Helder’s lofty lighthouse, it has not been suggested to you that the sea is anywhere in the neighborhood.

You will be standing on the top of one of the greatest and strongest dikes in Holland, its business side stretching away before you at an angle of forty degrees for two hundred feet into the Strait of [146] Marsdiep. Extending a total distance of five miles in the arc of a circle, this, then, is the sloping buttress that North Holland relies upon for its very life. A severe storm will lash the water of the strait into spray, and fling it across into the windows of the bordering houses, but the highest of tides cannot come over the backbone of the dike, while at all times the water laps restlessly at its foundations. The top of the dike is mounted with a roadway twelve feet in width. Some feet above the water line at low tide the tops of great stone breakwaters, like the ribs of a dinosaur, stretch seaward at regular intervals. The whole of this remarkable artificial coast is constructed of Norwegian granite.

Upon the summits of a few sand dunes that raise themselves here and there behind the dike the Dutch have completed the construction of some rather crude military fortifications which Napoleon commenced in 1811. But improvements upon them are going on apace, for Holland is not exactly anxious to suffer an experience with regard to her string of islands in the north, in furthering German aggrandizement as did the Danes of Helgoland before the gun muzzles of the British in 1807.

The single point of North Holland, however, most exposed to sea encroachments is a few miles south of The Helder on the North Sea. Here there is a chain of three great dikes, one beyond the other, named significantly, beginning with the one farthest [147] from the shore, “The Waker,” “The Dreamer,” and “The Sleeper.” Still farther to the south, on the same side of the province, are the great sand dunes, three miles in width in some places, under the protection of which the freight boats from Amsterdam creep to their destinations along the North Sea Canal.

Off the northern dunes the combined English and French fleets of war suffered defeat at the hands of the Dutch admirals, de Ruyter and Tromp, two hundred thirty-eight years ago to the day, as I write (the 21st of August), and in September, 1799, two armies of 10,000 and 13,000, English and Russian troops respectively, commanded by the Duke of York, landed here to try their luck at tempting the Dutch to revolt against the French. The Russian forces lost their way and were defeated by the French before they had advanced as far as Alkmaar, and the British, bearing in mind the comforting old adage about discretion being the best part of valor, retreated after having penetrated as far south as Castricum, near Zaandam.

In the town of The Helder itself—why they refer to it as “The” Helder I do not know, unless it be for the reason that the article makes of it a pseudonym for a Dutch John o’ Groats—in the town itself there is little of interest. One street I have in mind, however, which is of rather peculiar construction. The north side of it, from the middle of what ought [148] to be the common roadway, is possibly three and a half feet higher than its south side, the upper part built upon an embankment faced with a brick wall.

The place is full of Dutch sailors and navy people, for about three quarters of a mile down the dike lies Nieuwediep, the Dutch combination of Hampton Roads, Annapolis, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Situated at the mouth of the North Holland Canal, Nieuwediep is the most important naval station in Holland, maintaining large wharves, docks, machine shops, and a naval academy, the students of which, two, four, and six abreast—Holland’s future Tromps and de Ruyters—can be seen strolling up and down the great dike. A fraction of the country’s one hundred vessels of war and of her 8,000 men that man them receive their orders at the station at Nieuwediep.

Across the Strait of Marsdiep is the Island of Texel, the most southerly unit of the long series of vertebræ that curve far to the northeast, as if made to fit exactly the coast lines of the provinces of Friesland and Groningen. A steamer plies to Texel from Nieuwediep and returns four times daily; but you may profitably omit the island from your itinerary unless you are particularly interested in natural history and you happen to come upon Texel during the bird nesting season. The northern extremity of the island, called Eyerland, or “The Land of Eggs,” is infested with sea fowl, the eggs of [149] which are collected by the myriads and shipped to the large cities. Texel is seventy-three square miles in area and supports one or two very plain bathing places, but most of its six thousand inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the business of sheep raising on the long, crater-like pasture land hemmed in by the sand dunes.

XI
From Hoorn to Stavoren

In the matter of ancient buildings, Hoorn is one of the gems of all the towns of Holland. Its fine old harbor tower, its Town Hall, its weigh-house, its Oosterpoort—the most prominent remaining factor of the walls that once surrounded the town—its assortment of quaint old gateways and entrances, its steep-roofed dwellings and warehouses that lean forward or backward at more acute angles than even the oldest buildings in Amsterdam—all combine in contributing to Hoorn a medieval charm that is puissant and irresistible.

But whatever Hoorn may be noted for as she stands to-day, her name has gone down in history as that of the mother of Dutch navigators. Three of them were famous in their day: Schouten, Tasman, and Coen; and, in the eye of the Dutch nation, the greatest of these was Coen—Jan Pieters Coen, the founder of the Dutch dominions in the East Indies and the creator of Batavia as their capital. A statue of him in bronze stands in the Kaasmarkt of the town of his birth.

Tasman was numbered among the foremost discoverers [151] of the seventeenth century. In the year 1639 he was assigned to a voyage of exploration by Van Dieman, the governor general of the Dutch East Indies at the time, his cruise leading him to the Western Pacific. After exploring part of the coast of Luzon in the Philippine Islands, he sailed farther to the northward and around Japan, but, discovering no land not already nailed to the flag of some nation, he set sail again for home on October 15th of the same year.

The Hollanders having already discovered and explored a part of the west coast of Australia, the Dutch East India Company was desirous of obtaining fuller and more accurate information about the territory with a view of exploiting its natural resources and whatever others the company itself might develop. Accordingly, on August 14, 1642, Tasman was dispatched from Batavia in command of two ships and intrusted with the task of bringing back a full and authentic account of whatever he saw and conquered. Owing to the inaccuracy of his sailing charts, head winds that blew him from his prescribed course, and what not, he went south of his mark, and came upon a hitherto undiscovered country which he promptly named Van Dieman’s Land, in honor of his sponsor. But being unaware that what is now known as Tasmania was an island by its own right, he hoisted his flag and set to work exploring what he thought at the time to be the most [152] of Australia. He set sail again from the newly discovered territory, bearing to the eastward with a vague idea of reaching the Solomon Islands. On the 13th of December he discovered a “high, mountainous country,” which he noted in his log book as “Staatenland.” For some unaccountable reason the English have allowed its name to remain as New Zealand, neglecting to change it when they took it over, as they did that of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.

William Schouten, having had an earlier relapse under the spell of the spray, was the first to sail round the southern extremity of South America, his goal being one and the same with that of Henry Hudson, who attempted a supposed route to China from Amsterdam, first by way of the Chesapeake Bay, and later, the Hudson River. Schouten, in passing, christened the point “Cape Hoorn,” latterly contracted to “Horn,” in honor of his birthplace.

In addition to these, Hoorn refers proudly to the exploits of another of her sons, John Haring by name, a Dutch Horatius whose signal courageous achievement consisted in holding in check, single-handed, a round thousand of Spaniards, while his compatriots gathered themselves together in order to retreat in a systematic manner at least.

It took place before Amsterdam in 1573, when the city was held in the grip of the Dons. The Prince of Orange had taken up a position to the [153] south of the city, and Sonoy, his general, was encamped to the north. The operations of both were hampered by the lack of sufficient forces. Sonoy having gone to Edam for the purpose of gathering reinforcements, the Spaniards in his absence made a concentrated attack upon his division entrenched behind the Diemer Dike. Seeing the fight was going against his fellows, Haring of Hoorn, as Motley relates, “planted himself entirely alone upon the dike, where it was so narrow between the Y on the one side and the Diemer Lake on the other that two men could hardly stand abreast. Here, armed with a sword and a shield, he had actually opposed and held in check one thousand of the enemy, during a period long enough to enable his own men, if they had been willing, to rally and effectually to repel the attack. It was too late—the battle was too far lost to be restored; but still the brave soldier held his post, till, by his devotion, he enabled all those of his compatriots who still remained in the entrenchments to make good their retreat. He then plunged into the sea, and, untouched by spear or bullet, effected his escape.”

But John Haring survived only to suffer death in the attempt of an equally valiant feat a few months later before the sea-gates of his own native town.

The siege of Alkmaar having terminated unhappily for the Spaniards, they dispatched a fleet from Amsterdam under Count Bossu, to effect the surrender [154] of Hoorn and Enkhuizen. No sooner had the project been contemplated than the Dutch got wind of it; Admiral Dirkzoon sailed in command of a fleet of twenty-five vessels, and, having had favorable winds and weather, bore down upon the Spanish armada near Hoorn.

“After a short and general engagement,” according to Motley, “nearly all the Spanish fleet retired with precipitation, closely pursued by most of the patriot Dutch vessels. Five of the King’s ships were eventually taken—the rest effected their escape. Only the Admiral remained, who scorned to yield, although his forces had thus basely deserted him. His ship, the Inquisition , for such was her insolent appellation, was far the largest and best manned of both fleets. Most of the enemy had gone in pursuit of the fugitives, but four vessels of inferior size had attacked the Inquisition at the commencement of the action. Of these, one had soon been silenced, while the other three had grappled themselves inextricably to her sides and prow. The four drifted together, before wind and tide, a severe and savage action going on incessantly, during which the navigation of the ships was entirely abandoned. No scientific gunnery, no military or naval tactics, were displayed or required in such a conflict. It was a life-and-death combat, such as always occurred when Spaniard and Netherlander met, whether on land or water. Bossu and his men, armed with bullet-proof [155] coats of mail, stood with shield and sword on the deck of the Inquisition , ready to repel all attempts to board. The Hollanders, as usual, attacked with pitch hoops, boiling oil, and molten lead. Repeatedly they effected their entrance to the Admiral’s ship, and as often they were repulsed and slain in heaps, or hurled into the sea. The battle began at three in the afternoon, and continued without intermission throughout the whole night. The vessels, drifting together, struck on the shoal called the Nek, near Wydeness. In the heat of the action the occurrence was hardly heeded. In the morning twilight, John Haring of Hoorn, the hero who had kept one thousand soldiers at bay upon the Diemer dike, clambered on board the Inquisition , and hauled her colors down. The gallant but premature achievement cost him his life. He was shot through the body, and died on the deck of the ship, which was not quite ready to strike her flag.... At eleven o’clock Admiral Bossu surrendered, and with three hundred prisoners was carried into Holland. Bossu was himself imprisoned at Hoorn, in which city he was received, on his arrival, with great demonstrations of popular hatred.”

