Transcriber’s Note

[Page 76]—conquerers changed to conquerors

[Page 171]—expecially changed to especially

[Page 226]—Funicolà changed to Funiculà

AROUND THE CLOCK IN EUROPE

PIAZZA SAN MARCO FROM THE GRAND CANAL Page [305]

AROUND THE CLOCK IN EUROPE

A Travel-Sequence

BY

CHARLES FISH HOWELL

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HAROLD FIELD KELLOGG

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1912

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY CHARLES FISH HOWELL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October 1912

TO

HELEN EDITH HOWELL

Sweet the memory is to me

Of a land beyond the sea.

Longfellow.

IN EXPLANATION

The pages that follow should best account for themselves, of course, but for the satisfaction of those who very properly require some general conception of a project before definitely entering upon it, the author begs to say that he has here sought to visualize to the reader the appearance and the life of these cities at the hours indicated, and to preserve, as well, the distinctive atmosphere of each. He has endeavored to catch and present faithful impressions of the streets, their kaleidoscopic animation, and the activities and characteristics of the people; to touch the pen-pictures with a light overwash of the racial and national peculiarities that distinguish each, and to invest them with what insight, sympathy, and enthusiasm he is capable of. It is “fitting the scene with the apposite phrase,” as Mr. Howells has so aptly described the process and as he himself has so wonderfully exemplified it. A formidable undertaking? Indeed, yes; but there is the dictum of Mr. Browning that the purpose swells the account.

These, then, are impressionistic sketches. They are of the moment only. It has been sought, most of all, to give them just that character. They have been written as reflecting the probable observations and emotions of visitors of normal enthusiasm during these hours and in these environs. Under such conditions, it is well to remember, every active mind has its sudden, drifting excursions afield; something in the visible, present surroundings whimsically invokes the subtle genii of Memory and Imagination, and one is whisked off in a breath, and without rhyme or reason, to the most ultimate and alluring Isles of Thought. These swift and scarcely accountable flights are the common experience of all travelers, and the author has felt it to be a part of his task to take proper cognizance of them.

Travel is generally conceded to be one of the most informing and diverting of engagements, and to gain in both particulars in proportion to the favorableness of the conditions under which it is prosecuted. It is, therefore, a satisfaction to be in position to afford readers advantages scarcely obtainable elsewhere. Discarding conventions of time and space, the author undertakes to give them twelve consecutive happy hours in Europe,—once around the clock,—always endeavoring to secure the most favorable union of hour and place. And though there may be dissent from his judgment concerning the superiority of this combination or that, there can hardly be two opinions as to the perfection of the transportation facilities. The latter eliminate time and space, and convey the reader from city to city and from point to point, with no discomfort or inconvenience whatever, and without the loss of so much as a tick of the watch.

With foot in the stirrup, it may be added that there has been an earnest desire to entertain those whom circumstances have hitherto kept at home, as also to revive to memory golden recollections for travelers who have already passed along these pleasant ways. What is here offered is just a new portfolio of sketches from Nature; the touch of another but reverent hand on the old and well-loved scenes. Surely there can be no better reason for any book than a desire to share with others the happiness experienced by

The Author.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

AROUND THE CLOCK

IN EUROPE

EDINBURGH

1 P.M. TO 2 P.M.

Up there on the gusty heights of Edinburgh no one ever inquires the time at one o’clock in the afternoon. Precisely at the second, a ball flutters to the top of the Nelson flagstaff on Calton Hill and a cannon booms from a battery at Castle Rock; and watches are then set by merchants all over town, by shepherds on the shaggy Pentland Hills, and sailors on ships in the lee of Leith. And one o’clock is the very best time Edinburgh could have fixed upon to encourage her people to look up and about and behold her at her finest. It is luncheon-hour, and when the sun is kindly, “Auld Reekie” is just about as garish and stimulating as it is possible for a town of such dignified traditions and questionable climate ever to become. The air freshens in from blustering Leith, and fair Princes Street wears its most beguiling smiles. One thrills with the joy of being alive in so brave and bonny a world, with the bluebells and heather of Old Scotland about him and this town of song and story at his feet. He gazes at the cheerful crowds moving leisurely along the valley gardens elegant with statues and flowered lawns, or across at the frowzy heads in rickety garret windows away up among the palsied gables of ancient High Street, and he knows that over there is the Canongate of stern tradition and the storied St. Giles’ and black Holyrood, and beyond them he sees the Salisbury Crags, a gaunt palisade halfway up to lofty Arthur’s Seat. He has just arrived, perhaps, with the glow on his face of all he has read and heard of this famed place, and the bugles are singing on Castle Hill and the Edinburgh bells are ringing.

There is little opportunity for preliminary impressions while arriving. The train darts up a valley before you have finished with the suburban cottages of the laboring men, and with an ultimate shriek of relief abruptly dives into its cave, as it were, and deposits you unceremoniously in the esplanaded Waverley Station, with flowered walks above and a market just at hand. The wise traveler gathers up his luggage and fares eagerly forth to Princes Street, as a matter of course. There, on the way to his hotel, he finds a good part of Edinburgh idling pleasantly after luncheon, for Princes Street is the dear delight of the loiterer be he old or young, Robin or Jean. He is studied as he passes through the crowds, curiously, smilingly, critically, tolerantly. His clothing may excite disapproval, his baggage amusement, and his intentions speculation. Curiosity “takes the air” at noon. Arrived in a moment at a Princes Street hotel and duly registered, he is handed a curious disk of white cardboard the size of an after-dinner coffee-cup’s top, upon which is blazoned the number of the room to which he has just been assigned. Preceded by a chambermaid gowned in black and aproned in white and followed by a porter with his traps, he advances grandly to his quarters, according to the tag, and hurries to a window for his first keen impression of the “Modern Athens.”

EDINBURGH, PRINCES STREET

Just why it should be called an “Athens” would scarcely be apparent from a Princes Street hotel window. The literary rights to the title might be conceded, but the stranger will need to view the town from some neighboring height to appreciate the physical similarity between the two cities and to observe the suggestiveness of the Castle and the reminder of the Acropolis in the “ruin”-crowned summit of Calton Hill. What he does see from his window is sufficiently inspiring. At his feet stretches Princes Street which he has heard called the finest avenue in Europe, and along its other side terraces of vivid turf, set with shade trees and statues and flowered walks, drop down in graceful steps to the lawns in the bottom of the valley that was once the North Loch’s basin and where now, to Edinburgh’s chagrin, are the railroad tracks. Across these gardens vaults a boulevard styled “The Mound,” and on their farther side is the gray old Castle on its precipitous crag with a soft sweep of green braes at its base. On the Castle side of the valley the far-famed High Street turns the venerable backs of its tall, tottering, weather-blackened rookeries on the frivolity of Princes Street, and scornfully gives its laundry to the breeze in hundreds of heaped and crooked gable-windows. Centuries before any of us were born those fantastic and whimsical family nests were lined up as we see them to-day. One could fancy them a row of colossal, prehistoric giraffes with their tails all our way, nibbling imaginary tree-tops on High Street. The stranger will lean out of his window and look down Princes Street and start with delight to see that “sublimest monument to a literary genius,” the lace-like Gothic spire to Scott, where, under a springing canopy of arches and aspiring needles studded with statues of the immortal characters he created, sits the great Sir Walter himself in snowy Carrara, with his favorite hound at his feet. And one’s heart warms to this romantic Edinburgh so beloved of him and of the fiery Burns, the passionate Chalmers, the gentle Allan Ramsay, and Jeffrey of the brilliant “far-darting” criticisms. Here, in their time, mused Robert Fergusson and David Livingstone and Smollett and Hume and Goldsmith and De Quincey and “Kit North” and Carlyle; and but yesterday has added the name of Stevenson, not the least loved of them all. What inspiration this region must have kindled to have given to Art such sons as Gordon, Drummond, Nasmyth, Wilkie, Raeburn, and Faed! Could the roster of old Greyfriars Burying-Ground be called, one would marvel at the number of great names there memorialized that are familiar and beloved to the remotest, out-of-the-way corners of the earth. And so the new arrival closes his window more slowly than he raised it and steals reverently down into the street to meet this Edinburgh face to face.

You might think, to hear Americans talk at home, that every other Edinburgh man carries a dirk or a claymore under a tartan and wears a ferocious red beard like the pictures of Rob Roy; that people go about in plaid shawls and tam o’shanters, and that most society functions end up with a Highland fling. One may see at wayside railroad stations, as in our own country, wild, hair-blown lassies with flaming cheeks running in from the hills to have a look at the train; but with some such mild exception, if it is one, the Scots on their native heath are, of course, precisely what we are used to elsewhere. Types apart, the man of the streets of Edinburgh looks entirely familiar—shrewd and combative, rugged and perhaps hard, slouchy and indifferent in the matter of dress, hobnailed and be-capped. There is something tremendously genuine and wholesome about him. He is merry and brisk and lively, often; but you would not call him ever quite gay—at least with that sparkle that dances in the eyes you look into on the Paris boulevards. You could scarcely, for instance, imagine a Scotchman singing a barcarolle! Best of all they are honest and sincere, and one takes to them at once. Here are the lassies and laddies you have long sung about, fresh-faced and debonair. Cheerful fearlessness shines out of their frank blue eyes, and they look to dare all things and be utterly unafraid. The square foreheads of the older men, the austere cheek bones and strong chins, unscroll history to the observer and make him think of savage broils along the border, of fierce finish-fights throughout the wild Highlands, and of the deathless Grays of Waterloo. You may defeat a Scotchman, but he will never admit it, and if he is all-Scotch he will not even know it. They are brave, witty, and devoted, and many a person will take issue with Swift for finding their conversation “hardly tolerable,” and with Lamb for pronouncing their “tediousness provoking” and for giving them up in despair of ever learning to like them.

The new arrival plunges into Princes Street, accepts inspection good-naturedly, and soon feels entirely at home. He may even find the day bright and cheerful, in spite of apprehension over the dictum of Stevenson that this climate is “the vilest under heaven.” The street is quite unusual—one side a terraced valley, the other a splendid line of shops, clubs, and hotels, with gay awnings. Paris and London novelties fill the windows. A throng of vehicles bustles up and down—motor-busses, double-decked trolley cars, taxi-cabs, hired Victorias, two-wheeled carts, brewery wagons, station lorries, tourists’ chars-à-bancs with drivers in scarlet liveries, private carriages and bicycles. The stream of people on either pavement is of the holiday cheeriness that comes with the luncheon recess from office and shop, though here and there one may occasionally discover some “sour-looking female in bombazine” that recalls R. L. S.’s “Mrs. McRankin” and who appears as ready as she to inquire whether we attend to our “releegion.” The restaurants are plying a brisk trade, contenting their tarrying guests, speeding the parting and hailing the coming. Whole coveys of pretty shop-girls with brilliant cheeks, wholesome and vivacious, come chattering and laughing out of tea- and luncheon-rooms and flutter back to work with frequent enthusiastic stops before alluring windows. Workmen in tweed caps and clerks in straw hats pass by, to or from their occupations, and always with lingering looks toward the Princes Street Gardens, so that one can accurately guess whether they are coming from or going to office by applying the reliable Shakespearean formula—

“Love goes to Love as schoolboys from their books,

And Love from Love to school with heavy looks.”

The air is rhythmic with the up-and-down slur of this speech of “aye” and “na.” Curious faces flash past. Threadbare lawyers argue pompously as they saunter back arm in arm toward Parliament Close, and the ruddy-cheeked girls, by contrast, seem so distracting that a foreigner rages at the sentiment that “kissing is out of season when the gorse is out of bloom.” Occasionally, even at so early an hour, there is evidence of the passion for drink. “Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut” flashes to mind, and one fancies the unsteady ones are trying to hum, “We are na fou, we’re no that fou, but just a drappie in our ee.” When night comes on, sober men in the streets have reason to frown censoriously; and if it be a Saturday night, they may even feel lonesome.

A passing regiment is a welcome interruption and a brave spectacle. It is always hailed with shouts of joy. All Edinburgh turns in its bed Sunday mornings at nine to see the Black Watch come out from the Castle for “church parade” at St. Giles’s. Nothing stirs Princes Street on any week day like a military display. It is a thrilling moment to a stranger, perhaps, when he has his first glimpse of a young Tommy Atkins, and he stops stock-still to take in the bright scarlet, tailless jacket, the tight trousers, the “pill-box” perilously cocked over an ear, and the inevitable “swagger cane” with which he slaps his leg as he braves it along. But what is that to the passing of a company of Highlanders! Along they come, kilts and plaids, sporrans swinging, claymores rattling, and jolly Glengarry bonnets poised rakishly to the falling point. Ten pipers are droning and three drummers are pounding; and one watches, as they pass, for the holly sprig, or what-not, they wear in their bonnets as a badge of the clan. The best show is made by the King’s Highlanders from up Balmoral way; and splendid they are in royal Stuart tartan, with the oak leaf and thistle in their bonnets and each man carrying a Lochaber axe. If there is anything more inspiriting than cheery bagpipe music at such a time, no one to laugh foolishly at it and every one to love it, and the men stepping proudly and the crowd applauding,—I, for one, do not know it.

Keenness of impressions, as we all know, may depend on the most trivial circumstances of time and place. I recall, for example, a sharp and thrilling musical experience in Scotland, with the instrument nothing more than the despised and humble mouth-organ. Perhaps it was the mood, perhaps the setting, perhaps the unexpectedness of it; there was so little and yet so much. At all events, I shall not soon forget the sparkle and stir of “The British Grenadiers” as it ripped the sharp night air of quiet Melrose to the approach of three English soldiers, one with the mouth-organ and the others whistling in time as they marched briskly along. I shall always remember the rhythmic beat of their feet as they swung across the murky, deserted square, the loudness, the thrill, and the lilt of that historic melody, and the flicker of a lamp in a window here and there and the pleasant sting of the keen night air.

