WINDMILLS AND WOODEN SHOES

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.]

The veterans of the fishing fleet are among the most interesting inhabitants of Volendam, wearing fur hats in summer and waistband buttons made of old Dutch coins

WINDMILLS
AND
WOODEN SHOES

By
Blair Jaekel, F.R.G.S.

Author of

The Lands of the Tamed Turk

NEW YORK

McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY

1912

Copyright, 1912, by
McBride, Nast & Company

Published February, 1912

TO
MY AUNT

KATE FISHER BLAIR

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.

Blair Jaekel

Philadelphia, Pa.

CONTENTS

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

Probably the majority of travelers go to Holland, not for art, nor for scenery, nor for history, but for windmills and wooden shoes—to epitomize the characteristics of the country and its peoples

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, 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 the other of the different methods of transportation may overlook.

The shaded portions of this map of Holland and its immediate surroundings represent land that would be under water if by some inconceivable catastrophe all the dikes should break. The map gives, therefore, some idea of the never-ending struggle that the Hollander has faced and continues to face.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 possible it has fostered conspicuous groups of artists and scholars and scientists who in their times were the leaders of their guilds.

The Dutch build good roads and beautiful ones. On the left is one of the long shady avenues leading from Veere to Domburg; on the right a typical brick-paved highway

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.

“To men of other minds my fancy flies,

Embosom’d in the deep where Holland lies.

Methinks her patient sons before me stand,

Where the broad ocean leans against the land,

And, sedulous to stop the coming tide,

Lift the tall rampire’s artificial pride.

Onward, methinks, and diligently slow,

The firm connected bulwark seems to grow;

Spreading its long arms amidst the watery roar,

Scoops out an empire and usurps the shore.

While the pent ocean, rising o’er the pile,

Sees an amphibious world beneath her smile;

The slow canal, the yellow blossom’d vale,

The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail,

The crowded mart, the cultivated plain,

A new creation rescued from his reign.”

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 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 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 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 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.

Taken by and large, Hendrick is an unimpeachable bell keeper.

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 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 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.

Looking down over the roofs of Middelburg from the bell tower of Long John. From here one can see most of the Island of Walcheren

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 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 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 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 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.

This picturesque tower at Westkapelle belonged originally to a fifteenth-century church that was burned in 1831. It is now used as a lighthouse

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, 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 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 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 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 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.”

Behind the dike near Goes—a typical Dutch scene, with the black and white cattle and the milkmaid

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 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 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.

Dutch engineers are planning a stupendous project to reclaim the shaded portions that are now part of the Zuyder Zee.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

A picturesque corner of Dortrecht, called Dordt by the Dutch. In the Middle Ages it was the most prosperous town in Holland

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 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 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 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.

“He who claims that the romance of shipping has succumbed under the pressure of modern methods has never been to Rotterdam”

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, 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 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 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, 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 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.

In spite of its up-to-date spirit, Rotterdam is essentially Dutch, with the canals much in evidence

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

This was on a week day. A subsequent visit to Delft took me there on Sunday.

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.

The East Gate of Delft, one of the quaintest and quietest cities of the Netherlands

To come upon Delft, therefore, during this weekly 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 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 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 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 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, “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 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 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!

The Prinsenhof in Delft, revered by every Hollander as the scene where “William the Silent,” the George Washington of the Netherlands, was murdered

“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, 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, 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 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 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.”

Truly, Wilhelmina has an illustrious ancestor.

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 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.

Snapshots here and there. The Dutch maiden is a miniature of her mother, and she is taught cleanliness and thrift from the time she begins to learn the meaning of words

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 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.

But I digress. This is not a lecture on the marvels or fallacies of art.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 “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 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.

The Kurhaus at Scheveningen, Holland’s most expensive, most fashionable and most diverting seaside resort

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. 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 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 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.

An excellent way to go from The Hague to Leyden is by steam tram, the curious engine of which is shown here

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 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.