It was on a feast-day that I came upon Hoorn, and the place was garbed in gala attire. Throughout the morning the hotel stableboys were kept busy tending the horses of rural arrivals, and every stable-yard was congested with wagonettes and carts. [156] Never have I seen such a variety of vehicles. There was the painted produce wagon with its white canvas cover; there was the gayly decorated antique “two-wheeler,” its body swung upon heavy straps held fore and aft at the ends of great protruding springs; there was the commodious, shapely cart of plum-colored upholstery, belonging to the “gentleman farmer”; and there was a host of others too numerous to describe in detail.

Hoorn’s main street had been roped off, and the bricks covered with a thick layer of sand, in preparation for the series of horse races that was soon to take place up and down its length. Along about noon the Dutch David Harums led their horses down to the improvised race track behind the village band in all its glory, and the festivities were on.

Running races were of necessity tabooed on account of the danger to life and property—the actions of the horse being restricted to such an extent by the limited fairway of the course that, in event of the horse’s losing its head, even the side ropes along the street could not restrain it from dashing through the crowd and into the window of the nearest cheese shop. But there were sulky races between the Hal Pointers and the Palo Altos of the district, driven with rope reins by erstwhile jockeys, some of the costumes of whom were no less curious than the harness of the horses. Breeches, in some cases, and blouses, in others, looked as if they might have been [157] recently redeemed from many years of confinement in Amsterdam’s municipal pawnshop, their public sale having been repeatedly overlooked.

Riding, instead of driving, would seem with us a less effective method of developing the speed of a trotting horse, and it certainly appears to be a less comfortable one, but ride them they do in many parts of Holland. I can imagine only one reason for the prevalence of the custom, and that is that the trotting horses are so rotund and ponderous that the shafts of no sulky would fit them, and if it did, no driver could spread his lower limbs so far apart as to drive the horse from the sulky’s seat. Large and ample as Percherons are some of these North Holland and Friesland horses, with long, well-groomed tails and manes; but they have a faster gait than they might be given credit for when seen hitched to a cart or a farm wagon. Pads with knee braces, which serve the riders in place of saddles, are strapped to the horses’ backs, and they trot the course with but little less action than blue grass Kentuckians. A singular thing is that they seldom “break,” their weight apparently holding them to the trot.

The express trains from Amsterdam to Leeuwarden make the run in just over three hours and a half, including the ferry passage of an hour and ten minutes across the neck of the Zuyder Zee from Enkhuizen to Stavoren. The line runs through Zaandam to Hoorn and thence to Enkhuizen through [158] the richest farming district in North Holland. The farmhouses, somewhat more substantially built than those in the south, resemble what we rather ambiguously call “country residences.” They have their lawns and their gardens full of flowers, and each is surrounded with its little moat, bridged by a tiny archway which connects the house with the road at but a single point.

Enkhuizen is the unfortunate victim of what its inhabitants must consider to be a depraved taste for salmon rather than herring. The Rhine salmon has taken the place of the humble herring on the Dutch menu cards, and the town of Enkhuizen has dwindled accordingly. Of its fleet of four hundred herring vessels and its population of 40,000 souls in the seventeenth century, not a single fishing smack and only 6,300 descendants of its earlier inhabitants remain.

Aside from the magnitude of its one-time fishing industry, Enkhuizen courts the fickleness of fame by being the birthplace of Paul Potter. Born in 1625, he painted his most renowned canvas, “The Bull”—now in the Mauritshuis at The Hague—at the age of two-and-twenty, and died but seven years later—only another of the many instances where Death has chosen to lay his hand upon the shoulder of one so young and signally gifted in preference to an octogenarian dullard.

Waiting alongside the dock station at Enkhuizen [159] will be the side-wheel steamer that ferries the passengers the fourteen miles across the Zuyder Zee to Stavoren in Friesland. The old Dromedary Tower, as they call it, at the harbor, diminishes rapidly into the general skyline of Enkhuizen, and you will be sailing out over what was once a broad isthmus of dry land—for the Zuyder Zee was not always the Zuyder Zee. Until the thirteenth century it consisted of but a comparatively small inland lake called Flevo. Near the close of that cycle—in 1282, to give the exact year—the German ocean burst over the land from the north, wiping the lives of 80,000 people out of existence and combining itself and Lake Flevo into one, which was henceforth called the Zuyder Zee. Above the ferry crossing, beginning at the eastern end of the little island of Wieringen, they will build the contemplated dam across it, the first process in the reclamation of more than a million acres of what was once a fertile, productive district.

In pleasant weather it is a beautiful trip across the neck of the Zee, but if the breeze blows from the north, bringing with it the customary cold drizzle of rain, the best method of putting in the time is to go below to the cabin and follow the invariable custom of the country of eating bread and great, thin slices of Dutch cheese.

Stavoren is the deadest of all the “dead cities of the Zuyder Zee.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century the merchants of Stavoren were prepotent [160] among the rulers of the world of trade and commerce. Treasures from all the then known corners of the earth lay in their storehouses. The homes of these merchant princes were palaces comparable only with those of kings and furnished with the sumptuousness and incomputable grandeur of the famous abodes of the Sultan Harun-al-Rashid in the “Arabian Nights.” Previously, Stavoren had been the residence of all the Frisian princes. But riches contributed to the pride that came before its fall. To-day the census taker counts its population in three figures and its commerce is not worthy of mention in a trade report. The smoke of the lingering express train that will subsequently carry you to Friesland’s capital is the only evidence that the town may not be abandoned completely.

As you sail into the harbor, a wide, grass-grown embankment in front of the town can be seen plainly from the steamer’s deck. This is the Vrouwensand, and it recalls the legend that attributes the fall of Stavoren to the whims of a woman. The reader himself must be the judge whether or not the tale is worth the telling. One writer on Holland asserts that no author dealing previously with the country in a literary way has been gifted either with the independence or the imprudence to avoid it. His predecessors have been numerous and illustrious, and if the story be so important that each of them has seen fit to relate it, I can do naught but imitate.

Of all the inhabitants of the old city of Stavoren, none was so blessed with riches as the wife of a certain wealthy merchant. Continually bathed in the high lights of smiling fortune, she plucked one by one the treasures that were thrown daily at her feet. She owned everything of intrinsic value that the fabulous wealth of her husband could bestow upon her. But one thing she did not possess, and that was love. Her character was devoid of a woman’s tenderness. She was cold, indifferent, supercilious, insouciant. Exaggerated pride in her own wealth and an undying envy of those whose fortunes dared to compete with hers—these were the only passions of her life.

One day, while acting as hostess at a great banquet, a stranger from the Far East was ushered into the room. He had come, he said, to behold the marvelous wealth of Stavoren with his own eyes, and now that he had penetrated into this merchant’s house, he felt he had been amply rewarded.

The merchant’s wife, not impervious to flattery, requested the traveler to be seated and to partake of the banquet as her unbidden but welcome guest. He accepted the invitation in part, but asked, according to the custom of the Orient whence he came, for nothing but some bread and salt. Servants were dispatched to bring both, but returned, saying that no such simple articles of food could be found in the house. Thereupon the stranger, [162] without further word, ate of the costly and unfamiliar dishes prepared for the banquet.

After the feast he told of his travels, he expatiated upon the successes and the failures of his life, he discoursed with much eloquent verbiage upon the instability of earthly fortunes, and he prognosticated the ultimate fall of wealth and splendor. His hostess became offended, not only because of his contumelious belittling the value of riches in her presence and before her guests, but because he had failed thus far to compliment her upon her personal beauty and the luxuries to be found in her home. Before he took his leave he mollified his views to this extent: “O gracious lady,” he said, “marvelous indeed is your home and fit for a queen; if you traveled far and near you could not find its equal. But, my lady, among your treasures I miss one thing, and that is the noblest that all the earth produces.” He departed forthwith, leaving the gathering in a state of perplexity.

To please the whim of his wife, the merchant dispatched a fleet of ships to cruise the world until it should find “The noblest thing that all the earth produces,” whereupon the fleet’s commander should fill the hulls and cover the decks with it and bring it to Stavoren. For months the ships sailed about, touching at one port and then at another, blindly searching for this most costly of all treasures.

One day a heavy sea came over one of the ships, [163] flooding the ’tween decks and spoiling the provisions. The crew became in need of bread, but there was no flour with which to bake it. The men grew mutinous. The captain saw that neither gold nor silks nor precious jewels could outweigh the value of bread, and the occurrence led him to believe that bread was the most expensive thing in the world. He reported the matter to the commander, who agreed with his specious argument, and the whole fleet hurried to the nearest port, which happened to be Danzig. They loaded the vessels with the finest wheat, and set sail direct for Stavoren.

When the merchant’s wife heard of the nature of the cargo the fleet had brought home, she ordered the wheat thrown into the sea. The poor of the town begged and implored, stormed and reproached, but of no avail; the order of the woman was executed to the letter.