There is no better place for a stranger to “get his bearings” in Edinburgh than out on that valley-spanning boulevard they call “The Mound.” He then has the Old Town to one side and the New Town to the other, and on opposite corners, as if to maintain the balance, the Castle and Calton Hill. He also takes note of the several bridges that clamp the town together, as it were; and he may look down into the gardens before him and watch the children playing as far as the promenade-covered Waverley Station, or he may turn and look the other way and see quite as many more all the way along the pleasant green to the old battle-scarred West Kirk of St. Cuthbert’s where De Quincey lies in his quiet grave. Thus he will find himself of a sunny afternoon between the pleasant horns of a most agreeable dilemma. He must choose whether to spend his first hour in the New Town or the Old. If he remembers what Ruskin said he will fly from the New; but then he may go there, after all, if he recalls the opinion of the old skipper cited by Stevenson, whose most radiant conception of Paradise was “the New Town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a point free.” He must decide whether his present inclination is for latter-day city features, like conventional streets lined with substantial gray stone buildings looking all very much alike, for the fashionables of Charlotte Square and Moray Place and the bankers and brokers of St. Andrew Square, or the historic ground of crowded old High Street and the Castle and Holyrood. He would find in the New Town some old places, too, for it is one hundred and fifty years old, and there are the literary associations of the last century and the house on Castle Street where Scott lived more than a quarter-century—“poor No. 39,” as he called it in his Journal—and wrote the early Waverley Novels, and rejoiced along with his mystified friends in the tremendous success of “The Great Unknown.” He would find it a rapidly modernizing city; no longer may the children salute the lamplighter on his nightly rounds with “Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamps!” But he would find the most interesting things there the oldest things, and they all in the Antiquarian Museum—and what a show! John Knox’s pulpit, the banners of the Covenanters, the “thumbikins” that “aided” confession and the guillotine “Maiden” that rewarded it, the pistols Robert Burns used as an exciseman, and the sea-chest and cocoanut cup of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe; and there, too, is Bonnie Prince Charlie’s blue ribbon of the Garter and the ring Flora Macdonald gave him when they parted. If historic paraphernalia is alluring, however, the scenes of its associations are much more so; and our friend would doubtless hesitate no longer, but turn to the Old Town and trudge up the steep way to the Castle.

“You tak’ the high road

And I’ll tak’ the low road,

And I’ll get to Scotland afore ye”;—

and if the song had kept to geography it would probably have added, “And we’ll meet at the bonny Castle o’ Auld Reekie.” Such, at least, has been a Scotch custom for thirteen hundred years; and with every reason. Through the long and cruel centuries it has gathered to its flinty gray bosom memories of every possible phase of national mutation, desperate or glorious, gloomy or gay. One approaches it with awe. So long has it gripped the summit of that impregnable rock, half a thousand feet sheer on three of its sides, that it has blended into the life and color of its foundations, like a huge chameleon, until one could scarcely say where rock leaves off and castle begins. A stern and pitiless object, tolerating only here and there a grassy crevice at its base, and a clinging tree or two. In the great “historic mile” of High Street, lifting gradually from Holyrood to this rugged elevation, one feels the illusion of an enormous scornful finger extended dramatically westward toward the traditional rival, Glasgow. There is no need to see Highland regiments drilling on its broad esplanade, or to enter its sally-port or penetrate the dungeons in its rocky depths to have confidence that the royal regalia of “The Honours of Scotland” are safe enough here, on the red cushions in their iron cage. One enters, and there settles upon him a feeling of sharing in every grim tradition since the doughty days “when gude King Robert rang.” It is not a visit; it is an initiation.

Quite worthy of this savage stronghold is the inspiring outlook from its parapets over hills and rivers and storied glens. One turns impatiently from “Mons Meg,” which may have been a big gun in some past day of little ones, to gaze afar over the carse of Stirling and the trailing silver links of the Forth to where the snow shines in the clefts of Ben Ledi, or out over the Pentland Hills where the “Sweet Singers” awaited the Judgment. The sportsman will think of the grouse-shooting at Loch Earn; the sentimentalist will reflect that when night settles over Aberdeenshire the pipers will strike up their strathspeys and there will be Scotch reels by torchlight. Scotland seems unrolled at your feet and Scottish songs rush to mind until you fairly bound the region in verse and story: To the north and northwest, “Bonnie Dundee,” the glens of “Clan Alpine’s warriors true,” Bannockburn and “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” and “The Banks of Allan Water”; to the north and east, the Firth of Forth where the fishwives’ “puir fellows darkle as they face the billows”; to the west and southwest, “The banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,” “Tam o’Shanter’s” land, “Sweet Afton” and “Bonnie Loch Leven” whence “the Campbells are comin’”; and to the south, “The braes of Yarrow,” “Norham’s castled steep, Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep, and Cheviot’s mountains lone,” and, most sung of all, “The Border”:—

“England shall, many a day, tell of the bloody fray

When the blue bonnets came over the border.”

The afternoon sun rests brightly on the pretty glen in the foreground where lie the dismal, bat-flown ruins of Rosslyn Castle, loopholed for archers and shadowed in ancient yews that have overhung the Esk for a thousand years, and on the delicate chapel of stone-lace where the barons of Rosslyn await the Judgment in full armor with finger-tips joined in prayer. And there, too, are the cool, dark thickets of Hawthornden, recalling the ever-popular

“Gang down the burn, Davy Love,

And I will follow thee.”

One cannot forbear a smile as he surveys the noble bridge that spans the Forth and recalls the insistent pride of Edinburgh in the same. Here is an achievement over which all visitors are expected to exclaim in amazement—and engineers, I presume, invariably do. On this point your Edinburgh man is immovable. He scorns to elaborate and he will not descend to eulogy. He merely indicates it with a reverent inclination of the head, and turns and looks you in the eye; you are supposed to do the rest. Personally, while I give the great structure its dues, which are many, I like what flows under it more.

And there is one thing about the Forth that Edinburgh people never forget, nor do the visitors who find it out: “Caller herrin’!” It must have taxed the resources of even such a genius as Lady Nairne, whose home one may see if he looks beyond Holyrood to the villas of Duddingston, to have written two such dissimilar songs as the heart-melting “Land o’ the Leal” and the cheery “Caller Herrin’.” There’s the king of all marketing songs. It really compels one to think with despair of what a dreary mockery life would be were this, of all harvests, to fail. For love of that song I could defend the Forth herring against all competitors whatsoever. Loch Fyne herring? Fair fish, yes; but really, now, you would hardly say they have that racy flavor we get in the Forth article. Caller salmon? Oh, pshaw, you are from Glasgow; you have been swearing by caller salmon for five hundred years; have it on your coat of arms; used to draw it on legal papers as other people do seals;—but, honestly, have you ever seen a salmon in the Clyde, anywhere near Glasgow, in all your life? And if you did, would you eat it? Certainly not! So “give over,” as they say in England. Certainly there never was such pathos and unction devoted to just such a subject. And the music, too! How it compels you with its appealing monotones and rebukes you with the brave huckster cries on high F! So when you are passing near Waverley Market and encounter one of the picturesque Scandinavian fishwives, who has trudged in with her “woven willow” from her little stone house at Newhaven with the patched roof and quaint fore-stairs, unless you are willing to buy a herring then and there and carry it around in your pocket, run for your life before she starts singing:—

“When ye were sleeping on your pillows,

Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows,

Darkling as they face the billows,

A’ to fill our woven willows!

“Wha’ll buy caller herrin’?

They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’;

Buy my caller herrin’,

New drawn frae the Forth.”

To stroll down High Street is to unscroll Scottish history and survey Edinburgh of to-day at one and the same time. “Hie-gait,” as the old fellows still occasionally call it, is the “historic mile” par excellence of Scotland. In its independent fashion it assumes new names as it meanders along, first Castle Hill, then Lawnmarket, then High Street, and finally Canongate. Even the afternoon sun ventures guardedly among the nest of tall, gaunt lands that scowl at each other across its war-worn way. Bleak and glum to the peaked and gabled roofs, eight and ten stories above the sidewalk, they have resisted dry rot by a miracle of mortar and still hang together, doubtless to their own amazement, huddling a perfect enmeshment of tiny homes like some ingenious nest of boxes. It would be hard to imagine more drear and rickety domiciles or any more nervously overshadowed with an impending doom of dissolution. One looks anxiously about to see some venerable veteran give it up with a dismal, weary groan and collapse in a vast huddle of domestic wreckage. Fancy living where you have to scale breakneck stairs to a dizzy height and then reach your remote eyrie by a trembling gangway over an air well! The closes or wynds that are engulfed among these flat-chested ancients are equally surprising. One passes in from the street through a dirty entrance with a worn stone sill and a rudely carven doorhead inscribed with Scriptural and moral injunctions, and finds himself in an inner court fronted by dirty doors and palsied windows full of frowzy women, a cobbled pavement littered with refuse and a patch of sky half-hidden by fragments of laundry. And, mind you, these retreats are not without pride of tradition; many of them have entertained riches and royalty—but that was not last week. Lady Jane Grey was once hidden in famous White Horse Close, which must have fallen further than Lucifer to reach its present condition. Douglas Tavern was in one of them, where Burns and his brethren of the “Crochallan Club” were wont to revel with “Rattlin’, roarin’ Willie, and amang guid companie.” Legends, of course, abound. There was the case of the two stubborn sisters who quarreled one night and never spoke to each other again, though they lived the remainder of their lives together in the selfsame room. There’s Scotch persistence! Deacon Brodie was another instance, the “Raffles” of his time. He it was who used to ply his nefarious trade by night on the friends who knew him by day as a highly respectable cabinet-worker; and if you look furtively aloft at some dusty, closed shutter you can fancy the dark lantern glowing and the file rasping and the black mask drawn to his chin. Happily, they hanged him eventually; and, singularly enough, on the very gallows for which he had himself invented a very superior drop.

A close, therefore, is so cheerless a spot that you could not well be worse off if you were to dive down the steep, wet steps of a neighboring slit of an alley and come out on the old Grassmarket of sinister renown where they hanged the Covenanters of the Moss Hags. As you gaze about on this ill-omened slum, once the home of many a prosperous and respected “free burgess,” but now given over to drovers and visiting farmers, and peer suspiciously up the adjoining West Port where Burke and Hare conducted their murders to get bodies for the surgeons, you are very apt to beat a hurried retreat and cry out with Claverhouse, “Come, open the West Port and let me gang free!”

After one or two such explorations a stranger is content to pursue his investigation in the broad light of High Street. It seems delightful then to watch the barefooted boys in the street and the little girls in aprons and “pigtails.” And happily he may come across a shaggy steely-eyed old Highlander growling to a comrade in the guttural Gaelic, or perhaps a soldier in kilts and sporan. At this hour he will certainly see around Parliament Square groups of advocates and solicitors and “writers to the Signet,” and, it may be, some judge of the “Inner House” or “Outer House,” and possibly the Lord President himself. Otherwise he can take note of the uninviting shop-windows and the piles of merchandise on the sidewalks, and find entertainment in such unfamiliar signs as “provisioners,” “spirit merchants,” “bootmakers,” “hairdressers,” etc., with prices set forth in shillings and pence, or rejoice in a hostelry with so unusual a name as “The Black Bull Lodgings for Travellers and Working Men.”

There are pleasant surprises. For instance, you find in the cobbled pavement the outline of a heart—and you do not have to be told that you are standing on the site of the terrible old Tolbooth prison, at the Heart of Midlothian. And what rushes to mind and displaces all other associations if not the fine story Sir Walter gave us under that name! Here, then, the Porteous mob swarmed and raged in its struggle to burn this savage Bastile, and here they tried and condemned poor Effie Deans and locked her up while the faithful Jeanie turned heaven and earth to save her, and the heart of old David broke. “The Heart of Midlothian!” Why, it is like being a boy all over again!

Encouraged by this discovery, like a man who has just found a gold-piece, you keep a sharp lookout on the pavements, and presently comes a second reward in the shape of a brass tablet in the ground marking the last resting-place of stern John Knox. “There!” say you; “Dr. Johnson said he ought to be buried in the public road, and sure enough, he is!” What a man! He dared all things and feared nothing. How many a long discourse did Queen Mary herself supply him a topic for, and how often did he assail even her with personal rebukes and virulent public tirades! Thanks to the Free Church, his dwelling stands intact, farther down the street at the site of the Netherbow; and a fine specimen it is of sixteenth-century domestic Scotch architecture, with low ceilings and stairways scarce two feet wide—but, like its former austere tenant, narrow, cornery, and unpleasant. Implacable, unbending old John Knox! There is nothing in Browning more shuddering in imaginative flight than the quatrain:—

“As if you had carried sour John Knox

To the play-house at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,

Fastened him into a front-row box,

And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.”

One makes a long stop before the far-famed church of St. Giles, half a thousand years old and the battle-ground of warring creeds. Its crown-shaped tower top is one of the familiar landmarks of Edinburgh. Within you may study to heart’s content the grim barrel vaulting and massive Norman piers and the tattered Scottish flags in the nave, but there is scope for many an agreeable thought outside if one conjures up the little luckenbooth shops that once clustered between its buttresses, and imagines Allan Ramsay in his funny nightcap selling wigs, or “Jingling Geordie” Heriot, of “The Fortunes of Nigel,” gossiping with his friend King James VI over his jewelry counter. Nor would you forget Jenny Geddes and how she seized her stool in disgust when the Dean undertook to introduce the ritual, and let it fly at the good man’s head with the sizzling invective, “Deil colic the wame o’ ye! Would ye say mass i’ my lug!”

Old Tron Kirk, farther on, is still an active feature of Edinburgh life, and particularly on New Year’s Eve when the crowds rally here as the old year dies. Beyond it the Canongate extends itself in a rambling, happy-go-lucky fashion, lined with curious timber-fronted houses with “turnpike” stairs. It is like sitting down to “Humphrey Clinker” once more; or better still, perhaps, to the poems of Fergusson; and we smile at thoughts of the scowling, early-risen housewives of other days who would

“Wi’ glowering eye

Their neighbours’ sma’est faults descry!”

and fancy how the convivial revelers would foregather by night and

“sit fu’ snug,

Owre oysters and a dram o’ gin,

Or haddock lug.”

But lingering along the Canongate is a negligible pleasure. There is nothing in the whole architectural world more jailish and pitiless than the gaunt Tolbooth and all its grim neighbors. It is as if the conception of anything suggestive of beauty or ornamentation had been harshly repressed, and ugliness and the most naked utility sternly insisted upon. One may, however, if he is interested in slums, pause a moment to look down through the railings of the South Bridge on the screaming peddlers and flaunting shame of bedraggled Cowgate, and behold a district which stands to Edinburgh in the relative position of Rivington Street to New York, or Petticoat Lane to London, or Montmartre to Paris.

The end of the Canongate, a few steps farther on, debouches unexpectedly, and with a sudden unpreparedness for the stranger, on the great open square before Holyrood. There it stands, black and dismal; more like a prison than a palace! The Abbey ruins, in the rear, supply all the atmosphere of romance that the eye will get here. But the eye is better left as a secondary aid in comprehending Holyrood; history and imagination do the work. Cowering sorrowfully in its gloomy hollow, it has the look of a moody, forsaken thing brooding over a neglectful world. Its memories are of the dead. Its sole companionship is in the mosses and grassy aisles of the crumbling Abbey chapel, where lie the bones of Scottish royalty that ruled and reveled here its allotted time and left scarce a memory behind. It was here they slew Rizzio as he dined with Queen Mary; and perhaps that is romance enough.

The fumes and cobwebs of murky tradition dissipate in the keen, vigorous air of Calton Hill. Breezes from over the level shore-sands of Leith taste sharp of salt and excite bracing thoughts of the sea. Like a map, the whole environ of Edinburgh lies exposed from the Pentlands to the Firth. There is the steepled city, rising over its ridges and dropping down its valleys like billows of a troubled ocean, and there, too, is the enveloping sweep of suburbs dotted with villas or cross-thatched with streets of workingmen’s cottages, and farther still the Meadows and their archery grounds, “the furzy hills of Braid” and their golf links, Blackford Hill whence “Marmion” and his bard looked down on “mine own romantic town,” and, on the southern horizon, the heathery Pentlands, low and shaggy, with the kine that graze over them low and shaggy too. To the northward, away beyond the cricket greens of Inverleith Park, the blue Firth sparkles in the offing, dotted with fleet steamers and the white spread sails of stately ships laying courses for the Baltic. In the distance, over Leith, looms the tall lighthouse of the Inchcape Rock that Southey made famous with a ballad. Beyond the west end of the city a wavy blue line marks the course seaward of the bustling little Water of Leith, where “David Balfour” kept tryst with “Alan Breck,” and many a sturdy little “brig” leaps across it as it hurries along, “brimmed,” wrote Stevenson, “like a cup with sunshine and the song of birds.” Still farther to the westward, where the old Queens Ferry Coach Road appears as a faint white tracing, within many “a mile of Edinborough Town,” thin vapors of smoke rise from the chimneys of white cottages on peasant greens by brooksides; and one knows that the rowans there are white with bloom and the meadows flecked with daisies, and that bees are droning in the foxglove and blackbirds singing in the hawthorn.

Calton Hill itself scarcely improves on acquaintance, but loses rather. Its meagre scattering of monuments would barely excite a passing interest were it not for their conspicuous location and that suggestion of the Athenian Acropolis. A paltry array—a tall, ugly column to Nelson, a choragic monument like the one to Burns on a hillside near Holyrood, an old observatory with a brown tower and a new one with a colonnaded portico and a dome, and, most mentioned of all, the so-called “ruin” of the proposed national monument to the Scotch dead of Waterloo and the Peninsula, which got no farther than a row of columns and an entablature when funds failed and work stopped. Many a bitter shaft of scorn and mockery has this ill-starred undertaking pointed for the disparagers of Scotland. However, in its present condition it has done more than any other agency to stimulate the pleasant illusion of the “Modern Athens.” The hill itself is a favorite resort, lofty, and with a broad, rounded top. The eastern slopes are terraced and set with gardens, and the western and northern sides are steep verdant braes. One yields the palm for reckless daring to Bothwell; not every one would care to speed a horse down such a course even to win attention from eyes so bright and important as Queen Mary’s.

It was on Calton Hill I had my first experience of the old school of Scotchmen, in the person of a dry and withered chip of Auld Reekie, combative, peppery, brusque and sententious, and abounding in that peculiar admixture of braggadocio and repression so characteristic of the class. He had evidently been nurtured from infancy on Allan Ramsay’s collection of Scotch proverbs, for he quoted them continually, giving the poet credit for their origin. He was sitting in the shade of Nelson’s column in shirt sleeves and cap, absorbed to all appearances in a copy of “The Scotsman,” though I suspect he had been regarding me for some while with quite as much curiosity as I now did him. He was a grim, self-contained old party, as dignified as the Lord Provost himself, with gray, shaggy eyebrows and a thin, wry mouth that gripped a cutty pipe; and he looked so much a part of the surroundings, so settled and weather-beaten, that one might almost have passed him over for some memorial carving or, at least, an “animated bust.” Him I beheld with vast inner delight and gingerly approached, giving “Good day” with all the cordiality in the world. The reward was a curt nod and a keen scrutiny from a pair of hard and twinkling blue eyes that had an appearance under the grizzled brows of stars in a frosty sky. I observed upon the fineness of the day; he opined “There had been waur, no doot.” I noted what a capital spot it was for a quiet smoke; he allowed I might “gang far an’ find nane better.” Here I made proffer of a cigar and, presumably, with acceptable humility, for he took it with an “Ah, weel, I dinna mind,” of gloomy resignation—and so we got things going.

The conversation that followed I venture to give in some detail as illustrating, possibly, the peculiarities of a type to be encountered on every Edinburgh street corner—whimsical, conservative, witty, cautious in opinion, and surcharged with local pride.

“A man can take life pleasantly here,” said I, when we had lighted up.

“Aye, aye,” said he; “even a hard-workin’ one like mysel’, as Gude kens. But a bit smoke frae ane an’ twa o’ the day hurts naebody, I’m thinkin’; an’ auld Allan Ramsay was richt eneuch, ‘Light burdens break nae banes.’”

“You will never be leaving Edinburgh, I’ll warrant.”

“Na, na. Ye’ll have heard tell the sayin’, ‘Remove an auld tree an’ it will wither.’”

“There’s more money to be made elsewhere, perhaps.”

“I’m no so sure o’ that. Forbye, ‘Little gear the less care.’”

“One wouldn’t find a handsomer city than this, at all events.”

“Aweel, aweel, a’body kens that. Ye’ll no so vera frequently see the bate o’ it, I’m thinkin’. Them that should ken the best say sae.”

“How many people are there here, sir?”

“Mare than three hunner an’ fifty thoosan’, I’m telt.”

“No more? It is small for its fame. Why, Glasgow must be three times as large,” I ventured, resolved to stir him up a little.

“Glesgie, is it! Think shame o’ yersel’, mon, to say the same! A grippie carlin, Glesgie! Waur than the auld wife o’ the sayin’, ‘She’ll keep her ain side o’ the hoose, and gang up an’ doon in yours.’ Ye canna nay-say me there. Gae wa’ wi’ ye!”

“But you must admit it is a great port. The receipts are enormous, I’m told.”

“Aye, an’ it’s muckle ye’ll be telt ye’ll never read in the Guid Buik! Port, are ye sayin’? Hae ye na thought o’ Leith? Or the bonny sands an’ gardens o’ Portobello? Or Granton, forbye, wi’ the three braw piers o’ the Duke o’ Buccleuch? Ye’ll no be kennin’ they’re a’ a part o’ Ed’nboro, maybe.”

“But how about the ship-building on the Clyde?”

“An’ what wad ye make o’ that? How ony mon in his senses could gang to think sic jowkery-packery wi’ the gran’ brewin’ ayont the Coogait is mair than ever I could win to understan’. It’s by-ordinar, fair! An’ dinna loup to deecesions frae the claver an’ lees aboot muckle things. ’Twas Allan Ramsay himsel’ said, ‘Mony ane opens their pack an’ sells nae wares.’ It’s unco strange that a body should tak nae notice o’ the learnin,’ an’ the gran’ courts, an’ the three hunner congregeetions, an’ a’ the bonny kirks we hae in Ed’nboro, but must ever be spairin’ o’ the siller. Do ye think, noo, it’s sae vera wonderful to ‘Put twa pennies in a purse, an’ see them creep thegither’? Glesgie may ken a’ sic-like gear, I’m nae sayin’; but there’s no sae muckle worth in that, as ye’ll be findin’ oot, though ye read in the books til the morn’s mornin’. It’s a fair disgrace to hae sic thochts. Mon can sae nae mair.”

“At any rate, there’s a fine university there.”

“It’s easy sayin’ sae. Muckle service is it! Gude kens a’ they learn there! Gin it’s cooleges ye’ll be admirin’, maybe ye’ll no be so vera well acquaint wi’ our ain toun? There’s nane in a’ Glesgie like the ane ye see the day. Mon, it’s fair dementit ye’ll be.”

It took time and diplomacy and many a round compliment on Edinburgh to bring him out of his sulk; but eventually he yielded.

“Aye,” said he, “I believe ye’ll be in the richt the noo. It’s gran’ up here, dinna misdoot it. Mony’s the braw sicht to be had, that’s a fac’, an’ I ken them a’ like the back o’ my hand. Sin lang afore yon trees were plantit, mare than ane fine dander hae I taen mysel’, bonny simmer days, lang miles o’er the heather. Ye’ll believe me, I’d gang hame and sleep soun’. It’s na sae pleesant, maybe, in winter, wi’ the dour haars an’ the fog an’ the east winds. But I aye like it fine in simmer, wi’ a bit nip o’ wind betimes an’ then fair again. At the gloaming it’s quaiet an’ cauller, and then aiblins I bide a blink an’ hae a bit puff o’ my cutty, an’ syne I’ll gang to my bed wi’ an easy hairt. But, wheesht, mon! It’ll be twa o’ the day by the noo, I’m thinkin’? Is it so! Be gude to us! Weel, weel, I’ll gang my gait. I maunna be late to the wark; it’s a fearsome example to the laddies. ‘A scabbed sheep,’ says auld Allan, ‘smites the hale hirsel’.’ Guid day to ye; an’ keep awa’ frae Glesgie.” And with many a sigh and rheumatic hitch he shuffled off to the steps.

The old man was right. “Frae ane an’ twa o’ the day” a blither or more inspiring spot than Calton Hill would be hard to find. What more could possibly be desired, with a city so fair and famous at one’s feet and the air tonic with the sweetness of the heather and the brine of the sea! Fancy plays an amiable rôle and adds to one’s contentment with shadowy illusions of the Canongate of bygone days acclaiming Scotland’s kings and queens as they ride forth in pomp and pageantry, with trains of fierce clansmen from the furtherest Highlands, with pibrochs screaming, bonnets dancing, and axes and claymores rattling. And Montrose may pass with his Graham Cavaliers, or Argyle leading the Campbells of the Covenant. With our eyes on Holyrood, pathetic visions float before us of fair Mary of many sorrows, over whose gilded gloom the poets have loved to linger. One moment she looms in the heroic martyrdom conceived by Schiller, and the next we see her as Swinburne did in “Chastelard,” with

“lips

Curled over, red and sweet; and the soft space

Of carven brows, and splendor of great throat

Swayed lily-wise.”

Welcome apparitions of later days throng about us on the hill: Ramsay and his “Gentle Shepherd,” young Fergusson and his wild companions, Burns with his jovial cronies, the scholarly Jeffrey, the learned Hume, the inspired Sir Walter, the delightful revelers of the “Noctes Ambrosianæ,” the gentle Lady Nairne, the eager, brilliant Stevenson, and Dr. Brown with the faithful “Rab” and Ollivant with “Bob, Son of Battle.” The crisp sunshine lies golden on Princes Street and all her flowered terraces; it glints the grim redoubts of the Castle and lingers on the crooked gables of High Street. From the brown heather of the Pentlands to the distant sparkle of the Firth stretches a vigorous and comely land. What man so callous as to feel no joy in “Scotia’s Darling Seat”!

ANTWERP

2 P.M. TO 3 P.M.

A table in the lively little Café de la Terrasse, up on the broad stone promenoir overhanging the Antwerp docks, is one place in a thousand for the man who is inclined toward any such unusual combination as a maximum of twentieth-century business activity in a setting of the Middle Ages. He is fortunate in locality and happy in surroundings. A Parisian waiter removes the remains of his light luncheon of a salad of Belgian greens fresh this morning from a trim truck garden beyond the ramparts, refills the thin tumbler to the taste of the guest with foaming local Orge or light Brussels Faro or the bitter product of Ghent or the flat, insipid stuff they boast about at Louvain, and supplies a light for an excellent cigar made here in Antwerp of the best growth of Havana. Supposing it to be two o’clock of the usual mottled, doubtful afternoon,—for Antwerp’s weather, like Antwerp’s history, is mingled sunshine and shadows,—the loiterer may look out at his ease on a notable and fascinating panorama. Beneath him and to either side extend miles of massive docks of ponderous masonry, upon and about which swarms an ant-like multitude of nimble and active longshoremen plying a network of ropes and tackle, and directing the labors of vast, writhing derricks that toil like a mechanical Israel in bondage. Snuggling close to the grim granite walls are merchant mammoths from the ends of the earth, and into these, with the ease of a man stooping for a pin, gigantic steel arms sweep tons of casks and bales that they have lightly plucked out of long wharf trains lying alongside. There is a prodigious bustling of porters in long blue blouses, shouts and cries from the riverful of shipping, trampling of thousands of hobnailed shoes, and an incessant clatter of the wooden sabots of little Antwerp boys in peaked caps and baggy blue trousers and of little Antwerp girls in bright skirts and curious white headdress.

This sort of thing is proceeding for miles up and down the river front, and all through the intricate series of locks and bassins and canals that quadruple the wharfage of this rejuvenated old Flemish city. They are receiving whole argosies of raw material in the shape of hides, tobacco, and textiles, and are sending away fortunes in cut diamonds, delicate laces, linens, beer, sugar, and innumerable clever products of human hands from fragile glass to ponderous machinery. And they do it with more ease and, it seems necessary to add, with less profanity than any other port of Europe. What, then, could have possessed the genial Eugene Field to pass along that ancient slander on the excellent burghers of Flanders?

“At any rate, as I grieve to state,

Since these soldiers vented their danders,

Conjectures obtain that for language profane,

There is no such place as Flanders.

This is the kind of talk you’ll find

If ever you go to Flanders.”

While I should not wish to take such extreme ground as that assumed, in another connection, by a New York police inspector, when he observed that “every one of them facts has been verified to be absolutely untrue,” still I must say that, as far as I could notice, there is nothing notable about the Flemish oath as employed to-day. Indeed, it is more than likely that one could pass a long and pleasant evening loitering among the tavernes and recreation haunts of the Belgian soldier and civilian and come across nothing more vocally spirited than robust guffaws, possibly punctuated discreetly, or heavy fists thundering the time as a couple of comrades scrape over the sanded floor in the contagious rhythm of that venerable and favorite waltz of the Netherlands,—

“Rosa, willen wy dansen?