By and by myriads of blades of grainless wheat commenced to appear above the surface of the water. Their stocks and roots collected the sand as it was washed up by the tides of the German ocean, forming a great sand dune that blocked the port so that vessels could neither enter nor leave. The inhabitants of the place were suddenly brought face to face with the fact that commerce, the source of their wealth, had to be abandoned. Poverty and want reigned where riches ruled before. The wife of the once wealthy merchant wandered about from village [164] to village, begging the bread which no one who had heard of her improvidence would give her. She suffered death from utter starvation. Then one night the sea began to boom and, bursting over the dunes, buried the town forever.

To this day the more superstitious of the fisher-folk who ply their vocation along that coast of the Zuyder Zee talk of the wonderful sunken city of Stavoren and how its pinnacles and palaces at the bottom glitter up through the pellucid waters under the rays of a summer’s sun.

XII
Friesland and Its Capital

Leeuwarden is the most important town in Friesland; therefore its capital. Also it is the only place in the province that is really worth a protracted visit. On the way from Stavoren you may wander up the coast a short distance to Hindeloopen, once famed for its highly decorated furniture and the many-colored costumes of its natives; you may stop off at Sneek and see its stadthuis and its waterpoort , better examples of which you will have already seen in North Holland; you may journey over to the coast town of Harlingen—a much less interesting fishing port than Volendam—breaking the trip at Franeker to see the wonderfully ingenious astronomical model of the workings of the solar system which took one of the more inventive citizens of the place, Eise Eisenga by name, seven years to construct; but all of these especial features, and more, can be seen and studied in Leeuwarden.

When you enter the interior of Friesland you will be penetrating one of the three or four provinces of Holland that are not overrun with tourists. Even in its capital an American is more or less of [166] a curiosity and he may expect to be stared at until the people stumble over each other, almost, in their well-meaning efforts to divine his nationality; but he may console himself in the thought that they will be just as curious, if not as humorous, to him as he is to them.

Before the time of the terrific geographical convulsion responsible for the formation of the Zuyder Zee, there had been but one Friesland, stretching over much of the entire territory later known as that of the Dutch Republic, including Holland. Its inhabitants, the Frisians, were renowned throughout Europe for their physical prowess. Imbued with an unquenchable love for political independence, they had shaken off the yokes of the imperial counts and had formed the league of the seven “Sea Lands” in the eleventh century. After being subjugated for a time by Charlemagne, they suddenly rebelled, and in 1256 defeated and put to death the German king, William II of Holland. When the German ocean rolled in over the land, engulfing considerably more than a thousand Frisian villages, it separated kindred peoples, creating not only a geographical but a political chasm between them. West Friesland became absorbed in Holland, but East Friesland continued its career as a confederation of independently governed maritime provinces, until Saxony, hard pressed for funds, sold its sovereignty to the house of Austria for a paltry 350,000 crowns.

Then Charles V , Count of Holland, Emperor of Germany, King of Jerusalem, Sicily, and Spain, Duke of Milan, dominator of much in Asia and Africa and “autocrat of half the world,” established his predatorial authority, and “this little country, whose statutes proclaimed her to be ‘free as the wind as long as it blew,’ whose institutions Charlemagne had honored and left unmolested, who had freed herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny, who had never bowed her neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke,” finally forfeited her independent existence. Her peoples are the only Germanic tribe that have preserved an unaltered nomenclature since the time of the Romans; they will be Frisians to-morrow, as they were the day before yesterday.

The most prominent and characteristic feature of the Frisian costume is the headdress of its women—in fact, it is the only one extant worthy of any notice whatever, for the remainder of the make-up, not only of the men but of the women also, is commonplace and unattractive. This headdress consists of a kind of metal skullcap, as often made of gold as of silver, fitting closely at the temples and embellished at these points with a pair of spiral ornaments. Over this is worn a cap of white or light blue lace, having a so-called “tail piece” dangling down the back of the neck like the scoop of a fireman’s helmet. On top of all this, many of the women—as [168] if their violent efforts to adapt the modern were wrestling with a series of sturdy determinations to retain the antique—will crown the sublime with the ridiculous by wearing an old-fashioned black “poke bonnet,” with the strings tied in a bow under the chin. These gold and silver head-pieces are handed down from one generation to another, and the gold ones, especially, are expensive; but that item does not curb the desire and ambition of every mother’s daughter in Friesland to own one, where the usual heirloom has not been forthcoming.

An admirable collection showing the evolution of the Frisian metal skull plate is on view in the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden. Adapted first as a kind of hair ornament of two coin-sized flat pieces connected simply by a thin wire, its size developed gradually until the two small termini became consolidated into a single large one that covered the entire head of the wearer. The latest specimen in the Museum is decorated in front with a diamond-studded brooch, the whole costing in the neighborhood of $1,200.

The Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden contains also about the most valuable and comprehensive collection of old Delft, Chinese, and Japanese ware in Holland, tastefully cabineted in one of the large rooms on the ground floor. To the connoisseur in such matters this room is a treat that cannot be overlooked with impunity, for the character of its contents is unparalleled and its value indeterminable. Shelf after [169] shelf there are of the most delicately tinted tea sets and table services, vases and urns of every description, and the wooden columns that support the floor above are hung with graduated festoons of plates and saucers, so that it would take the greater part of a week to inspect them all.

On the second floor are a number of tiled rooms furnished in authentic sixteenth and seventeenth century style, even to the sleeping bunks in the walls and the miniature ladders that once assisted in climbing into them. The models of these and most of their furnishings were found in Hindeloopen. To increase the realistic effect of these apartments the authorities have introduced groups of three or four stuffed figures attired in the costumes of the period, posed in front of the fireplace or about a center table, but they are so stiff and ludicrous-looking that they might well be dispensed with, and their costumes shown to better effect behind the glass of a cabinet. In the basement can be seen a few rooms finished and outfitted with the domestic and culinary implements of the same centuries.

In addition to all these there are two adjoining rooms on the second floor of the Museum containing old furniture and decorations bequeathed to the State by the artist Bisschop. The most conspicuous object in one of these rooms is an immense cabinet of beautifully carved oak, black and glossy with age, that would excite the envy of any lover of the antique. [170] Built in 1610, it was purchased thirty-five years ago by Bisschop for something like twelve or fifteen dollars; to-day it has a valuation of $2,000. On its top stand two pieces of old Delft for which the artist originally gave as little as ten gulden.

The remaining rooms of the Museum contain collections of Roman and Frisian coins and medals, Roman curiosities found in the neighborhood, fine old silver plate and flagons, remarkably carved ivory hunting horns, and, since the early Frisians were alleged by some to be the first pipe smokers in Europe, an instructive conglomeration of pipes and tobacco pouches and all the accessory appurtenances necessary to the full enjoyment of the weed.

The Chancellerie, a large building just around the corner from the Museum, erected in the reign of Philip II and used originally as a law court, still serves the government by housing the national archives and the provincial library. With its handsome Gothic façade, this building is Friesland’s architectural masterpiece and one of the best preserved of ancient buildings in all Holland. In forceful contrast to it is Leeuwarden’s structural curiosity, an unfinished church tower of brick, called the Olde-Hove, one hundred and thirty feet in height and marking the western boundary of the city proper. Just when it will take it into its head to topple over is a problem of uncertain solution, but, judging from this Dutch Leaning Tower of Pisa’s utter disregard [171] for the perpendicular, it looks as though it might bury a part of Leeuwarden’s pretty park under its débris almost any minute.

The city of Leeuwarden is entirely surrounded by the cobra-like coil of a wide canal, the quays of which afford loading and unloading facilities for the many boats that ply to and from Leeuwarden from and to almost every point in Holland. Along the north and west edges of this canal on the town side they have planted lawns and flower beds on the site of the old city bastions. And, speaking about flower beds, the largest geraniums I think I ever saw were growing in a little plot near the station in Leeuwarden; each cluster of blossoms seemed as great in diameter as the head of a small cabbage. Friesland is also the land of begonias, but in Groningen the plants seem to bear a larger flower than they do in Leeuwarden.

Distant as it is from the great centers of Dutch life and activity, Leeuwarden seems of more recent vintage than any city of its size you will have seen so far in the Netherlands; its types are fewer than in almost any town on the other side of the Zuyder Zee and its old buildings and churches are less numerous. Most of the former they have adapted to modern usage, and even the old weigh-house that stands severely alone beside the canal in the Waagsplein has been turned into a fire station. The canal that sweeps through the town from west to east is lined [172] where the space permits with little colonies of shops on wheels, built of corrugated iron and capable of being closed at night against the mischievous pranks of young Holland—peripatetic shopping and marketing districts, offering anything and everything for sale that may be found in the permanent stores.

Hotel accommodations, however, are more provincial. In the dining-room everyone is seated at one long table, as in the smaller hotels in The Hague, so that an ordinary mealtime looks more like a banquet. The business and social phases of the hotel are conducted in one large room wherein the men gather after dinner to sit and smoke, read, or play chess. Here in a corner at a little desk holds forth the head waiter. Although he is the functionary who assigns you to your room and to whom you pay your bill, he is not so preëminent as the head waiters of most of the hotels in the south, for the proprietor usually shows a preference to manage the place according to his own ideas. As a general rule he will do his own marketing and, if conditions require it, he is not above helping to wait upon the table and making himself useful in many other ways.

Not far from Leeuwarden, in the village of Dronrijp, was born, in 1836, one of Holland’s most eminent modern artists, although a naturalized subject of Great Britain since 1873—Sir Laurens Alma Tadema, some noted examples of whose work are to be seen in the Mesdag Museum in The Hague.