Danst Rosa; danst Rosa.

Rosa, willen wy dansen?

Danst Rosa zoet!”

On the other hand, if, with this much of an excuse, a stranger should go exploring Antwerp between two and three o’clock in quest of “verkoop men dranken” signs, he would be quite otherwise repaid in the discovery of charming huddled and crooked streets and a wealth of architectural quaintness and beauty. He would have no difficulty in finding tavernes and drinking-places, particularly along the river front, where they abound. As he passed them he would encounter robust whiffs of acrid and penetrating odors with tar and fish in the ascendancy, and catch glimpses of a wooden-shod peasantry fraternizing with evil-eyed “water-rats” and devouring vast quantities of salmon and sauerkraut washed down with ale and white beer. There is no charge now, as once there was, for noise made by patrons. The silk-fingered gentry overreached themselves here, for when, a number of years ago, they had carried the robbing of foreign sailors to the point of international notoriety, the authorities took a hand and devised a system of payment for Jack ashore; then the American and English ministers and consuls established and made popular the Sailors’ Bethel on the quay, with its clean and attractive reading- and amusement-rooms, and the Sailors’ Home on Canal de l’Ancre, where, for fifty-five cents a day, Jack can have a neat little room to himself and four excellent meals in the bargain. For these reasons among others, a visitor, even by night, finds much less of noise and revelry than he had anticipated, and beholds the thirsty Antwerpian content himself with a final “nip” at an estaminet or even make shift of a “nightcap” of mineral water or black coffee at one or another of the city’s innumerable cafés. In these he will himself be welcome to read the news of the day in the columns of “Le Précurseur” or “De Nieuwe Gazet,” or, better still, in the venerable “Gazet van Gent,” one of the oldest of existing newspapers, with nearly two hundred and fifty years of publication behind it. The real drinking will have been in progress where the out-of-town people have been dining à prix fixe, and clinking their burgundy and claret glasses at the great hotels on the Quai Van Dyck, the Place de Meir, or the Place Verte. The palm should really go to the amusement seekers of the latter little square; for nothing this side the capacity of an archery club at a July kermess can compare with the thirst of the music lovers who throng the tables on the sidewalks before the restaurants and cafés of jolly Place Verte when the band is playing, on balmy summer evenings. Instead of dissipation, the man who explores Antwerp makes constant discovery of unanticipated delights. He observes about him in the surprising little streets of the old section an amazing collection of absurd roofs slanting steeply up for several stories, pierced with owl-like, staring, round windows; house fronts by the hundreds with denticulated gables stepping upward like staircases toward the sky; and pots of flowers and immaculate muslin curtains in tiny doll-house windows peering out from the most unexpected and impossible places away up among the eaves and chimneys. He will catch an occasional glimpse of massive old four-poster beds with green curtains and yellow lace valances; of shining oak chests, and high-back chairs, and brown dining-rooms wainscoted in polished oak and most inviting with ponderous side-boards set with Delft platters and gleaming copper and pewter pieces. From time to time he will see large, cool living-rooms in which the father enjoys his paper and meerschaum pipe, while the placid-faced mother employs herself with lace or embroidery and the fair-haired daughter at the piano tells how

“Ik zag Cecilia komen

Langs eenen waterkant,

Ik zag Cecilia komen

Mit bloemen in haer hand.”

As I previously observed, there is no better place for a preliminary impression of Antwerp than along the docks. There one acquires some adequate idea of the amazing extent of its industrial operations and enjoys, at the same time, an extraordinary panorama of a river choked with shipping in the immediate foreground, and, on the opposite bank, the sombre redoubts of Tête de Flandre and Fort Isabelle keeping watch and ward over the flat little farms that extend seaward in fields of pale-green corn and barley. For any one who has done the proper amount of preparatory reading on Antwerp, it will inspire stirring thoughts of the musical, artistic, and martial career of this rare old Flemish town.

If the visitor be a lover of music—of Wagner’s music—the surrounding uproar and confusion will shortly fade into a charming reverie as he gazes far down the glittering zigzag of the Scheldt and some distant glimmer will take the form of the swan-boat of Lohengrin with the Grail knight leaning on his shining shield. The docks and quays will have disappeared, and in their place will once more lie the old low meadows, and, under the Oak of Justice, King Henry the Fowler will take seat on his throne with the nobles of Brabant ranged about him. Fair Elsa, charged with fratricide, moves slowly forward, sustained by her dream of a champion who is to come to her defense; and the heralds pace off the lists and appeal to the four quarters in the sonorous chant,—

“Wer hier im Gotteskampf zu streiten kam

Für Elsa von Brabant, der trete vor.”

And suddenly the peasants by the water’s edge cry out in amazement and point down the reaches of the river, and there comes glittering Lohengrin in the “shining armor” of Elsa’s dream. The champion steps ashore and gives no heed to the awe-hushed company until he has sung to his feathered steed what now every child in Germany could sing with him, “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan.” And then the contest rages and the false Frederick falls, and the royal cortège retires to the neighboring old fortress of the Steen. All night the treacherous Ortrud and her defeated Frederick plot by the steps of yonder cathedral, and there, in the morning, Lohengrin weds Elsa and the immortal Wedding March welcomes the “faithful and true” back to their fortress home. The black night of mistrust and carnage follows, and when day dawns Lohengrin bids farewell to his suspicious bride in these green Scheldt meadows and sails sadly away in his resplendent boat drawn by the dove of the Grail.

On the other hand, if the visitor has a mind for history, he may scorn the pretty Grail story and look with stern eyes on this Scheldt and the battle-scarred city beside it, mindful of the deeds of blood and fire that fill the hypnotic pages of Schiller, Prescott, and Motley. The monk of St. Gall could have appropriately dedicated to the war-ravaged Antwerp of those days his solemn antiphonal “media vita in morte sumus.” The grim, turreted Steen, just at hand, recalls the bloody reign of Alva and how he condemned a whole people to death in an order of three lines. In its present rôle of museum it houses hundreds of implements of torture that once were drenched in the blood of the heroic burghers of Antwerp. Not all the horrors of the “Spanish Fury,” when eight thousand citizens of this town were butchered in three days, nor the stirring memory of the “French Fury,” with Antwerp triumphant, can dim the glory of the heroic resistance the “Sea Beggars” made to the advance of the Duke of Parma up the Scheldt.

ANTWERP, FROM THE SCHELDT

From the cathedral tower one may see the little towns of Calloo and Oordam, on either bank of the river; it was between them that Parma built his bridge to obstruct navigation, and against it the men of Antwerp sent their famous fire-ships to open up a passage for the Zeelander allies. Gianibelli, who devised them, and whom Schiller styled “the Archimedes of Antwerp,” builded better than he knew, for with one ship he destroyed a thousand Spaniards and heaped up their defenses into a labyrinth of ruin. Could Antwerp have risen then above the clash of factions, there would have been no need later to tear down the dikes and present the strange spectacle of ships sailing over the land, and their story might have been as triumphant as Holland’s, and a united Netherlands have issued from those long wars with Spain.

Here where the visitor takes his afternoon ease many a brave pageant foregathered in the troubled, olden days. In the magic pages of old Van Meteren’s chronicles we see them pass again: Cold, gloomy, treacherous Philip stepping from his golden barge to walk under triumphal arches on a carpet of strewn roses, surrounded by magistrates and burghers splendid in ruffs and cramoisy velvet; later on, the Regent, Margaret of Parma, strident and gouty, whom Prescott has called “a man in petticoats”; and then the bloodthirsty Alva; then the dashing “Sword of Lepanto,” the brilliant and romantic Don John of Austria; next, the atrocious Requesens; and, last of all, the revengeful Alexander of Parma. Hopeful, stolid, impassive Antwerp, ever the sheep for the shearers, ever believing that at last the worst was over, rejoices in her welcome to each as though the millennium had finally dawned on all her troubles and sets cressets to blazing in the cathedral tower and roasts whole oxen in the public squares.

The scream of a river siren will arouse the visitor from the Past to the Present, and, with a sigh, he will saunter forth to see the places that cannot come to him. He will leave with regret this busy, fascinating river—“the lazy Scheldt” that Goldsmith loved. Excited little tugs are bustling busily about, queer-coated dock-hands struggle mightily with their mammoth burdens, and ships of every shape and pattern throng the roadstead before him. The sharp and trim Yankee sloop, the ponderous German tramp, the fastidious British freighter, the clean-cut ocean liner, and, best of all, the round-sterned, wallowing Dutch craft, green of hull and yellow of sail,—all are here, and, he can think, for his especial diversion. A canal barge crawls laboriously by, and in that floating home which she seldom cares to leave, a much-be-petticoated mother of Flanders busies herself with her many children and looks after the care of her tiny house;—and looks after it well, as you may see by the spotless little curtains that flutter in the windows and the bright pots of geraniums that stand on the sills. One recalls the keen delight this singular craft afforded Robert Louis Stevenson at the time he made his charming “Inland Voyage” from Antwerp. Quoth he: “Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands; the most picturesque of things amphibious.... There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.”

Along the front there is also opportunity to expend a couple of francs to advantage for a ticket on the comfortable little steamer that is just impatiently casting off from the embarcadère, and to go sailing with her on an hour’s voyage up the river to Tamise to view the shipping at greater length, to see the merchants’ villas at Hoboken, and finally the famous picture of the Holy Family at the journey’s end. Otherwise the visitor may take a parting look up the Quay van Dyck and the Quay Jordaens, examine once more the striking Porte de l’Escaut that Rubens decorated, and so turn a reluctant back on the bright life of the river to thread a crooked street or two, cobbled and tortuous, and issue forth on the Grand Place before the immense, fantastic Hôtel de Ville.

In the drowsy early afternoon this quaint and curious old city hall wears a most friendly and reposeful air. To one who has never before seen any of these extraordinary Old-World buildings such a one as this will move such incredulity as mastered the countryman at the first sight of a giraffe;—“Shucks!” said he when he had looked it all over, “there never was such an animal!” Fancy a rambling, picture-book of a structure a hundred yards long, made up of the oddest combination of architectural orders—massive pillars for the first story, Doric arcades for the second, Ionic for the third, and last of all, an abbreviated colonnade supporting a steep, tent-like, gable-pierced roof! As though some touch of the whimsical might even so have been neglected, behold a pompous central tower, decorated to suffocation, arched of window and graven of column, rearing itself in three diminishing, denticulated stories above the long, sloping roof, until the singular, box-like ornaments on the very tiptop appear tiny Greek tombs of a cloud-hung Acropolis. The statues of Wisdom and Justice could pass for Æschylus and Sophocles, and the Holy Virgin on the summit might very well be Athena. The friendly air to which I have referred extends even to these statues, who have the appearance of shouting down to you to come in out of the heat and have a look at the great stairway of colored marbles and rest awhile before the splendid chimney-piece of delicately carved black-and-white stone in the elaborate Salle des Mariages. Subtle matchmakers, those statues! And, indeed, if Antwerp is the first steamer-stop of the visitor, he may well be pardoned for reveling in this Hôtel de Ville as something that for picturesque beauty he may not hope to better elsewhere. And yet that would only be because he had not seen the glorious one at Brussels, or the grim and huddled caprice at Mechlin, or the incredible Halle aux Draps at Ypres, or the amazing Rabot Gate or Watermen’s Guild House of Ghent. And even these will fall back into the commonplace once he has drifted along the Quai du Rosaire of drowsy old Bruges and been steeped in picturesqueness and color that is beyond any man’s describing.

No one who cares for structural quaintness and originality can fail to find especial delight in the surroundings of this venerable Grand Place. Along one entire side, like prize competitors in an architectural fancy ball, shoulder to shoulder, stiff and precise, range the old Halls of the Guilds. The Archers, the Coopers, the Tailors, the Carpenters, and all the others of that most unusual alignment, present themselves in full regalia of characteristic ornament and design. As though in keeping with their ancient traditions of stout rivalry, there is a very real air of vying between themselves for some coveted palm for fantastic bizarreness; and all the while with a solemn innocence of being at all grotesque or unusual. One could laugh at their naïve unconsciousness of the prodigious show they make, with sculptures and adornments of bygone days and a combined violent sky-line slashed with long eaves and bitten out in serrated gable ends. But there is little of merriment and very much of reverence in the thoughts they excite of worthy pride in skill of craftsmanship and the glory their masters brought to this city in the sixteenth century in winning from Venice the industrial supremacy of the world. In those days there were no poor in all Antwerp and every child could read and write at least two languages, and the Counts of Flanders were more powerful than half the kings of Europe.

But the Grand Place has more to show than the guild halls. The apogee of the whimsical and fantastic has been attained in the choppy sea of red-tiled roof-tops that eddies above this huddled neighborhood. Grim old dormered veterans, queer and chimerical, palsied and askew, have here held their own stoutly through the centuries. They have echoed back the shouts of the crusaders, the triumphal cannon of Spanish royalty, and the free-hearted welcomes to foreign princes come to curry favor with the Flemish merchant rulers of the world. They have turned gray with the groans of their nobles writhing under the Inquisition and rosy with approval of the adroit and courageous William of Nassau. From their antique windows have leaned the burgomasters of Rubens and the cavaliers of Velasquez, brave in ruffs and beards; and out of the most hidden nests of their eaves the wan and pallid faces of their hunted sons have been raised to watch the approach of the ruthless soldiery of Requesens and Parma. These old roofs look down to-day on a rich and happy people whose skill and tireless industry have reared a commercial fabric that astonishes the world.

At this afternoon hour the Grand Place betrays little of its early-morning activity, when it is thronged with the overflowing stands of busy marketmen in baggy trousers, and banks of rich colors of the flower-women in immaculate linen headdress proffering the choice output of their scrupulously tilled farms. Scarcely less picturesque are these oddly garbed country-folk than the famous fish-venders over at Ostend, and certainly they are a more fragrant people to shop among. A curious and colorful picture they present with the long lines of gayly painted dog-carts blazing with peonies and geraniums. Huddled around the great statue of Brabo they quite throw into limbo the Daughters of the Scheldt that are disporting in bronze on the pedestal. Brabo himself, Antwerp’s Jack-the-Giant-Killer, pauses on high in the act of hurling away the severed hand of the vanquished Antigonus as though he could see no unoccupied spot to throw it in. Should he let go at random, and hit house Number 4, he could surely expect to be hauled down forthwith, for the great Van Dyck was born there, and Antwerp is nothing if not reverent of the memory of her glorious sons of Art. And Brabo cannot afford to take too many chances with the security of his own position, for he himself has a rival; Napoleon the Great was really a greater champion of Flanders than he, and overthrew a worse enemy of Antwerp’s than the fabled Antigonus when he raised the embargo on the Scheldt, that had existed for a century and a half under the terms of the outrageous Treaty of Westphalia, until scarcely a rowboat would venture over the silt-choked mouth of the river, and only then to find the famous capital a forsaken village of empty streets and abandoned factories. The dredging of the channel, the expenditure of millions in construction of wharves and quays, and the restoration of the city to its high place in the commercial world was a greater and more difficult work than Brabo’s.

The varied and vivid life of Antwerp unfolds itself strikingly in the early afternoon to one who exchanges the sleepy, mediæval Grand Place for the broad, curving, crowded boulevard of the popular Place de Meir. It was just such clean and handsome streets as this that inspired John Evelyn to write so delightedly of Antwerp two hundred and fifty years ago, describing them in his famous “Diary” as “fair and noble, clean, well-paved, and sweet to admiration.” Indeed, everything seemed to have charmed Evelyn here, as witness his inclusive approval, “Nor did I ever observe a more quiet, clean, elegantly built, and civil place than this magnificent and famous city of Antwerp.” Rubens, the name of names in Flanders, was then too recently dead to have come into the fullness of his fame; whereas to-day one thinks of him continually here and likes nothing better than the many opportunities to study him in the completeness of his wonderful career—“the greatest master,” said Sir Joshua Reynolds, “in the mechanical part of the art, that ever exercised a pencil.” Even trivial associations of his activity are cherished; as we find them, for instance, in the little woodcut designs he made for his famous friend, Christopher Plantin, the greatest printer of the era, and which one handles reverently in the old Plantin house in the Marché du Vendredi—that picture-book of a house, where corbel-carved ceiling-beams overhang antique presses, types, and mallets, and great windows of tiny leaded panes let in a flood of light from the rarest and mellowest old courtyard in the whole of the Netherlands.

The Place de Meir is Antwerp’s Broadway; and an afternoon stroll along it affords a constantly changing view of stately public and private buildings, no less attractive to the average man than those “apple-green wineshops, garlanded in vines” that delighted Théophile Gautier on the river front. Little corner shrines, so numerous in this city, shelter saints of tinsel and gilt and receive the reverence of a population that has four hundred Catholics to every Protestant. One must necessarily delight in a street whose houses are all of delicately colored brick, with stone trimmings carved to a nicety and shutters painted in softest greens. The imposing Royal Palace is graceful and beautiful, but human interest goes out to the stone-garlanded house across the way,—old Number 54,—where Rubens was born and where he lived so many years and took so much pleasure in making beautiful for his parents. On either hand one sees solid residences of the most generous proportions, and all in tints of pink and gray, and busy hotels with red-faced porters hurrying about in long blouses. Picture stores and bookshops scrupulously stocked with religious volumes beguile lingering inspection. There are establishments on every hand for the sale of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, with windows hung with confirmation wreaths, crucifixes, rosaries, and what-not. Occasionally, even here, one discovers, crushed in between more consequential businesses, the celebrated little gingerbread-shops of which so much amused notice has been taken. Restaurants and cafés abound. One sees them on every hand, with their characteristic overflow of tables and chairs on the sidewalk, always thronged, both inside and out, with jolly, chattering patrons and gleaming in sideboard and shelf with highly polished vessels of brass and pewter. Here and there one passes the confectionery shops, called pâtisseries, where ices, mild liqueurs, and mineral waters refresh a thriving trade. Stevenson found no relish for Flemish food, pronouncing it “of a nondescript, occasional character.” He complained that the Belgians do not go at eating with proper thoroughness, but “peck and trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit.” “All day long” is apt enough, for Antwerp’s restaurants and cafés are always thronged.

These ruddy-faced and placid Belgians are a very serene and contented people. It is pleasant and even restful to watch them; they go about the affairs of life with such an absence of fret and fever. Spanish-appearing ladies float gracefully past in silk mantillas; priests by the hundreds shuffle along leisurely in picturesque hats and gowns; the portly merchant, on his way at this hour to the moresque, many-columned Bourse, proceeds in like deliberate and unhurried fashion. Street venders, in peaked caps and voluminous trousers, approach you with calm deliberation and retire unruffled at your dismissal. On every sunny corner military men by the score “loafe and invite their souls.” Tradesmen in the shops and cabmen in the open go about their business as though it were a matter of infinite leisure. Even the day laborers in the streets, whose huge sabots stand in long rows by the curb, survey life tranquilly; why worry when a good pair of wooden shoes costs less than a dollar and will last for five or six years?

The snatches of conversation one catches betray the confusion of tongues inseparable from a nation of whom one half cannot understand the other, and whose cousins, once or twice removed, are of foreign speech to either. The Dutch spoken in the Scheldt country is said to be as bewildering to a German, as is the French the Walloons employ in the valley of the Meuse to a Parisian. But although the Flemish outnumber their fellow countrymen of Wallonia two to one, still French is the tongue of the court, the sciences, and all the educated and upper circles. It is like Austria-Hungary all over again. And French continues steadily to gain ground in spite of the utmost efforts of the enthusiasts behind the new “Flemish Movement.” One sees both classes on the Place de Meir,—the stolid, light-haired man of Flanders and the nervous, swarthy Walloon. The beauty of the blue-eyed, belle Flamande is in happy contrast with that of the slender, dark-eyed Wallonne, and their poets have exhausted themselves in efforts to do justice to either side of so delicate and distracting a dilemma. Our grandmothers heard much of the charms of La Flamande when Lortzing’s melodious “Czaar und Zimmermann” was so popular, seventy-five years ago:—

“Adieu, ma jolie Flamande,

Que je quitte malgré moi!

J’en aurai la de demand,

J’ai de l’amitié pour toi.”

The complexion of the life on the Place de Meir changes with the hours. Between two and three o’clock we find it disposed to adapt itself as closely as possible along lines of personal comfort. By five it will be lively with carriages and automobiles bound for the driving in the prim little Pépinière, or the bird-thronged Zoölogical gardens, or around the lake in the central park, with a turn up the fashionable Rue Carnot to the stately boulevards of the new and exclusive Borgerhout section. At that hour one may count confidently upon seeing every uniform of the garrison among the crowds of officers who turn out to have a part in the beauty show. On the other hand, if it were early morning—very early morning—and the sun were still fighting its way through the mists and vapors of the Scheldt, the Place de Meir would resound with rattling little carts by the hundreds, bearing great milk cans of glittering, polished brass packed in straw, by whose sides patient, placid-faced women would trudge along in quaint thimble-bonnets, with plaid shawls crossed and belted above voluminous skirts and their feet set securely in the clumsy wooden sabots of the Fatherland. Market gardeners in linen smocks and gray worsted stockings would be bringing Antwerp its breakfast in carts only a little larger than the milk-women’s, and butcher boys would be scurrying by with meat trays on their heads or suspended from yokes across their shoulders. And all the echoes of the city would be forced into feverish activity to answer the wild clamor of the barking and fighting dogs, shaggy and strong, that draw all these picturesque little wagons. Assuredly there are few sights in Antwerp so impressive to the stranger as this substitution of dog for horse. It has been celebrated in prose and verse, with Ouida possibly carrying off the palm with her canine vie intime, “A Dog of Flanders.”

As the loiterer continues his afternoon stroll to the large and central Place de Commune, crosses into the chain of transverse boulevards, and returns riverward to that choicest spot of all, the tree-shaded, memory-haunted Place Verte, he is bound to reflect upon the vast changes that Antwerp, above all other Continental cities, has experienced in the last quarter-century. He will marvel, too, that Robert Bell should have lamented in his charming “Wayside Pictures” the paucity of gay life here and particularly the lack of theatrical entertainment. It may have been so when Bell wrote, fifty years ago, but it is decidedly otherwise to-day. So far as theatres go, they simply abound; nor could city streets be gayer than these, thronged with a merry, happy people and bright with the uniforms of artillery-men and fortress engineers, grenadiers of the line and the dashing chasseurs-à-cheval. Every hotel and café has its orchestra; and in the early evening practically every square of the city has its concert by a band from a regiment or guild. There is no suburb, they say, but has its own band or orchestra, or both. Indeed, Antwerp is nearly as music-mad as art-mad.

The shady aisles of poplars in the cozy Place Verte, the perfumes and peaceful sounds, the music of the cathedral bells, the homelike hotels and cafés and the drowsy, nodding Old-World house-fronts combine to produce a sense of comfort and satisfaction peculiar to this favored little square. There is, besides, a special and impressive feeling of something like the personal presence of the great Rubens; partly, perhaps, from the fact that the city’s chief statue of him, a lifelike bronze of heroic size, stands at the centre of the Place. Twice the normal stature of man it is, and its pedestal is five times as high as one’s head, and the great palette, book, and scrolls are all of more generous proportions than such things actually ever are;—but there seems nothing at all disproportionate in that, considering what he was and what the average man is. The memory of one who could paint a masterpiece in a day, who stood head and shoulders above every living artist of his time, and whose work has inspired and delighted mankind for three hundred years, becomes, like all great objects, positively prodigious from actual proximity. Such is the inevitable attitude towards Rubens when one touches the things he touched, walks the streets of the city where he was born, lived, and lies buried, where he wrought his greatest artistic triumphs, and where his finest work is still preserved and reverenced. The most admired cathedral in the whole of the Netherlands rises out of the fluttering tree-tops of the square, and the greatest treasures it contains are the product of this man’s genius. Every one feels the Rubens influence in the Place Verte; Eugène Fromentin, fresh from his pictorial triumphs of Algerian life, observed in “Les Maîtres d’Autrefois”: “Our imagination becomes excited more than usual when, in the centre of Place Verte, we see the statue of Rubens and further on, the old basilica where are preserved the triptychs which, humanly speaking, have consecrated it.” Such are the privileged emotions of the wise and fortunate visitors who pitch their passing tent in this fair and favored nook.

Reflections over Rubens naturally arouse thoughts of the many sons of Flanders who won preëminence in the domain of art. No other city, inexplicable as it is, has, in modern times, seen so large a proportion of its citizens achieve the loftiest heights of fame in this glorious activity; nor has any other honored art so unaffectedly in memorializing their triumphs. In Antwerp there are scores of streets and squares, and even quays, named after its artists. There are also fine statues to Rubens, Van Dyck, David Teniers, Jordaens, Quinten Matsys, and Hendrik Leys, and other memorials to the brothers Van Eyck, to Memling, Wappers, Frans Hals, Van der Heyden, De Keyser, and Verboekhoven. In private and public collections the people have jealously kept possession of the masterpieces of their fellow countrymen. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, on the Place du Musée, is as much a treasure-house of Flemish art as the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam is of Dutch art. Again Place Verte plumes itself, for just around the corner was born the great Teniers, wizard depicter of tavern life and kermesses, and on one side is that tourists’ delight, the graceful, feathery well-top that Quinten Matsys wrought out of a single piece of iron, before the days when love inspired him to win the most coveted laurels of the painter.

However, art aside, Place Verte has distinctions of its own. Something of interest is always occurring here. Suburban bands hold weekly competitions in its artistic pavilion and the most skillful musicians hold concerts here each evening. The sidewalks then are crowded with chairs and tables, and at the close the people rise and join in the national hymn “La Brabançonne,” with its out-of-date lament to the men of Brabant that “the orange may no longer wave upon the tree of Liberty.” Of an afternoon a regiment may swing through in full regalia, the red, yellow, and black flag snapping in the van, and the band crashing out the ancient war-song “Bergen-op-Zoom.” If to-day were July 21 there would be tremendous enthusiasm and cheering celebrating the Fêtes Nationales in honor of the Revolution of 1830; as well there should, for Belgium is the smallest and one of the most desirable little kingdoms of all Europe, and the national motto, “L’Union fait la Force,” has to be closely adhered to if the Lion of Brabant would stand up under the baiting of his powerful and covetous neighbors.

The passing of a Sister of the Béguinage, in sombre black garb and an extraordinary creation of immaculate white linen on her head, recalls the many things one has read of this interesting and noble order which is peculiarly Belgium’s own. Their neat little settlements are a source of endless admiration to strangers, and quite as fascinating is their beautiful vesper service which bears the pretty name of the “salut des Béguines.” Readers of Laurence Sterne, who should be legion, promptly recall the curious story of “The Fair Béguine” that Trim told Uncle Toby in “Tristram Shandy,” and the valiant Captain’s comment: “They visit and take care of the sick by profession—I had rather, for my own part, they did it out of good nature.”

It is one of the proud distinctions of Place Verte to be at the very portals of Antwerp’s glorious cathedral, the largest, richest, and most beautiful in the Netherlands. From his café chair the visitor watches its great shadow steal over him as the afternoon wanes, while at any moment by merely raising his eyes he may revel in the graceful outlines of its sweep of ambulatory chapels and let the aspiring tips of delicate pinnacles and arches entice his vision to the loftiest point of its one finished and matchless tower. Never was Napoleon so pat in “fitting the scene with the apposite phrase” as when he compared this tower to Mechlin lace. It is delightful to look up above the trees of the Place at the enormous bulk of this tremendous structure, stained and darkened by the vapors of river and canals, study its rich carvings and stained-glass windows centuries old, and note how the blue sky, in patterns of delicate foliation and fragile arch, shines like mosaics through the clustered apertures of the filmy openwork of the lofty tower. A hundred bells drip mellow music from that exquisite belfry every few minutes all day long. You listen, perhaps, to detect the impression they gave Thackeray of a new version of the shadow-dance from “Dinorah,” conscious that they are going to haunt you as they did him for days after you have left Antwerp far behind. It is peculiarly appropriate that the Lohengrin Wedding March should be a favorite on the bells of the very cathedral where Lohengrin, according to the story, was married. Indeed, so many and so varied are the clear bell-voices of this great carillon that their music seems, as the neighboring bells of Bruges did to Longfellow,—

“Like the psalms from some old cloister,

When the nuns sing in the choir;

And the great bell tolled among them,

Like the chanting of a friar.”