Another town, Marssum, a few miles distant, is famous as the center of the cattle district, and dealers and breeders come to some of the large farms in the vicinity from all over the world, including America, to purchase blooded Frisian stock. Indeed, all along the thirty-three miles of railway between Leeuwarden and Groningen the pastures are dotted with fine, healthy-looking black and white cows. Each field being surrounded by a small canal eight or ten feet in width, the cattle may be segregated, one herd from another, by simply closing the gates on top of the narrow hills that lead across the intervening canal from one pasture to its neighbor; thus the labor and expense of building fences is saved. As much as North Holland is noted for its cheese, just so much is Friesland famed for its butter, and between 130,000,000 and 140,000,000 pounds of it are churned annually. The conditions of the trade are exceptionally sanitary and at all times under government inspection.

Here and there through Friesland—in fact, through almost any part of the Netherlands—you will see a high wooden tripod topped with the usual cartload of débris that constitutes a stork’s nest; for the stork, be it remembered, is the national bird of Holland, and if the farmhouse offers no suitable place, such as a chimney pot, for example, for the stork to build its summer home, the farmer is wont to court the luck that a nesting stork about the place [174] is thought to be sure to bring, and builds a nesting place for it.

They wend their migratory way northward, these storks, from the interior of Africa near the sources of the Nile, and make their appearance in Holland contemporaneous with the first signs of approaching spring. Their coming is regarded as a veritable Godsend by the Netherlander and the various Dutch journals feature the “stories” of first reported arrivals, and devote to them an amount of space commensurate with the importance of the event, while any decrease in the numbers of the birds is quickly observed and promptly linotyped.

When the storks, so high in the air that they appear as mere specks, approach the familiar scenes and nesting places of previous summers, they descend to the earth in pairs to hunt about for their old abodes. Having finally discovered these, a deal of repairing will have to be done to render them once more habitable. Both the male and the female labor with a great deal of energy and no little resourcefulness in the reconstruction of the old nest, collecting sticks and twigs, and weaving them together with much mathematical precision. Endowed with no vocal power of calling each other or criticising their work, their silence while at the task is punctuated only with a comical snapping of bill and a suggestive flapping of wings. If a certain pair has been a little premature, perhaps, and chosen, not [175] always by mistake, another pair’s nest, the ensuing imbroglio often results in such a complete destruction of the point at issue that both pairs instead of one must build anew.

The story of the “Stork’s Judgment” is one of the best known among the Dutch with regard to these birds. It is that in the fall, prior to the departure of the storks for southern climes, all the old and decrepit ones, too weakly to stand the long trip, are killed off so that the general migration may not be delayed or impeded. Another belief held by the Hollander, more or less a child of the imagination but not without at least a tinge of fact, is that among the stork communities a certain number of picked birds are detailed each season to act in the capacity of a regular police force to preserve the peace and protect the interests of the colony at large.

A stork’s nest on the roof serves, according to the superstitions of many Dutch farmers, as a prevention to the ravages of lightning and the contraction of contagious diseases by their families. Misfortune in some form or other is sure to follow if the stork does not see fit to nest somewhere near the house, and simply because of this, land holders have been known to pack up, bag, baggage, and agricultural implements, and move into another district.

XIII
The Hinterland of Holland

If Friesland be considered the frontier of Holland’s tourist territory, the provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, and Over-Yssel certainly constitute its hinterland.

With the exception of one or two towns they lack the symmetry of scenery, the quaintness of costumes, the masterpieces of art that adapt the provinces west of the Zuyder Zee to intensive sight-seeing, so to speak, while their peoples differ in manner so much from those in the west that you seem to be traveling through another country altogether. Old buildings they have in plenty, and rural and urban beauty spots may be discovered here and there, but taken by and large, they offer fewer attractions for and cater less to the invasion of the tourist than any portion of Holland.

For the above reason, in planning a trip through this land of the brave and the home of the sea, it might be well, if practicable, to tap these three provinces at the beginning, embellishing first impressions by reversing the time-honored route and returning, instead of advancing, through North and South [177] Holland, Utrecht, North Brabant, and Zeeland, and spending a profitable day at least on the Island of Walcheren as a kind of tasteful cordial after the seven course tour.

Groningen, the capital of the province of the same name, shares the distinction with Leyden and Utrecht in being one of the three university towns in Holland. Although twice as large as Leeuwarden, it is barely half as interesting. It seems, too, a vastly more modern place, with its trolley service, its large assortment of wide streets, its apparent dearth of silent canals, while its narrow, busy Heerestraat emulates the examples set by the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam and the Spuistraat in The Hague.

Its university, established in 1614, is attended by half a thousand students, and has within recent years moved into more commodious and modern quarters in the form of an appropriate and handsome building erected in 1850. Among the treasures of its library, housed in a separate building, is to be found a copy of the revised New Testament by Erasmus, bearing marginal annotations in the handwriting of Martin Luther. This much for learning. With respect to art, Groningen is the birthplace of two of Holland’s best known modern painters, H. W. Mesdag and Josef Israels, the latter being especially distinguished for his ability to record upon canvas the sadder aspects of humble life. At the advanced age of eighty-seven this master of his craft died [178] during the past summer in The Hague, where he had resided for a number of years.

At the foot of the tower of the church of St. Martin on the edge of the market square stands the old regthuis , a small brick building of early sixteenth century erection, lately restored and put into use as a guardhouse. With its green and white shutters of diamond design it looks strangely out of place as the opponent of a building of such conglomerate architecture as the columned stadthuis , on the western side of the square. Grain being one of the staple commodities of the place, one end of the visch-markt is bounded by the corn exchange. Behind this stands the Aa-Kerk, of Gothic construction and thirteenth century origin. And, as is the habit with many of the towns in this section of Holland, Groningen has made the most of the site of her old ramparts and city fortifications by transforming it into a public park.

Without the least savor of favoritism, Groningen might easily capture the palm for supporting about the most uninteresting market in Holland. Held in the great square that serves the town as a center for outdoor business transactions and trolley service, it is a market of everything and a market of nothing. It looks as if all the shopkeepers had put up tents and transferred their stock from their shops to the street. Here they sell anything from cucumbers to cocoanuts, from stepladders to safety matches—a [179] nondescript assortment of edibles, cooking utensils, secondhand clothing, cheap crockery, old books, and umbrellas. There are no types to speak of, and the place reeks with the essence of small and insignificant bargaining. The hotel at which I registered in Groningen was centrally located—too centrally, in fact—on the market square. Just in front along the curb a purveyor of dried fish held forth in his tent. The breeze was blowing gently, and the hotel stood to the leeward of the dried fish purveyor. As Sam Bernard would say, “Sufficiency!”

The railway line from Groningen down through Assen and Meppel to Zwolle penetrates a flat, barren, unattractive-looking country which, in places, might be mistaken for the “meadows” near Atlantic City. The roadbed of the railway itself is the worst in the world—at least I think it is the worst in the world, although the allegation may arouse the envy of one or two Mexican roadbeds that I am no longer on speaking terms with, each of which claims the same distinction. The engineers who were responsible for this piece of track, through a perfectly flat country with no curves or grades to cope with, could hardly have done much worse. It is even beyond the powers of the imagination how they contrived to make it as bad as it is. Its construction reminds one vaguely of the story of the “jealous pie,” whose top and lower crusts grew jealous of each other for fear something might come between them. So with this [180] railway. If one rail bulges outward a little the other rail bulges inward sympathetically. And it is fortunate that they are so attached to each other, because if one rail bulged outward and the other rail likewise bulged outward at the same point we might not be here to tell of it.

Neither is the tediousness of the two-hour ride relieved at all by the congeniality of one’s traveling companions. For the information of the prospective tourist through Holland it might be well to state in this connection that smoking is only forbidden in those few and far-between compartments of the railway carriage marked “ Niet Rooken .” In all others, whether labeled “ Rooken ” or not, whether occupied by men, women, or children, smoking is not only permitted but encouraged; and however vigorous and healthy a Hollander may be, his one weak point is his aversion to ventilation. In this matter he may be likened to the elephant afraid of a mouse. Consequently, the first move he makes when he enters the compartment is to close both windows. If he lacks the boorishness to reach over deliberately and try to curtail your supply of fresh air, which is not often, he will huddle himself in a corner as far from the offending draft as possible, and eye you up and down for your failure to appreciate his position.

For the full distance from Groningen to Zwolle I traveled in the same compartment with three of the most rabid stale air agitators I have ever run afoul [181] of. To make matters worse, one was highly perfumed with a mixture of musk and mint, and wore the nails of his little fingers long—half an inch would not be an exaggeration—as some sort of a mark of caste, possibly borrowed from the Chinese. During the trip they tried to make things as blithe and agreeable for me as possible—although with the opposite intent, judging from several remarks which I finally succeeded in translating—by giving a variety of imitations of various barnyard animals because I guarded one open window with my life.

All through the province of Drenthe the sources of another industry in which little Holland is preëminent may be seen from the car windows—the great peat bogs. Upon peat the Dutch housewife must rely for her fuel, for the coal mines in the Netherlands are next thing to null and void; so the preparation of peat has become at once an art and an industry. Towns and hamlets are named for it—“ veen ” with an appropriate prefix. It is as indigent to Holland as the wild turkey to the mountains of Virginia. But, instead of striving to eliminate as quickly as possible a very essential natural resource, the Dutch have developed the scientific cultivation of peat and made the vast bogs into almost inexhaustible producers of fuel.