Within this treasure-chest of a cathedral are jewels worthy of such a casket. One goes out of the glare of the afternoon sun into the coolness and scented gloom of its vaulted, many-aisled, and multi-chapeled vastness, and there in the hush of worshipers kneeling in prayer he finds splendid altars that gleam in a profusion of ornaments of silver, gold, and precious stones, glorious rose-windows, carven confessionals and choir stalls, life-like figures in wax clad in silks and crowned in gold, hundreds of masterful paintings, a high altar of extraordinary splendor blazing in costly decorations under a golden canopy supported by silver figures, and, at the centre of the seven aisles, Verbruggen’s far-famed carved wooden pulpit, realistic in lifelike foliage and birds, and with plump little cherubim floating aloft with the apparently fluttering canopy. As if this were not enough to distinguish any one church, here hang three of the most glorious creations of the hand of man, the masterpieces of Rubens himself. The Assumption alone could have sufficed; what is it, then, to have the tremendous glory of the presence of those greater achievements, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross! One feels he could easily do as did the hero of Gautier’s “Golden Fleece” and carry away forever after a hopeless passion for the beautiful, grief-stricken Magdalen.

The power and appeal of sheer beauty has perhaps never been exampled as in the case of this cathedral. Through all the sackings and pillages of Antwerp the savagery and destructiveness of her foes have stopped here. The most ruthless soldiery could not bring themselves to lay violent hands upon it. One exception stands out in this remarkable experience, and that one was quite sufficient. The fanatical “Iconoclasts,” frenzied against the Church of Rome, fell to a depth of abasement below the worst villains of Spain. Those atrocious, misguided “Iconoclasts”! What a frightful page in Antwerp’s history is the one that recounts the three days of horrors of these frantic and terrible zealots, three hundred and fifty years ago! Schiller, Motley, and Prescott have told the story as few stories have ever been told. In the calm of this afternoon it is impossible to conceive the uproar and confusion with which these lofty arches then resounded. Fancy a horde of men and boys, lighted by wax tapers in the hands of screaming women of the streets, demolishing the altars and rending and destroying every exquisite decoration and even tearing open the graves and scattering the bones of the dead. Says Motley: “Every statue was hurled from its niche, every picture torn from the wall, every wonderfully painted window shivered to atoms, every ancient monument shattered, every sculptured decoration, however inaccessible in appearance, hurled to the ground. Indefatigably, audaciously,—endowed, as it seemed, with preternatural strength and nimbleness,—these furious Iconoclasts clambered up the dizzy heights, shrieking and chattering like malignant apes, as they tore off in triumph the slowly matured fruit of centuries.”

Not the cathedral alone, but every Catholic temple of Antwerp, and four hundred others in Flanders, were sacked in this sudden revolt against the Papacy. It is said that King Philip, when he heard of it, fell into a paroxysm of frenzy and tore his beard for rage, swearing by the soul of his father that it should cost them dear. How dear it shortly did cost them, both the guilty and the innocent, we are shown in the picture Schiller has drawn of Calvinists’ bodies dangling from the beams of their roofless churches, of “the places of execution filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the highroads with fugitives.” Such was one of the extraordinary experiences through which this beautiful cathedral passed—one of the maddest, most senseless, and most frightfully punished outbreaks in all history.

In the company of the doves that nest among the pinnacles and arches away up in the cathedral tower, one looks out at this hour on a very considerable portion of the little kingdom—forty miles, they tell you, with a good glass, in any direction. It is a prospect well worth the weary climb. Just below, the tiled and gabled roofs rise and fall all about like a troubled sea. The crooked streets of the old section and the straight ones of the new, and the places and parks in verdant spaces here and there have the appearance of some vast topographical map. The gray Scheldt lies like a string of Ghent flax to Antwerp’s bent bow. A wrinkled arc of massive and intricate fortifications wards the rich city from its foes, and just beyond lie numerous tiny villages all with the exact primness of mathematical problems. An unusual country view is spread out on every hand. Canals, numerous as fences and dotted with boats and slowly-moving barges, sear the green fields like pale-blue scars; and white, dusty roads criss-cross with their solemn flanking of tall poplar trees. As if this region were the natural habitat of some strange and monstrous form of animal life, one beholds everywhere a semblance of motion and activity in the gaunt, waving, canvas arms of hundreds of plethoric windmills. Diminutive, trim farms, like little gardens, give the appearance of a general carpeting by Turkish rugs of vivid and diversified design; each has its whitewashed cottage roofed in thatch or tile and set in orchards hedged with box and hawthorn. Fields of corn, wheat, rye, and oats expand in well-kept richness, and in all this profusely cultivated region men, women, boys, and girls toil from the faintest dawn to sunset, and often all night by moonlight, content and even happy in the winning of enough to supply clothing and shelter and the unvarying fare of soup, coffee, and black rye bread. Seaward and northward lie sand dunes, dikes, and polders stretching away to the old morasses where the valiant Morini faced and stopped even Cæsar. Literary people will see in all this country the land of “Quentin Durward,” as that greatest story of Flanders comes to mind, and they will perhaps reflect upon the characteristics of the good burghers of those days, whom Sir Walter thought “fat and irritable,” and will see young Durward defying the ferocious “Wild Boar of Ardennes” in the perilous service of the fair Lady Isabelle, herself a Flemish countess.

To the northwest one sees the gleaming reaches of the Scheldt emptying themselves into the distant sea and, nearer at hand, solemn little Terneuzen where the ships turn into the canal for Ghent—Ghent, the “Manchester of Belgium,” where old Roland swings in his belfry and calls

“o’er lagoon and dike of sand,

‘I am Roland! I am Roland! There is victory in the land.’”

On the east rise the spires of Westmalle, where in their Trappist convent austere disciples of St. Bruno, garbed in sackcloth and with shaven heads, pass their voiceless lives and keep watch beside the open graves in the orchard. To the south is venerable Mechlin on the many-bridged river Dyle, once famous for such laces as we may still see in the pictures of its immortal son, Frans Hals. Brussels lifts its towers forty miles due south, and stretches its broad roads to Waterloo. And it is there the black forest of Ardennes expands, where St. Hubert, patron of hunters, intercedes for the health of good dogs, and which certain Shakespearean editors have fixed upon as the Forest of Arden of “As You Like It.” Over there lies Namur where the gallant Uncle Toby of “Tristram Shandy” received the painful wound deplored of the Widow Wadman, “before the Gate of St. Nicholas,” as the precise description always ran, “in one of the traverses of the trench, opposite to the salient angle of the demibastion of St. Roch.”

One lingers long and delightedly over this charming panorama of fascinating and storied associations, until presently the great clock beneath us booms the hour of three, and our time is up. We turn regretfully from this toyland country and the gracious, old-fashioned town—this placid, music-loving, art-reverencing Antwerp, with its many gables and its many rare delights. The friendly moon, a little later, will silver her huddled roofs and serrated fronts, her façades whose fantastic ends will be steps for White Pierrot to go up to his chimney-tops, her quiet squares and quaint, twisting alleys, her solid burgher mansions and vineclad waterman cottages. Serene and chaste, the delicate spire of the magic cathedral will rear its traceried, guardian length from out the deep shadows of little Place Verte and look down all night, with the affection of half a thousand years, on this quaint and merry Antwerp snuggling up to the languid Scheldt.

ROME

3 P.M. TO 4 P.M.

Like the lizards in the dusty Forum ruins, emerging from dusky retreats to warm and blink in the sun and then flash back into some sheltered refuge, so visitors at Rome issue from dim closing museums at three o’clock in the afternoon and gaze around in a stupid, dazed fashion on a sky of cloudless deep blue and on placid streets and squares that seem fairly to quiver in a golden haze of strong sunshine. After the cool interiors the sultry heat seems doubly oppressive, and there is something of the nature of a mild struggle before reality succeeds in summoning them back from that vague state of disassociation, that condition of all-mind-and-no-body, produced by an intense and protracted study of all those wonderful things that great museums contain. To this confused condition of mind there is generally added a further disquieting element in the shape of a blank misgiving as to how the intervening hour can be tolerably passed before joining the four o’clock promenaders in the Pincian Gardens to see Roman Fashion at its ante-prandial rites. And yet were strangers merely to remain receptive and allow their extraordinary surroundings to assert themselves and supply the diversion with which they are dynamically charged, this is an hour that might well prove to be one of the most delightful of the whole twenty-four in Rome.

For the masterful spell of the Eternal City is still world-conquering; it only asks the chance. Protract your stay as you will, there remains at last a sense of awe, almost of incredulity, at being, in the actual flesh, in precincts so ultra-venerated—in dread, historic Rome. It is only a somewhat milder form of the feeling that overpowered you the very first morning of your visit when, after the night’s sleep of forgetfulness, you read with amazed, half-awake eyes the printed slip on the bedroom door that affirmed your hotel to be on no less august an eminence than one of the seven hills of Rome. Even when you had rushed to the window for corroboration and stared out in excited astonishment on a vast shoulder of dusty, reddish brown ruins with pert vines greening in its loftiest recesses, and a guidebook insisted that they were the Baths of Diocletian, a reluctant fear remained that you might only be, after all, in the pleasant toils of the old, recurrent dream from which you might shortly and miserably awake.

But if, at three o’clock of a summer afternoon, the particular museum whose doors are remorselessly closing upon your final, lingering look chances to be that fortunate one on the Capitoline Hill that houses, among its array of mellow antiques, the pointed-ear original of Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun,” you could not do better than make use of the remainder of the admission ticket and have a survey of Rome from the airy summit of the campanile in the rear. To effect this, one picks his way among the imposing remains of the ancient record-house of the tabularium, mounts the long flight of iron steps in a corner of its colonnade, and soon reaches the top of the tower of the Capitol, with Rome as utterly at his feet as ever it appeared to the eyes of Alaric and his Goths.

In tones of soft yellow, gray, and dull orange the roof-masses sweep northward, eastward, and westward, while to the southward and at your feet lies heaped the earthy, dusty chaos of ruins that crown the imperial Palatine, the popular Cælian, and the luckless Aventine Hills. Parks and villa gardens are blotches of dark foliage; and, within its white embankment walls, the sacred Tiber, in a twisting yellow band, rushes swiftly down the face of the city in its mad rush for Ostia and the sea. Beyond the most distant suburbs extend the rolling plains of the Campagna like an all-embracing sea, until they seem to wash in a gentle surf about the Sabine foot-hills, away to the north, and brim southward to the verge of the Alban Hills beyond the farthest glimpse of the Aqueduct’s long line of broken arches or the dimming perspective of that taut thread, the Appian Way. From this vantage-point the city may hide no surface secrets. It lies below us like an enormous fan, whose converging point is the round Piazza del Popolo, a good mile to the north. Like three great fingers, there extend from that focus the Via Ripetta, the Via Babuino, and, in the centre and running toward us as straight as a ruler, the popular Corso carrying the old Flaminian Way right through the heart of modern Rome. By degrees we come to distinguish familiar churches among the hundreds of spires, towers, and domes; to pick out, here and there, a mediæval watchtower; to locate well-known squares; to name an occasional obelisk; to identify a column; and even to particularize some of the scores of fountains that give latter-day Rome a pleasant distinction among modern cities. The ribbed, blue-gray dome of St. Peter’s looms impressively from out the deep green of the Papal Gardens of the yellow Vatican; the circular bulk of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo and the columned Pantheon look as familiar as old friends to us—though they may not be friends to each other, with the latter, under papal stress, forced in other days to yield its beautiful bronze tiles to make saints’ ornaments and cannon for the former; the yellow walls of the Sant’ Onofrio monastery mark where died Tasso, “King of Bards,” and where they still show his crucifix and inkstand; and yonder is the great gray church where Beatrice Cenci lies in her nameless grave. If we turn and look southward we see strange sun-tricks among the bleak and shadowy corridors of the vast, half-demolished Colosseum, and crumbling arches of the emperors warm into a venerable dotage. The sun-baked wreckage of the Forum expands at our feet in rows of column stumps, shattered arches, isolated shafts with clinging fragments of cornice and entablature, yawning earthen doorways and dusty heaps of cluttered brick and tufa,—like a gigantic honeycomb,—while all about it birds are singing divinely in the shade of the laurels. The famed Tarpeian Rock, just at hand, has little suggestion of a short shrift for traitors, with rookeries nestling snugly to its base and a rose-trellised garden on its commodious summit.

Victor Emmanuel II, in the regal cool of bronze, gazes over his colossal charger in the gigantic monument on the Capitoline slopes below us and beholds the hills studded with the pretty white villas of his grandson’s prosperous subjects, and the Quarter of the Fields carpeted with the neat stucco homes of the poor that used to languish in the vile slums of the old Ghetto. Had he read Zola’s “Rome” he might even be justified in frowning at so defamatory a description of so pleasant a section. But apparently he prefers to watch the afternoon glow on the gleaming domes and towers and myrtle-set villas of the Trastevere, where the powerful and violent descendants of the ancient Romans still dwell; and to take amused note of Garibaldi over there twisting around on his big bronze horse to keep a wary eye on St. Peter’s.

It taxes the credulity of the visitor to comprehend that yonder is the renowned Janiculum, down whose slopes Lars Porsena led his troops to contend with Horatius Cocles and his intrepid companions as they “held the bridge”—only a hundred yards from where we are standing. And, indeed, imagination is quite unequal to the tasks set it on all this historic ground. Even if we succeed in carrying ourselves back through the periods of the popes, the emperors, the republic, the kings, and possibly the shepherds, what is to become of us when confronted with the statement of Ampère that there were really “nine Romes before Rome.” It is quite enough to undertake the reconstruction of ancient Rome to the mind’s eye, such as authentic history describes it, considering how repeatedly its conquerors sacked it, and how both Nero and Robert Guisecard burned it; and that the Romans themselves, as Lanciani insists, have done more harm to it than all invading hosts put together. “What the Barbarians did not do,” ran the famous pasquinade, “the Barberini did.” It is, really, asking too much of the man who is risking “a touch of sun” to see the city from the sweltering top of the Capitol Tower, to expect him to be communing with himself in terms of travertine and peperino and reassembling antiquities as an agreeable pastime. He will probably content himself with a hasty glance around, and a little irreverent levity over the task of Ascanius, son of “the pious Æneas,” in building a city on the scraggy ridge of distant Alba Longa, or the scramble the Roman bachelors must have had when they scampered down the neighboring Quirinal Hill with their arms full of their Sabine allies’ wives. As he trudges down the tower steps and catches periodic glimpses of that ancient Latium that is now the Campagna, he ought to devote a moment to self-congratulation that the pestilence no longer stalks there by night and noon-day, or that the evil campagnards of Andersen’s “Improvisatore” no more terrorize with impunity, or wild beasts imperil the wayfarer; but rather that these latter themselves flee, especially the foxes, what time the red-coated gentlemen of the English Hunt round on them among the shattered tombs of the Appian Way.