The lighter, more fibrous peat, laagveen , in Dutch—found several feet in thickness in the eastern part of Groningen, all through Drenthe, and even stretching [182] well across the German border—is contrasted with the dry peat, or hoogeveen , underlying a thick layer of clay. In the case of the latter, the layer of clay is removed carefully, the peat is dredged from under it, and what water remains is drained off. The peat is then spread upon the ground and worked by foot pressure until the process, assisted by exposure to the sun, brings it to a certain consistency. It is then cut into convenient lengths, stacked, and allowed to dry. In the meantime the layer of clay has been mixed with sand, replaced, and planted with crops. With respect to the bog peat, the fen is first surrounded with a canal for drainage purposes; also the plant putrefaction is assisted by successive reformations of soil from city refuse, laden with which the peat boats return to the fens.

The bait with which Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe, should lure the tourist to stop off, if only between trains, is the church of an ancient nunnery suppressed during the Reformation. This relic, with a fragment of the old cloisters still attached to it, has been transformed into Assen’s Town Hall, and forms a part of the adjoining provincial offices erected on the site of the nunnery. The great tumuli, or so-called “giants’ caves,” within half an hour’s drive from Assen, and marked with huge boulders borne down by the glaciers from Scandinavia, are of interest more to the profound archeologist than to the ordinary sight-seer.

Meppel, farther down, is a peat town of no artistic or historical importance, although it is the junction of the peat and the butter routes through the hinterland. From it the traveler may journey up through the butter district direct to Leeuwarden, or he may break through the peat country on another line to Groningen.

Zwolle, the first stop below Meppel, is an attractive town, but with fewer types even than Groningen. Here the familiar windmills and wooden shoes begin to diminish perceptibly in numbers. With its 32,000 inhabitants, Zwolle is but a shade smaller than Leeuwarden. It is the capital of the province of Over-Yssel and was the birthplace of Gerard Terburg, one of Holland’s celebrated seventeenth century wielders of the brush and crayon. But like too many other towns in the Netherlands, Zwolle has been so short-sighted and so remiss in her duty that she has failed to preserve for public appreciation a single example of the work of her most famous son.

The most striking architectural feature of the town is her old Sassen-Poort, or Saxon gateway, the five Gothic spires of which tend to relieve any monotony of city skyline. It stands but a short distance from the station, framed behind a green mat of trees that lends a pleasant contrast to its diamond window shutters of delicate blue and spotless white. The modern stone bridge across the canal just in front, although forming rather an inappropriate [184] approach to the old tower, is one of the most artistic in all Holland.

Upon a certain warm, sunlit morning I crossed this bridge and turned down along the canal, following one of the many labyrinthian pathways under the spreading trees. Soon I came upon what anyone on not too familiar terms with the customs of the country might have supposed to be a public café. It was neither fenced nor hedged in, and the path I was following led straight as a die to its low, broad veranda, carpeted and freely sprinkled with comfortable wicker chairs. Little round tables were scattered here and there, and I concluded that the place lacked nothing for the enjoyment of a glass of liquid refreshment.

Accordingly, I followed the course of least resistance, and presently found myself reclining deeply and luxuriously in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.

After a short struggle, my thirst overcame my lethargy, and I summoned enough energy to push a convenient electric button.

As a drastic last resort, I arose with no little effort, and wended my angry way into the building to ascertain the cause for such delinquent service.

I was approached by a gentleman who, having [185] observed my impatience, had come to my rescue from his little secluded corner in the reading room.

In my very best Dutch—my vocabulary consists of some three or four words—I asked the gentleman where on earth the waiter might be in hiding. In his very best English the gentleman replied politely that the place was a private club and not a public grogshop. Whereupon, I could have accomplished an exit through any convenient keyhole without the least pinching.

Near Zwolle, in a monastery on the Agnetenberg, reached after a drive of three or four miles from the town, lived and died Thomas à Kempis, the author of “ The Imitation of Christ ”—a work that has been translated into almost every tongue.

A short ride in the train from Zwolle brings you to Kampen, on the broad Yssel at its point of discharge into the Zuyder Zee. It is Holland’s home town of ancient gateways, no less than three of which, leading out into the park that has superseded the old fortifications, are in excellent state of preservation and worthy of study from an architectural point of view. Originally the town possessed seven of these gates, and there might have been fourteen, had the City Council listened to a learned one of its members who arose at a certain meeting and proposed that they double the original number; for, he argued, had not each of the seven gates contributed its 10,000,000 florins a year to the [186] town treasury in the shape of taxes upon merchandise and produce passing through it? Therefore, it would be a simple matter to double the town’s revenue, for all they had to do was to double the number of gates.

But the rank and file of tourists that include Kampen in their itineraries come to view its Town Hall, a venerable building erected in the fourteenth century, restored after a devastating fire in 1543, and which may be numbered to-day among the most characteristic curiosities in the Netherlands. Among the features of its Gothic façade are six statues in stone, dating from the original building. From left to right these may be recognized as the effigies of Charlemagne and Alexander the Great and the characterizations of Moderation, Fidelity, Justice, and Neighborly Love. One of the windows of the weather-stained edifice still remains trellised with iron as in the days of Kampen’s olden time importance. The interior contains a medieval council room with magistrates’ seats of oak, handsomely carved, and a gigantic chimney piece, unfortunately overladen with ornaments.

Kampen stripped of its gateways and its Town Hall would scarcely be worth the time spent to reach it. The town itself seems to be given up to small manufacturing establishments, and its people made up of the class that keeps them in operation. But the fine architectural relics of its earlier days raise its [187] instructive power to as high a degree as that of any town now within Holland’s tourist area.

From Kampen you may take a steamer out across the Zuyder Zee to the Island of Urk, inhabited by a colony of daring fishermen who are less spoiled, yet whose costumes and customs are less interesting, than those of the people of Marken. But you will have to hurry if you wish to pay it a visit, for Urk will soon go the way of Schokland, an island nearer to Kampen, the habitation of which has recently been forbidden by the government on account of the imminent prospects of total encroachment by the sea. To-day Urk is tussling for life with every tide; it may be merely a question of months, perhaps of weeks or days, before its people will be compelled to give up their homes and move to the less dangerous mainland.

Eighteen and a half miles south of Zwolle, still on the river Yssel, and just across the frontier of Gelderland, lies Deventer, noted commercially for a rather incongruous assortment of enterprises: iron, carpets, and honey cakes. A weigh-house, abnormally large for a town of Deventer’s size, having a great flight of steps ascending to its entrance from the Brink, the principal square of the town, has been converted into a gymnasium. Also facing the Brink are several handsome private houses of seventeenth century erection. Deventer, strange to say, seems to be most athletically inclined; it maintains no less than [188] fifty different association football clubs, which strive with each other for the title of champion on the many athletic fields along the banks of the Yssel.

After years of study in Spain and other foreign lands, after a lengthy residence in Haarlem, and his experiences in the studio as co-worker with Franz Hals, to Deventer came Gerard Terburg, where he finally settled down and where he died in 1681 at the age of sixty-four. Unlike Rembrandt, Hals Holbein, and Jan Steen, Terburg took a lively interest in public and municipal affairs, and in his later years he served his adopted city as Burgomaster.

XIV
Gelderland

From Deventer to Apeldoorn is simply a matter of a quarter of an hour in a railway carriage which now darts past so many fields of grain, now past so many fine old woods and terraced summer homes that the effect upon the tourist is kaleidoscopic—like being shot through a Christmas wreath.

Apeldoorn is a beautiful little city, very much unlike what might be expected of Holland, since its canals are few and its windmills at a premium. Its streets remind one more of those of an English village. Its outskirts and environs are freely sprinkled with attractive country homes and villas belonging to that class of Hollanders that passes its time, for one purpose or another, hovering in the neighborhood of royalty, for near by at Het Loo the Queen is wont to summer. The town’s two parks, named appropriately Oranje and Wilhelmina, present effects in landscape gardening incomparable with those of almost any other parks in Holland, and the broad avenues that lead out to Her Majesty’s palace are barely surpassed in beauty even by the Old Way from The Hague to Scheveningen. Like the spokes of a wheel [190] their shaded roadways stretch straight as a die, with the palace of Het Loo as their common hub.

Pensions and private villas are as thick in and about Apeldoorn as seventeen-year locusts. Each has its velvety lawn; each its variegated flower garden. Apparently the town boasts of everything to make the lives of its summer residents one blissful dream of being some day bidden to dinner or tea at the dazzling white palace at the end of the avenue. I imagine the sanitary arrangements of some of the summer homes of these pseudo patrons of royalty must be primitive in the extreme. This may or may not be a criterion by which to judge the others, but, as I drove by the estate of one of Apeldoorn’s nabobs, a maidservant appeared upon the second-story balcony and emptied the contents of a pocket folding rubber bath tub full upon the lawn in front—anything but a discreet exhibition, to say the least about it.

Het Loo, or The Grove, was the favorite palace of Wilhelmina’s father, William III , and of his grandfather, William I , the first King of the Netherlands. A steam tram operates upon rather uncertain schedule between the railway station at Apeldoorn and Het Loo, but a much more pleasant method of consuming the time, if only between trains, is to drive by carriage out the long avenue, returning through the parks of Apeldoorn.

The peasants of the surrounding country are [191] of purely agricultural proclivities, and their land seems more like real farm land than the lower level portions of the Netherlands. Apeldoorn itself lies in the district known as the Veluwe, a territory between the Yssel and the Zuyder Zee, in places as much as three hundred feet above the level of the ocean and, with few exceptions, the highest in Holland. Parts of it, however, are so sandy and sterile that the ground is available after complete fertilization mainly for the cultivation of tobacco.

Zutphen, a few miles below Apeldoorn, was the first city in the east to offer any speakable resistance against the Spaniards during the war of independence, and there still stands the gateway, called the Nieuwstadtspoort, through which Don Frederic of Toledo, the son of the notorious Duke of Alva, forced an entrance into the town on the 16th day of November, 1572. Mons and Mechlin having been captured and promptly sacked, Alva had repaired to Nymwegen, leaving Don Frederic to conquer the provinces in the north and east—preferably by force, for they were a bloodthirsty lot, those Spaniards. A seeming lack of patriotism on the parts of the cities which had already submitted, too enthusiastically perhaps, to the Spaniards, gave these international marauders little excuse to resort to their usual heinous methods of effecting subjugation.

When Zutphen, therefore, offered a feeble and half-hearted resistance against the troops of Frederic of [192] Toledo, and the fact was reported to his father, the commander in chief and arch brigand of the whole depredating crew, he promptly sent orders to his son to enter the city and kill every man and burn every house to the ground. According to Motley, “the Duke’s command was almost literally obeyed. Don Frederic entered Zutphen, and without a moment’s warning put the whole garrison to the sword. The citizens next fell a defenseless prey; some being stabbed in the streets, some hanged on the trees which decorated the city, some stripped stark naked and turned out into the fields to freeze to death in the wintry night. As the work of death became too fatiguing for the butchers, five hundred innocent burghers were tied two and two, back to back, and drowned like dogs in the river Yssel. A few stragglers who had contrived to elude pursuit at first, were afterwards taken from their hiding-places and hung upon the gallows by their feet, some of which victims suffered four days and nights of agony before death came to their relief.”

To-day Zutphen is a quiet old city, very un-Dutch, if the expression may be permitted, with many narrow, crooked streets and a few canals of varying degrees of picturesqueness on its outskirts. Lumber is the principal industry of the place, and a great deal of poplar wood which goes to supply the wooden shoes for many parts of Holland is shipped from Zutphen.

Arnhem on the Rhine is the most thriving town as well as the capital of Gelderland. It is essentially an ancient place, dating back to a remote period in the history of the Netherlands; even some there be who give Arnhem the credit of being the original Arenacum of the Romans. It lies upon the southern slopes of the Veluwe district, and from its railway station the visitor will actually have to go down hill into the town—a topographical condition so foreign to any of the other Dutch cities already visited that Arnhem’s allegiance to Holland is questioned at first sight.

Although Arnhem is old, it lacks many of those gifts of age that one sees in other old cities throughout the country. Its appearance is German, but its people, realizing the monetary benefits that rival Dutch municipalities are deriving annually from the hordes of tourists that descend upon them, try to advertise it as typically Dutch, and issue frantic appeals to the traveler to be sure to pay it a visit on these grounds. With its 60,000 inhabitants it is the sixth city in point of population in Holland. Although it enjoys every advantage of transportation its commerce is pitiable; as a residence city, however, it is particularly favored. Because of the attractions of its environs, Arnhem is a favorite spot for the retired Dutch merchant, who, having amassed a fortune in the colonial trade after a long residence in the remote Straits Settlements, seeks some quiet place at home [194] endowed with the beauties of nature, in which to spend the remainder of his days in comfort.

The oldest part of Arnhem is the southern end of the city, bordering on the Rhine and clustering about the Groote Markt as a center. The Groote Kerk, an ecclesiastical building of large parts and deep excavations, containing numerous monuments in memory of various historical celebrities, bounds the market square on the west, and on the south one may pierce the surrounding buildings to the Eusibius Square and the Rhine bank through the ancient Sabil-Poort, a Gothic gateway recalling the days when Arnhem was fortified with the customary town wall.

At the side of the Groote Kerk Arnhem holds a weekly market which is scarcely more distinctive than that of Groningen but so popular with the peasants that it overflows into the neighboring streets, and places trolley service through the vicinity in a state of disruption. Having driven into town the evening before, the country people unhitch their horses and leave their wagons standing in the square so as to lose no time in getting ready for business in the morning. Much faith they must have in the honesty and orderliness of the citizens of Arnhem, for their loads of vegetables and whatever they have for sale remain in the open, when the weather is propitious, without even a covering.

A few blocks to the east of the market square lies the Eusibiusbinnensingel, a beautiful park-like place, [195] but a mouthful to pronounce, with a lake in the center surrounded by great shade trees and geometrical flower plots. If you follow this to the northward, you will come, after a short walk, to the Velperplein, the pulse of Arnhem’s trolley traffic, the principal feature of which is a large building that goes under the poetical name of the Musis Sacrum, containing a restaurant and various halls for exhibitions. Here at the tables of the open air café the German tourists are wont to forgather for refreshment purposes, guarding the while their little ten-by-two-inch satchels, scarcely large enough to hold half a dozen cigars, as if they contained the entire wardrobe and family jewels of their owners.

In the Velperplein one may board an electric car for any part of the city and many of its suburbs. And it is best to patronize the trolley service of Arnhem whenever possible, because taxicabs, horse drawn or motor propelled, are not to be found in operation. The buccaneering cabbies of Arnhem, next of kin to the piratical baggage porters of Fiume, charge a goodly price to take you out upon a drive in the environs, and double the amount to bring you back, on the ground that your ignorance of their language, not considering their ignorance of yours, was the cause of a misinterpretation of directions. And the worst of this tourist bleeding system is that the hotel head porters connive with the cabbies.

On top of a real hill half a mile to the north of [196] the railway station is Sonsbeek, a favorite rendezvous of the pleasure-seeking Arnhemers, thickly wooded, containing a small lake or two, and, of course, the inevitable café, while the ascent of a tower called the Belvedere is offered as a temptation only to those who expect to obtain a magnificent and inspiring view where only a mediocre one exists.

The Velperweg, the Amsterdamschestraatweg—but if this kind of thing goes on it might tangle my type into a knotted, inextricable mass; for purely mechanical reasons, therefore, I shall revert to an English version. The Velper Road, the Amsterdam Road, the Zyp Road, the Utrecht Road, and the Apeldoorn Road are the five principal arteries that tap the environs that have made Arnhem famous with the Dutchman. Each one penetrates imposing woods, the like of which the Hollander never saw before, but ruthlessly tramped almost threadbare by his frequent pilgrimages through them in search of a “panorama,” no matter how insignificant. At the different points where the foliage permits of a view of sometimes several miles across the wheat fields, fruit venders have set up their stands, the ground is littered with papers and the empty boxes discarded by many picnickers, and the importunate picture postcard man is seen in his element.

The Velp Road, which leads at length to Zutphen, is, perhaps, the gem of all the five. Wide and well kept, it is lined on either side as far as the village [197] of Velp, a distance of three miles from Arnhem, with handsome residences and tastefully laid out lawns and gardens which are girt with small canals in lieu of fences, so that each may be admired from the roadway.

Halfway along is Bronbeek, the royal asylum for invalid soldiers who have served in the colonial wars. It was bought by King William III in 1854 from its private owners, and presented by him to the State five years later on condition that it be devoted to its present purpose. Little cascades trickle here and there through its grounds, while the pair of cannon mounted on its front lawn bespeaks its use as no blaring signboard could possibly do. Not far from the corner entrance to its park stands a statue of William II as Crown Prince, portrayed as carrying his arm in a sling after having received a wound in the battle of Waterloo. The interior of the building contains collections of portraits of East Indian heroes, and of weapons, flags, and other trophies of war taken in the colonies.

Rosendaal, one of the largest estates in Gelderland, can be reached after a pleasant walk of a mile in a northerly direction from Velp. Mentioned for the first time as early as 1314, its grounds are still kept in a state of baronial magnificence, but of its old castle only a comparatively small part of a great round tower remains.

Another walk, but toward the east on the road [198] to the village and wood of Beekhuizen, brings you to the castle of Biljoen, erected by Charles, Duke of Guelders, in 1530, upon the foundations of an eleventh century stronghold.

Nymwegen may be considered the twin city of Arnhem; when one is mentioned the other is instinctively thought of. They lie close to each other, are of about the same population, offer the same general aspects, and have played parts of equal importance in the general history of the country; but of the two, Nymwegen is possibly the more diverting. It is two cities in one—the older part being purely Dutch, with its old Dutch buildings and a few Dutch types which are mocked by the declivity of some of its streets; the more modern and larger part being distinctively German, with its platzes , the general distribution and embellishment of its thoroughfares, and the density of its greenery. The center of this German portion of Nymwegen is the Keiser-Karelplein, a beautiful square from which the different streets radiate; but what should be the pleasing quiet of the neighborhood is constantly and mercilessly broken by the shrieks of the engine of a noisy tram train that rattles around among the trees as if hunting in vain for a convenient exit.

Yet another example of the very esthetic habit that the Dutch have of demolishing old fortifications and planting the sites as public pleasure grounds may be seen in the Kronenburg Park, the contour of [199] whose slopes adds admirably to the general landscape effect. Down at the bottom is a duck-dotted lake bordered with the benches that constitute the trysting places of many a young Nymwegen couple, so unconscious of any but their own affairs that they suffer old ladies to sit upon the same bench and knit and spy with generous eyes upon the lovers’ advances. At the farther edge of the lake they have mercifully preserved one of the sixteen towers that once strengthened the town walls.

The Waal, one of the many branches of the Rhine, is a busier river at Nymwegen than the real Rhine is at Arnhem. Tows of long, narrow boats, typical of the Rhine above Cologne, ply up and down under the great iron railway bridge and lend to the city more of a German air than ever.

Overlooking the river some distance above the railway bridge are the shady pleasure grounds of the Valkhof, one of the seven hills upon which the city of Nymwegen was originally built and where Charlemagne erected an imperial palace, later destroyed by the French in 1796. An interesting and picturesque ruin is a small fragment of the old palace church, built by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, while near by may be seen the oldest remnant of ecclesiastical architecture in the Netherlands—the sixteen-sided Gothic castle chapel, rebuilt a number of times after being consecrated originally by Pope Leo III in 799.