And yet, if the visitor is a sentimentalist, no Italian sun is going to rob him of his reverie: he will be hearing the cries of the Christian martyrs at a Colosseum matinée, and beholding the pride and beauty of ancient Rome loitering along the palace-lined streets on their way to the afternoon diversions at the Baths of Caracalla. And the Forum will bustle with the state business of the world, Cicero will mount the rostrum, and a train of Vestal Virgins pass demurely along the Sacra Via. He will attend the mournful wails of priests at worship in the temples of Jupiter and Saturn, and thrill to see a detachment of the Prætorian Guard dash into the Forum and acclaim some new military hero as emperor. But this should be sufficient to startle him back to the Rome of to-day, and as he looks anxiously over to the northwestern walls, beyond which once stood that infamous camp, he will doubtless rejoice devoutly that the sober and law-abiding soldiery that drills there now is something so very different from the uncontrollable “Frankenstein” that the Cæsars devised to their own undoing. It is, in consequence, with hearty complacence that he will turn his back on even the aristocratic treasure-heap of the lordly Palatine, conscious that if the cry were raised to-day, “Why is the Forum crowded, what means this stir in Rome?” the reply would be forthcoming, “Tourists and picture-card sellers and peddlers of cameo pins.”

Parenthetically, it may be observed that, although pathos and bathos rub elbows in the foregoing reflections, still incongruities come very near to being the rule in latter-day Rome. What is to be said of obelisks of the Pharaohs with Christian crosses on their tops? Of the column of Trajan with St. Peter at its summit, and at its base those twentieth-century cats that visitors feed with fish bought from stands at hand for the purpose? Of St. Paul on the column of Marcus Aurelius, and the sign of an American life insurance company across the street? Of a modern playhouse in the mausoleum of Augustus where the emperors were buried? Of the present use of King Tarquin’s great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, just as good as it was twenty-five hundred years ago? Of electric lights where Cincinnatus had his cabbage-farm? Of a Jewish cemetery above the circus of Tarquin? Of steam-heated flats in the gardens of Sallust? Of modern houses at the Tarpeian Rock, and the Baths of Agrippa? Of street cars with the name of Diocletian? Of automobiles on the Flaminian Way? Of tennis courts beside the burial-place of a Cæsar? Of motor-cycles around the tomb of the Scipios? Of an annual Derby down the Appian Way? Of railroad trains beside the old Servian Wall? Of telephone booths on the banks of Father Tiber? Modernism is, indeed, with us, as his Holiness laments!

The sultry, torrid hour that lies between three o’clock and four of a summer afternoon usually sees Rome rubbing her eyes, fresh from her siesta, that ancient midday nap that Varro declared he could not live without; and you may be sure the final rub would be one of vast amusement if she were to see you walking on the sunny side of the street, where, by the terms of her immemorial observation, only dogs and foreigners go. The heat is intense on these lava pavements; one keeps religiously to the shade. But Roman society is not rubbing its eyes,—at least, not in town,—for tout le monde is passing the annual villeggiatura at its villa in the hills or by the sea, economizing for the fashionable expenditure of the winter, and, incidentally, obliging the people who stay in town with that much more of elbow room on the Corso and other popular promenades. All of which helps a little in making the stroll from the Capitoline Hill to the Pincian Gardens rather more comfortable than moving around the hot-room of a Turkish bath.

As we pick our way down the Capitoline slope, pass Marcus Aurelius on his fat bronze steed, and “bend our steps,” as the old novels used to say, toward the tramway-haunted uproar of the Piazza di Venezia, the rabble rout of the slum district on the left affords a lively conception of the element that goes farthest to make Rome howl. Having been told that this old Ghetto had been swept and garnished, one is properly indignant at finding the air redolent of garlic and everybody under conviction that the chief end of man is to amass macaroni and enjoy it forever. You gaze askance on a universal costume of filth and rags, and hurry along through it, protesting that, while you would not invoke the precedent of Pope Paul IV’s sixteenth-century method of putting gates across the streets, and locking the people in and making the men wear yellow hats and the women yellow veils, as he did with the Jews, still some expedient ought to be hit upon for making the district look a little less like a camp of Falstaff recruits. “A frowzy-headed laborer,” say you, “shouldering a basket of charcoal, may seem attractive in Mr. Storey’s ‘Roba di Roma,’ but in real life one likes to think men can afford shirts, and not have to wear rags over their shoulders after the manner of a herald’s tabard.” You pause a moment to watch the disappearance of a yard of macaroni down some red gullet, and George Augustus Sala’s description of the banquet of the seven wagoners rushes to mind: “Upon this vast mess they fell tooth and nail. The simile is, perchance, not strictly correct. Teeth may be de trop. You should never bite or chew macaroni, but swallow each pipe whole, grease and all, as though it were so much flattery. But their nails they did use, seeing that they ate the macaroni with their fingers. What wondrous twistings and turnings-back of their heads, what play of the muscles of their throats, what straining of their eyeballs and vasty openings of their jaws, did I study as they swallowed their food.”

And now we begin to have the usual experience of Roman mendicancy. Truly, there is no beggar like your Roman beggar. He has raised his profession to both an art and a nuisance. Appeals to charity take every form and phase. Evidences of anatomical disaster are utilized to excite pity at so much per sigh. Tales of misery and misfortune ring all the changes of fervency and fancy. Their whines are both groveling and dramatic. “Niente!” they moan, as with woe-begone faces and pathetic twists of their necks they sidle up with stiff gestures of weary and hopeless expressiveness; “Illustrissimo! Eccellenza! Per amor di Dio!” You could not bluff them, though you were armored in all the calloused nonchalance of the average ambulance surgeon; and your doom is sealed if you undertake to bandy repartee, for their invective is as searching as a satire of Juvenal. Whether you give or not, their volubility and frankness continue unabated; for you are savagely cursed if you decline, and if you acquiesce are blessed strictly in proportion to the gratuity. Indubitably, in the social scheme of the beggar we be brethren all and should each aid the other—after the philosophy of the Italian, saying, “One hand washes the other, and both the face.” The Roman, understanding them, passes coolly by; but the foreigner, who is their special prey, gives up in desperation, on the principle of the local proverb, “We are in the ballroom and we must dance.”

Parenthetically, again, they say the authorities are helpless to curb this universal Roman nuisance. It is an institution. These beggars come of all classes—from the Capuchin and Franciscan lay brothers who go about in brown robes, rope girdles, and sandals and present a basket for food, to the dirty urchins of the Appian Way who stop your carriage with their acrobatic proficiency and then howl for soldi in the name of all the saints. Many a beggar here is a bank depositor; and any of them who can retain the monopoly of the door of a popular church may confidently look forward to affluence. Very likely they are better business men, in their way, than many who drop coins into their pathetic, swindling hands. À chacun son métier.

It would extend a Brooklynite to negotiate the crossing of the Piazza di Venezia. It is the grand gathering-place of tramcars, busses, cabs, carts, bicycles, and every other form of conveyance. You will certainly find a “Seeing Rome” automobile, with the lecturer pointing out the castellated old Palazzo di Venezia and telling his people that it was built of stone from the Colosseum, and has been the seat of the Austrian embassy to the Curia for over a hundred years. So far as traffic is concerned, this is the heart of Rome. Nothing less than a whirlpool could be expected in a spot that is the confluence of such full streams of life as the Corso and the Via Nazionale. One admires its broad, busy sweep, and the dignity of the solid old gray buildings that rim it. No mid-afternoon heat lessens the bustle and activity that rages here; even the experienced natives can be found in large numbers, jostling their way across it, and visitors pass through in droves to reach the Cenci Palace or to see the spot where Paul dwelt for two years “in his own hired house.”

If you stopped, as I did, at one of the hotels near the Baths of Diocletian, the Via Nazionale will have a friendly suggestion of the nearest way home. With thoughts of that temporary home the recollection often comes to me of the mildly stimulating delight I once found in getting lost by night in this city of superior chance encounters. It seemed, on the first occasion, as though I had scarcely turned the corner into the Via Cavour before a delicious conviction of unfamiliarity with my surroundings assured me I was pursuing a course that was certain, sooner or later, to lead to artistic discovery or adventure. Nothing was easier than getting lost, for I was newly arrived; and yet localities and objects of consequence were not without significance, for, like every one else, I had a vivid idea of the landmarks of the famous city. And first of all, I discovered I was passing the infamous spot where “the impious Tullia” drove her chariot across the bleeding body of her royal father; whence I hastened on, with furtive glances. Next, after some speculation I identified an enormous church to be none other than the famous Santa Maria Maggiore, whose ceilings, I had read, were crusted with the first gold brought from the New World, and to whose high altar the popes used to come by torchlight for New Year’s mass. I thrilled at the incredible reflection that the street cars crossing that corner would be passing, a moment later, the site of the gardens of Mæcenas where Horace and Virgil had mused and read their verses. A few blocks farther on I came to a halt before the house of Lucrezia Borgia; and I tried to fancy the circumstances of the night of their quiet family supper there, before the children took leave of their mother with false words of affection and Cæsar hurried to gather his bravos and overtook Francesco, and, muffled in a cloak, sat his horse in easy unconcern while his brother was done to death and thrown into the Tiber. For relief I turned across the street to the church of St. Peter-in-Chains, and imagined how Michael Angelo’s vigorous Moses might be appearing in the dark of the side aisle, and thought of the master striking the completed work with his mallet and crying out, “Now, speak!” On I rambled, through a block or two of darkened shops and gloomy houses, and suddenly a great open space yawned before me and I was staring at rows of column stumps, mellowed and battered, and among them a tall, ghostly shaft of marble with a spiral band of half-mutilated reliefs winding away up to the summit, where was the dusky outline of a sculptured form. It was the old school-geography picture come to life! There was I in the heart of an unfamiliar city, alone, by night, with this vast relic of the ancients. It was like Stanley finding Livingstone in Africa. I felt I had honestly discovered it and that it ought to be mine. It was the Forum of Trajan!

It will seem a violent transition to jump from midnight to mid-afternoon, but the plunge must be taken. The normal state of the Corso at three-thirty of a summer afternoon is one of leisurely activity. The crowds are lethargic, slow-moving, inclined to curiosity. An interesting social comedy is proceeding, with foreign ladies playing sight-seeing rôles, clutching their red Baedekers and Hare’s “Walks in Rome.” Jostling groups of them gather before the beguiling shop windows, and occasionally one enters and possesses herself of a Roman pearl or cameo, or perhaps a mosaic or copy of an antique bronze. Business people pass along in their habitually distrait manner, and priests beyond number brighten the scene with habits of every hue. There is little enough of room in the middle of the street and scarcely any on the sidewalks. Like all Roman thoroughfares, the Corso is clean and distinguished. Long perspectives of gayly awninged shops extend toward the Piazza del Popolo, agreeably broken here and there by the interposition of mellow old palace fronts and richly sculptured baroque façades; and there is frequent opportunity for passing glimpses into cool courtyards attractive with foliage and fountains.

Visitors keep forsaking the Corso at every turning to make inspiring discoveries in the tangled mesh of side streets. We are at liberty to suspect those who go to the west, of sentimental designs on the star under the dome of a neighboring church that marks the spot where Julius Cæsar was assassinated in Pompey’s Senate House; or, perhaps, of an intention to visit the sombre statue of Giordano Bruno in the Field of Flowers, and reflect upon what a constant rebuke it must be to the church that burned him there, three centuries ago, for persisting in his “modernism” to the outrageous extremity of defending the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and like heresies of the hour.

Afternoon walks in Rome should be frequently interrupted, not only to escape the floods of sunshine, but to find out occasionally what is behind the mellow garden walls over whose tops glistening, green foliage droops enticingly down with hints of cool and restful retreats. Such an opportunity presents itself here in the rare Colonna Gardens, just around the corner of the great Colonna Palace where earlier in the day the Titians and Tintorettos ravish the artistic. Spacious, elegant Rome has nothing more charming and exquisite than such gardens as these. Art and antiquity are everywhere in restful profusion—“storied urn and animated bust.” It is even said that sculptures are to be found almost anywhere underground for the mere pains of exhuming. One rests with infinite satisfaction in the deep shade of eucalyptus, cypress, ilex, and laurel, to the sweet singing of multitudes of birds. There are roses and oranges in bloom, and tall hedges of clipped box, and musical little cascades tumble down from terrace to terrace and drip over mossy marble steps. In this particular garden come thoughts of Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, who so often strolled along these very paths and communed in their serene and beautiful friendship. Theirs was a faith that brought its own reward.

And what, pray, without its amazing faith, would this Catholic Rome be, anyway? À chaque saint sa chandelle. Otherwise, what would become of that marble block from the floor of the Appian Way—which the stubborn archæologists will insist was really paved with silex—that is preserved with so much reverence in the church of Domine Quo Vadis, as showing the impressions of the feet of Our Lord and St. Peter when they faced each other there on the occasion of the memorable rebuke of the latter for his proposed flight from Rome? And how about the scala santa—the worn and venerated marble steps in the shrine near the church of St. John Lateran, which were brought from Jerusalem and up which we are told Christ passed on his way to the judgment seat of Pilate? The faithful thank God for the privilege of ascending them on their knees, praying, and receiving the indulgence of a thousand years of purgatory; and they were worn thin with kisses long before the day when Martin Luther got halfway up and suddenly quit and came tramping down with a voice crying in his ears, “The just shall live by faith.” And without faith, where would be the use of the miraculous Bambino, the adored and bejeweled little wooden image that a Franciscan pilgrim carved from a tree of the Mount of Olives and which is imposingly domiciled in a glass case in the church of Ara Cœli? They say there is no disease that the Bambino cannot cure; and when his keepers accompany him through the streets on his errands of mercy, conveyed in his magnificent buff coach, people kneel by hundreds and beseech a blessing. Such blessing may be secured, though possibly of a diminished efficacy, by buying one of his legended cards at the church and having the priest rub it across the glass top of the case. Who would eschew faith and forfeit such advantages? Would we not still have Life’s puzzle, and without this key? Might we not even be reduced to a plane as confused and desperate as that of the famous Sultan of Turkey, who knew so little of music that, when his new Italian band had finished tuning-up, he shouted in delight to the leader, “Marshallah! Let the dogs play that tune again!”