Across what must have been the castle moat and connected with the Valkhof grounds by an iron bridge, a tower of the seventeenth century affords the people of Nymwegen an attractive view of which they are justly proud, embracing as it does the fertile farming districts as far as Cleve, to the southeast, as far as Arnhem, to the north, and, upon a clear day, as many as four rivers: the Rhine, the Maas, the Waal, and the Yssel.

The old Church of St. Stephen and the brick gateway that leads to it from the market square, the weigh-house with its red and black shutters, the Town Hall, and a number of other old buildings in the vicinity of the Groote Markt are all essentially Dutch, but for which the visitor might easily imagine himself in a German city.

With those of Arnhem, however, Nymwegen’s environs can scarcely hope to compete. The steam tram that rattles around the Keiser-Karelplein eventually escapes the city limits and climbs the long hill to the Hotel Berg en Dal, from the vicinity of which one may look out upon a much vaunted “panorama” that might at least be worth while under certain conditions. But what with the blatant strummings of an automatic piano that considers itself of valuable assistance to the complete enjoyment of the view, and the petty vibrations of a more or less popular photographer intent upon making likenesses of visitors in the unusual and startling act of looking [201] from the top of a hill in Holland, the view is rendered more of a bore than a diversion.

The Dutch province of Limburg, a narrow tongue of land successfully battled for by the Dutch against the Belgians in the war of 1830–31, lying away to the south of Gelderland and wedged in between Belgium on the west and Germany on the east, is so un-Netherlandish, both as to peoples and topography, that it can scarcely be considered as a part of the Holland that the tourist expects. Its inhabitants even speak a low German dialect instead of Dutch. Furthermore, it is not on any route that a tour through Holland might include, for Maastricht, its historical old capital, is on the direct railway line between Brussels and Cologne and may be more easily visited from either of those points than from any city in Holland proper.

CHAPTER XV
Utrecht and ’S Hertogenbosch

There can be only one reason for my clearing my conscience of Utrecht and ’S Hertogenbosch in one and the same chapter. This may or may not be apparent to him who has already toured Holland, for the two towns cannot be said to be on the same line of traffic; they are not even in the same province; neither are they alike in appearance. Utrecht, the capital of the province of that name, with its canals and old houses, its lime avenues and its shady parks, has more of the typical Dutch element in its make-up, and can be as easily reached, and as profitably, from either Rotterdam or Amsterdam.

’S Hertogenbosch, on the other hand, the frontier town of the southern provinces, lies along the route that leads into Germany, and its “windmills and wooden shoes” are conspicuous in their absence. It seems, out of respect for its geographical position, more of a Belgian city. Indeed, the Belgians, unable to conquer its Dutch nomenclature, long ago rechristened the place, and now it is as often spoken of by the more euphonious name of Bois le Duc—a [203] merciful convenience for all of my personal purposes, because it is as difficult to write ’S Hertogenbosch as it is to pronounce it. Since to Bois le Duc it has been simplified, Bois le Duc it shall be henceforth called within these pages.

Now to divulge my secret for treating Utrecht and Bois le Duc in the same chapter: with their famous churches they are the most important ecclesiastical cities in Holland. Utrecht, in addition, is a university town, a cattle center, and one of the oldest places, as well as one of the largest, in the Netherlands. In Roman times it was known by the Latin translation of “The Ford of the Rhine”— Trajectum ad Rhenum . In the seventh century, under the Frisians, King Dagobert I founded here the first Frisian church. Subsequently the archbishops of Utrecht grew to be the most powerful of medieval prelates, and their see at an early date became renowned for the magnificence of its houses of worship. Utrecht was included in the French province of Lorraine, was later annexed to the German empire by force of circumstances, and enjoyed the distinction of being a favorite residence of the emperors. The union of the seven Dutch provinces was formed in Utrecht in 1579, under the sponsorship and direction of John of Nassau, brother of William, Prince of Orange, to establish the independence of the Netherlands. From that time on until 1593 the States-General assembled here; in that year the seat [204] of the Dutch Government was transferred to The Hague. The most celebrated event in the old city’s history, however, took place on the 11th of April, 1713, when the peace was here concluded that terminated the Spanish wars of Succession.

Twentieth century Utrecht is different. Its old-time importance as one of the foremost commercial cities of the Middle Ages was owing to its enviable position on the Rhine where the river wrenches itself into two branches—the Old Rhine and the Vecht. The former percolates, according to the will and calculations of the Dutch engineers, into the North Sea at Katwyk, and the Vecht empties into the Zuyder Zee, near Muiden. The city’s commercial importance and activity have dwindled piteously into a weekly cattle market held in the Vreeburg, Utrecht’s great central square, occupying the site of a castle built in 1517 by Emperor Charles V .

With the break of day on Saturday the farmers from the surrounding country, “ klomped ” in more varied styles of wooden shoes than you will find in any other single town in Holland, begin to arrive with their stock at the Vreeburg. In the night a conglomerate collection of little side-show tents and canvas-covered stalls for the sale of almost everything, has sprung up like a bed of mushrooms on the outskirts of the market place, so that the cattle dealer, after he has negotiated a substitution of stock [205] for its equivalent in the coin of the realm, may want for neither amusement nor a convenient place to purchase the hundred and one articles that his better seven-eighths has cautioned him not to come home without.

Singularly enough, the same methods obtain in bargaining for cows in Utrecht that are prevalent while dickering for cheeses in Alkmaar. There is the same placid composure on the part of the seller, the same minute examination on the part of the buyer; there is the same Captain John Smith pose; there is the same whacking of hands; there is the same general exodus from the market place, after the ceremonies, to the more blithesome lunchrooms and halls of frivolity. I wish I might have followed up the case of a cattle dealer whom I saw in a certain café after the market, making a lunch of the uncertain mixture of a glass of beer and a dish of currants. The notation of the after effects of the combination might have been of value to materia medica.

Utrecht’s famous old churches have been pillaged and desecrated to a great extent by the elements and the changes wrought by time and tide. Once, long ago, when the followers of the various creeds were all at sixes and sevens, the Munsterkerk, the Pieterskerk, the Janskerk, and the cathedral itself, no doubt, with their cloistersful of clergy, were walled in and moated, and patronized as much as asylums of refuge as for worship. To-day they are simply tolerated. [206] A coffeehouse does a land office business in the archbishop’s palace, and the tramcar company has tunneled through the vaulted archway of the great detached cathedral tower rather than go to the trouble of laying the tracks around it.

And what a cathedral this Gothic curiosity of Utrecht is! Erected in the eleventh century upon the site of a former ecclesiastical edifice founded in 720, in its day it must have easily outclassed anything of its ilk in all the Netherlands. Now its back is broken, so to speak, beyond repair, for in 1674 a violent hurricane that bowled a spare with the church towers in the district, tore out the nave of the cathedral and left the tower and the choir completely disconnected. The site of the demolished nave now forms the center of the Cathedral Square, and is as much a thoroughfare as any street in the city.

The interior of the church, like the interior of almost every church of any size in Holland, offers little of originality or interest. The walls are covered with many layers of unbecoming whitewash, and any pleasing effect that the columned interior might have originally had is lost, for a portion in the center is boarded up, like a bull ring with its barrier, segregating the inclosed space for the purpose of uninterrupted worship. The one redeeming feature of the whole place, aside from a few meritorious monuments, is a handsome oaken pulpit, elaborately carved by [207] hand, so as to give the effect of a miniature cathedral in itself.

After being a city of disabled and decrepit churches, Utrecht is a university town, and the seven or eight hundred students in attendance do their best to emulate the early ecclesiastics by trying to keep the place in a state of perennial siege, for it is to be remembered that the drudgery and frugality of university life in Holland is not what it is cracked up to be. In a way, a Dutch college education is a good bit of a farce. The student is under very few obligations except to himself. He does not have to appear in chapel; he does not even have to attend classes, and there are a large number of students in each of Holland’s three universities—young men of private fortune who take up a course in law or what not, with no intention of ever practicing, in order to avail themselves of the gaiety and freedom of university life—who never enter a lecture room from one term’s end to the other. Consequently, there is much hilarity and much extravagance, all of which is more or less resented by the thrifty, peaceful townspeople, and which sometimes places the two factions under strained relations. When a student does complete a course, having seen fit to relegate himself to the hard, honest work necessary to the attainment of a doctor’s degree, he deems it of such momentous occurrence that he forthwith has his thesis published in book form de luxe , and, hiring a carriage, which is [208] manned by student initiates into his Corps, he drives in state to the residences of his several professors and intimate friends, leaving with each a copy of his work.

In the above mentioning of the Students’ Corps, I have named a salient feature of student life in Holland, and one which none of her universities is without. Although of broader membership, it takes the place of our own fraternities. It includes, however, all the students who can afford to pay its dues and subscriptions. A senate, comprising a rector, a secretary, and three other functionaries, elected annually by the Corps from among its members of four or more years’ standing, dictates the policy of the Corps and administers its affairs. Any member of the Corps is eligible for membership in the Corps Club, the culminating distinction of Dutch university life, or for any of its various subdivisions of athletic or social societies. The initiates undergo most of the harmless little byplays, not to mention some new ones, that provide for such a halcyon period in the careers of our own fraternal neophytes.

Among its numerous idiosyncrasies Utrecht has a canal, called the Oude Gracht, that is unique in comparison with other canals in other cities in Holland. The water in this canal lies far below the level of the bordering streets. Between the street and the water there is a great stone step that forms the real canal bank. In the old days the “riser” [209] above this step was made up of foundation arches of stone upon which were built the specious mansions that fronted the thoroughfares alongside the canal. To make use of spaces which would otherwise be wasted, these vaulted foundations served as cellars, with the street for a roof, and were in as constant use as any other part of the dwelling. Most of them are now occupied as shops, to the entrances of which you must descend a flight of steps from the roadway above; but here and there their windows display the lace curtain and the boxful of flowers that give evidence of domestic habitation.

Utrecht, too, has many verdant beauty spots, the most verdant being the Hoogeland Park, with its circumference bordered with attractive villas and reached through a wide lime avenue they call the Maliebaan. In the Antiquarian Museum, situated in the park, one may behold the two most interesting relics in the possession of Utrecht, if we exclude, perhaps, the seventy different kinds of lace on view in the Archiepiscopal Museum on the Nieuwe Gracht. These are: a table, handsomely and delicately carved, at which the signatories of the famous Peace of Utrecht were said to have sat in 1713; and the “Doll’s House,” an accurate reproduction in miniature of a patrician dwelling of the period, executed in 1680, and worked out in the minutest detail from cellar to chimney pot, from kitchen utensils to genuine oil paintings by celebrated masters on the walls of the drawing room.

Surrounding Utrecht and penetrating far to the east and the south are the great fortifications, of whose presence the casual observer is entirely unaware, belonging to the first line of national defense that might be used to protect the Dutch capital from invasion—a defense in which she seeks the assistance of her mortal enemy, and discovers him weighed in the balance and not found wanting. Upon a process of general inundation, by fresh water wherever possible so as not to impair the future productiveness of the fields, does Holland depend for her safety from invasion both by land and by sea. In the probability of the latter, her power of self-exclusion is augmented by a treaty with Belgium, signed in 1892, confirmed in 1905, and only recently made public, reserving for her the right to block the great estuary of the Scheldt in case of war or rumors of war. In times of peace Belgium shares with the Netherlands all rights of navigation of the Scheldt, and Holland may not displace or remove buoys, lights, or other aids to navigation, without Belgian consent.

But with regard to Holland’s ability to isolate herself by general inundation, it is a scheme that gives little outward evidence of being in operation. A stranger might roam within her boundaries for a year and a day without even surmising that such a thing could be accomplished, so successfully are her greatest works hidden from the eye. The scheme [211] provides, in brief, for the blowing up of railway bridges and for the opening of the sluice gates of great reservoirs, regulating the amount of water to be poured in over the country so that it should all be of the same depth, prohibiting both the possibility of wading through it and the passage of vessels over it.

A half a day, if time presses, will suffice to see Bois le Duc. After you have wandered about in its great Gothic cathedral of St. John, one of the largest and, by all odds, the fanciest church—if a church can be said to be fancy—in Holland, you will have done with the town. It holds nothing else of interest. Although of 32,000 population, and the capital of the Province of North Brabant, it is dull and unappealing to the tourist. There are few types and few distinctive mannerisms. Of its costumes, the only feature is a headdress, affected by some of the countrywomen of the surrounding district, composed of white lace and topped with garlands of artificial flowers as ridiculous and disappointing as the “poke bonnets” worn by the middle-aged matrons of Leeuwarden, and just as out of place.

Even the market square is devoid of the usual fringe of ancient buildings. Here they hold a cattle market on Wednesdays, but to strike every city in Holland upon the day of its distinctive market would necessitate a vast amount of vibratory traveling, which in itself, and not considering the markets, [212] would soon grow monotonous. I happened upon Bois le Duc on a Saturday, when one of those nondescript, unsavory bazaars of cooking utensils and crockery was in full swing. It was a hot day, for Holland, and the sun beat down upon the unprotected square with a most uncomfortable effect. So I spent most of my spare time under the awning of a nearby café watching the business transactions of a couple of “hokey-pokey” wagons, decorated and garnished so that they resembled the floats in a Queen of the May pageant.

But an inspection of Bois le Duc’s cathedral will reimburse any traveler who has planned to pay the town a visit. It stands on the edge of a wide parade ground, not far from the market, from the opposite side of which the church’s Gothic gargoyles and entablatures can be seen to good advantage above the trees.

Founded in the eleventh century, this cathedral was originally erected as a Romanesque edifice. After suffering the inevitable results of a devastating conflagration, it was rebuilt in the early half of the fifteenth century, its Romanesque design having been discarded and a late Gothic one adopted. Since 1860 it has been subjected to a plan of restoration. And not only from without is it a pleasing contrast to the usual run of Dutch churches, but it is the only one in Holland whose interior, having marvelously escaped the iconoclasm of early days, and having [213] been allowed to remain undesecrated by the customary coat of whitewash and the central bull ring, is what it ought to be. The visitor of to-day may obtain an uninterrupted view from one end of the cathedral to the other, for the authorities, always in need of funds to carry on the restorations to the church, sold its handsome choir screen some years ago and realized $4,500 on it. But the absence of the screen will scarcely be noticed in the cathedral—indeed, the general effect is more satisfying without it. Stowed away, however, among a collection of other ecclesiastical curios in the new Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London, without the lights and shadows of its church to enhance its richness, it has lost much of its beauty.

From Bois le Duc I was ticketed to quit the country. I had seen the cathedral, and time hung heavily, so I wandered back to the station all of an hour before the scheduled departure of my train, to jot down a few notes and indulge in a few final musings upon a great nation—the only little thing about which I found to be its area—a nation of great deeds in peace and in war, a nation of great men, a nation that has, by the sheer character of its people, surmounted great obstacles, and a nation with a future as great as its past.

Each time I have visited Holland I have been loath to leave, but in more ways than one this feeling was mitigated in Bois le Duc, for Bois le Duc is a more [214] satisfactory place to leave from than The Hague, for example, and when the always solicitous station master, in black frock coat and bright red cap, finally came to tell me that my train was due, I gathered together my impedimenta and followed him resignedly toward the train shed.

As I passed through the waiting-room my eye caught some lettering over the mantel of an artistic fireplace. Its words pronounced the traveler’s benediction: “ Goede Reis .” Whether he appreciated the fact or not, that old fireplace had stood there for years, wishing the voyageur a pleasant journey, and the gentleness, the simple kindliness of the message struck me as being characteristic of the men who put it there—the Hollanders.

Transcriber’s Note

The changes are as follows:

Page 16 —seven and a half minutes changed to seven-and-a-half minutes.

Page 22 , Page 43 and Page 91 —brick paved changed to brick-paved.

Page 23 —robbin’s changed to robin’s.

Page 27 —fifteenth century changed to fifteenth-century.

Page 30 —diaphram changed to diaphragm.

Page 30 —black-and-white cattle changed to black and white cattle.

Page 49 —machine-shops changed to machine shops.

Page 57 —awnnings changed to awnings.

Page 63 —anl changed to and.

Page 70 —half-way changed to halfway.

Page 80 —Friederich’s changed to Friedrich’s.

Page 85 —beside being changed to besides being.

Page 95 —marketplace changed to market place.

Page 104 —comma added after the siege of Lyden.

Page 113 —pleasure seeking changed to pleasure-seeking.

Page 116 —rused changed to rushed.

Page 123 and Page 209 —situate changed to situated.

Page 130 —four fifths changed to four-fifths.

Page 136 —brass work changed to brass-work.

Page 172 —Donrijp changed to Dronrijp.

Page 191 —blood-thirsty changed to bloodthirsty.

Page 195 —Velper Plein changed to Velperplein.

Page 196 —picnicers changed to picnickers.

Page 197 —Rozendaal changed to Rosendaal.

Page 198 —Keiser-Karelsplein changed to Keiser-Karelplein.

Page 201 —topograhy changed to topography.

Page 201 —Furhermore changed to Furthermore.

Page 203 —States General changed to States-General.

In the Index:

Page 215 —Pages 41–48 for Albert Cuyp changed to 41, 48, 49.

Page 216 —Donrijp changed to Dronrijp, and the alphabetical order corrected.

Page 217 —Osterpoort changed to Oosterpoort.

Page 218 —Schenckweg changed to Schenkweg.

Page 218 —Velper Plein changed to Velperplein.

Page 218 —Verdronkenland changed to Verdronken Land.

Page 219 —Zaandvoort changed to Zandvoort, and the alphabetical order corrected.

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Veterans of the Fishing Fleet of Volendam	Frontispiece
	FACING PAGE
Wooden Shoes of Holland	1
The Dutch Build Good Roads	12
Looking down over the Roofs of Middelburg	20
The Old Church Tower and Lighthouse of Westkapelle	24
Behind the Dike at Goes	30
A Picturesque Corner of Dortrecht	40
The Romance of Rotterdam Shipping	44
A Canal Street in Rotterdam	50
The East Gate of Delft	60
The Prinsenhof in Delft	68
Dutch Maids and Washerwomen	76
The Kurhaus at Scheveningen	88
A Steam Tram Engine	92
Inside the Groote Kerk in Haarlem	104
The Royal Palace, Amsterdam	112
Diamond Workers in Amsterdam	116
A Waterfront Street in Volendam	124
A Canal Backyard	132 [xii]
Cheese Day in Alkmaar	140
The Dike at The Helder	144
An Old Street in Hoorn	152
Hoorn’s Racetrack on the Main Street	156
The Metal Skull Cap of Frisian Women	164
Leeuwarden’s Leaning Tower	168
The Town Hall and Market Square in Groningen	180
The Best of Kampen’s Gateways	184
Queen Wilhelmina’s Summer Palace at Het Loo	188
The Market at Arnhem	196
The Eusibiusbinnensingel of Arnhem	200
Utrecht’s Cathedral	204
The Oude Gracht in Utrecht	210