At this languorous hour of the afternoon the broad, sunny piazzas with their many fountains afford incomparably lovely loitering-places on the way to the Pincio. The one of the Quirinal is a near neighbor to the Colonna Gardens, and there you may shelter under eucalyptus trees and dream over the brown old obelisk and the vigorous fountain sculptures of the “horse-tamers” that once graced the Baths of Constantine, and philosophize over the irony of fate that converted a papal summer residence into a royal palace. Or you can thread your way through narrow streets of the Middle Ages that are lined by ochre-colored houses with sun-shades, where artists have their studios and transients their hôtels garnis, and down which a belated wine-cart may jangle or a gayly painted Campagna wagon creak, with its oxen festive in bells and crimson tassels and its rugged driver clad in blue. Were you to follow these typical byways of mediæval Rome until you came to the embankment of the Sant’ Angelo Bridge, you would pass by where Benvenuto Cellini lived among his goldsmiths, and could identify the Gothic window of the old Inn of the Bear where Montaigne stopped, centuries ago.

At this hour the Trevi Fountain is doubly appealing and refreshing, rejoicing the whole side of its roomy square with sparkling waters that dash merrily about Neptune and his allies in the wall niches. Devoted as one may be to the venerable tomb of Cecilia Metella, on the Appian Way, he will fervently commend Pope Clement for having pillaged some of its stone to supply this cheery fountain with its dramatic setting. Were this our last day in the city we should certainly toss a copper coin over our left shoulder into these boiling waters, to insure a return to Rome. Of course, one is pretty sure to come again anyhow; but that makes it a certainty. Besides, it is much less trouble than going away out to Tivoli to ask the same thing of the Sibyl in the Grotto.

Were you to yield to the fountain habit, you would go bird-hopping all over town, for no city has so many or such beautiful ones as Rome, thanks to its huge aqueducts. It is a never-failing delight to turn a corner and come across one of these sun-deluged pleasaunces with its crowds of picturesque loungers; its tritons, “rivers,” and sea gods disporting themselves in attitudes of aqueous grace and gayety; its flower-girls banked behind fragrant barriers of roses and violets; and the slender columns of water streaming sideways like tattered flags in a breeze.

ROME, THE PIAZZA DI SPAGNA

Mid-afternoon is an admirable time to drop in at the most popular of all the piazzas, the Spanish Square. One wonders how the jewelers of the Via Condotti manage to make both ends meet, with such a superior attraction at hand. It is certainly one of the most charming nooks in Rome. A heavy golden sunshine glorifies, at this hour, the broad reach of the Spanish Steps, themselves quite as wide as the square, that sweep between picturesque parapets like a yellow cascade from the terraces of the church at S. Trinità de’ Monte to the boat-shaped fountain in the piazza below. About them, drowsy, dusty, Old-World houses supply a pleasant background of soft color, and the crystal-clear Italian sky spreads above like a cathedral dome. The flower market is the crowning touch, with a flood of fragrant blooms welling over the lower steps and rimming the fountain edge in brilliant hues of purple Roman anemones, orange wallflowers, white narcissus, golden daffodils, snowy gardenias, violets, camelias, hyacinths, mignonettes, and every fair and odorous blossom. A lovely, sunny, fragrant spot—this Piazza di Spagna; a place to dream whole days away in; a well-beloved corner of fascinating Rome, where one may realize to its fullness the beautiful, consoling reflection of Don Quixote, “But still there’s sunshine on the wall.”

Literature has had its chosen seat in the Piazza di Spagna. Half the traveled world of letters has lived or visited there. It invests the spot with a fresh and human interest to know that it has been the musing-place of such rare spirits as Byron, Smollett, Madame de Staël, Cooper, Andersen, Thorwaldsen, Hawthorne, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Dickens, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Lowell, and Longfellow. One thinks of the Brownings entertaining Thackeray, Lockhart, and Fanny Kemble. But, of course, the closest memories are of Keats and Shelley, who lived in either corner house—those radiant friends whose ashes repose under myrtles and violets in the cypress-shaded cemetery beyond the Aurelian Wall. The works of all these authors, as also of the others who may or may not have seen the Piazza di Spagna,—along with the idealism of Fogazzaro, the sensuality of D’Annunzio, the realism of Verga, and the grace of De Amicis,—are to be had at the celebrated shops of Piale or Spithöver, in the square; where, also, you may at little expense become a momentary part of Rome’s bohemia over toast and muffins in the adjoining tea-rooms.

Chacun à son goût. If you are cold to tea there may be something else to interest in the numerous cafés of the neighborhood that begin to hum with activity as the hour approaches four. And, indeed, they may be angels in disguise for such as have tried pension life and grown sadly familiar with puddings as mysterious as Scotch haggis, meat that suggested travertine, and pies constructed of something like silex and tufa. Besides, in the cafés you can regale yourself with vermouth, syrups, or ices, and at the same time observe the Roman at his afternoon ease—thus realizing in yourself the acuteness of the Italian proverb, “One blow at the hoop and one at the cask.” It is quite worth the cost to see how quickly the chairs and little marble-topped tables, out on the sidewalk, are taken by leisurely habitués bent on gossip; by precise old gentlemen in lavender gloves who drop in for a tumbler of black coffee and a hand at dominoes; or by foppish young men in duck trousers, who clatter on the tables for the cameriere to bring copies of the “Tribuna” so they may sup on frivolities and horrors along with coffee and tobacco.

A ruder jocundity also, at this time, is making its start for high tide in poorer sections, where in arbored osteries, Tuscan wine-shops, and spacci da vino straw-covered fiascos of chianti are passing, along with glasses of local wines whose prices will be found conspicuously chalked up on the outsides of the taverns at so many soldi per half-litre.

As we follow the Corso toward the Pincian Gardens we find the congestion increasing, with a decided addition of carriages all bound in our direction. It is now the hour of the afternoon passeggiata; and one marvels that the ancient campus Martius should still be the heart of Rome, and wonders how this narrow street could have held its crowds when the mad, brilliant scenes of Carnival riot and revelry were enacted before these old Renaissance palaces. Every restaurant of the tumultuous Piazza Colonna is working to capacity, and groups of gay army officers swagger about the corners and over by the marble basin beside the Column of Marcus Aurelius where the taxi-cabs have their chief stand. No red-and-white street car dares venture in this favorite square, but busses and cabs supplant them to distraction. And who, indeed, does not prefer an omnibus to a street car! It may want the latter’s business-like directness, but what a holiday air it has of cozy, informal deliberateness! It is coaching in town. You may not arrive so soon, but what a lark you had! And if you mock at the faithful bus, there are the impertinent Roman cabs. Here is speed, seclusion, and economy. You cannot fail to be suited both financially and æsthetically, for you may pick between the latest varnished output of the factory and venerable, decrepit ramshackles that look to have been contemporary with the Colosseum. The Roman cabmen are an inconsequent lot; they wear green felt hats and greasy coats, and dash at one with a reckless scorn of human life that strengthens a suspicion that they are really banditti of the Campagna, transparently disguised. The famous Column of the philosophic Emperor never lacks its groupings of adaptable “rubber-necks,” who are twisting themselves into suicide graves trying to read the spiral band of reliefs that winds away up to the statue of St. Paul.

The Corso passeggiata is an interesting affair. Toward four o’clock it quite fills the street. Young girls are out, with their inevitable chaperons, kittenish and alert-eyed; Bergamasque nurses, with scarlet ribbons and extraordinary silver ornaments falling below their snowy muslin caps; clerks in sober black; Douane men, in short capes and shining hats with yellow rosettes; hatless women, with light mantillas over their blue-black hair; the stolid country-folk,—the contadini,—with the men in brown velvet jackets and goatskin breeches, and the women in faded blue skirts and with red stays stitched outside their bodices; the despised forestieri, with guidebooks; carabinieri, in pairs, resplendent in braided uniforms and cocked hats; the nervous Bersaglieri, with shining round hats and glossy cocks’-feather plumes; army officers in cloaks or bright blue guard-coats, fresh from vermouth at Aragni’s; Savoyards in steel helmets and gold crests; diplomats in silk hats and Prince Albert coats; and clericals by the hundreds. The clericals, indeed, may always be relied upon to supply an effective color-touch anywhere in Rome. They come along in fluttering groups of every hue: English and French seminarists in cassocks of black, Germans in scarlet, Scotch in purple, and Roumanians in orange and blue; it is diverting to see them raise their black beavers to one another with the quietest and most serious air imaginable. Solemn lay brethren shuffle past in sombre brown of Franciscan and Capuchin, or white of the cowled and tonsured Dominicans. Occasionally, along a side street, one passes slowly, absorbed in his breviary, like Don Abbondio in “I Promessi Sposi.” Rome abounds in shovel-hats, shaven heads, sandals, and hempen girdles. But you must not expect to see them all in a Corso passeggiata.

Unless we have yielded too much to the blandishments along the way, we should be crossing the sunny, somnolent circle of the Piazza del Popolo and climbing the fountained and statue-set terraces of the Pincian Gardens as the first strains of the promenade concert usher in the hour of four. The spectacle that confronts us on the low, broad brow of the old hill is animated and brilliant. Hundreds of motor-cars, private carriages and hired cabs roll in a long, gay procession around the driveways, their occupants arrayed in the last word of Italian fashion, and a multitude of happy loiterers stroll leisurely in the mild afternoon sunshine along sylvan paths hedged with box or bordered with flowers, where long lines of marble portrait-busts of Italy’s dead immortals extend into the pleasant shade of groves of myrtles and fragrant acacias. What a contrast in occupation to the scenes that in olden days were enacted here—the luxury and splendor of the golden suppers that the war-worn Lucullus gave to Rome’s poets and artists; or the vicious and voluptuous orgies with which the vile Messalina indulged the depraved favorites of the Claudian court! Young Rome, this afternoon, has decked itself in its gayest raiment, and youth vies with youth in gallantries to the fashionable beauties who prefer the fascinating town, even in summer, to the listless diversions of the country. “Visiting” goes on between carriage-parties, which is said to answer the social requirements of calls at the house. Mild refreshments are being served in a lively little café to which many repair when weary with lounging among the brilliant flowers and lovely foliaged paths; and groups ramble across the new viaduct and stroll among the sycamores and stone-pines of the neighboring Villa Borghese. The Pincian Gardens seem very formal and compact and precisely ornate as compared with our parks at home, but there is much more of sociability and comfort than is to be found Sunday afternoons in New York’s Central Park, for instance. That is probably because New York’s pedestrians are centred in the Mall to hear the band, or around the lakes to watch the boating, and all her carriage-folk are by themselves in the East Side Drive. The Pincian promenade mingles both classes into a great family party. It is a brilliant scene, but it must have been much more so in other days when the popes joined the company in the great glass coach drawn by six black horses in crimson trappings, and outriders and footmen flocked about them.

One wonders whether Pius X does not sometimes think with a sigh of regret of the liberties of his early predecessors, as he paces the flowered garden paths of his voluntary prison and lifts his gentle, shining face toward these pleasant Pincian heights. How often will the memory recur to me of that mild and friendly man, as once I saw him in the Vatican’s Court of the Pine, in his snowy robes and the little cap scarce whiter than his hair. I remember his only ornaments to have been the famous Fisherman’s ring, and a long gold chain about his neck from which a great crucifix was pendent. It was the occasion of a calisthenic drill given by a local orphan asylum for his Holiness’s special benefit. Each little athlete in gray was burning to do his very best in so notable a presence, and was, indeed, succeeding, with the glaring exception of the smallest of the band, whose eager efforts had resulted only in an uninterrupted series of comical mischances, to the infinite chagrin of himself and associates and the increasing amusement of the Pope. In due time the performance came to an end, and the boys were drawn up facing each other in a double line through which, attended by cardinals, chamberlains, and members of the Papal Guard, his Holiness passed extending his hand to be kissed. When he reached the diminutive and blushing blunderer, he halted his imposing train and laid his hand on the boy’s head and smoothed his hair and patted his cheek with affectionate tenderness, whispering the while an intimate message of good cheer, as though it were something strictly confidential between himself and that fatherless little waif whose face was shining with reverence and awe and whose eyes were full of happy tears. I am, I trust, as confirmed a Protestant as the next, but I confess that my heart was bowed as well as my head as that white-robed figure turned, as it disappeared through a door of the Vatican, and raised a hand toward us in the sign of the cross.

The marble parapet of the Pincio is, at this hour, a prime favorite among Roman loafing-places. As from an upper theatre box, one looks precipitously down into the great, peaceful, siesta-drugged circle of the Piazza del Popolo, the scene in other days of so much cruelty and often of so much happiness. The stone lions of the fountain spout patiently to the delighted observation of scores of playing children, and drowsy cabmen nod on the boxes of the long rank of waiting victorias. One may indulge to his fullest in moral reflections over the slender obelisk from the Heliopolis Temple to the Sun, upon which Moses himself may have gazed in days before Rome was thought of, and when the celestial consorts, Isis and Osiris, still waved their lotus sceptres and ruled the quick and the dead. Nineteen hundred years ago Nero, who should have begun blood-letting with himself instead of ending it there, was buried in this ground, and you are told how the evil spirits that haunted the accursed spot were not finally exorcised until yonder church of Santa Maria had been reared above his tomb. One will find it more agreeable to look across the piazza at the portal of the Flaminian Way and re-create the scenes of the triumphant entrance of the noble, hardy Trajan walking by the side of his fair and amiable wife.

The elm-tops are rustling in the deep groves of the Villa Borghese, and the yellow Tiber, “too large to be harmless and too small to be useful,” slips swiftly between the yellow walls of its quays. To the mind’s eye, in the azure distance Mons Sacer is clear, and Tivoli and the Sabine Farm of Horace. Like the Archangel Michael on the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, the sun, too, begins to sheathe his sword, and its glitter throws a warm mantle over the shoulders of the marble angels on the bridge. Most conspicuously, as is proper, it lingers on the pale dome of St. Peter’s, touches into life the sculptured saints of the portico, and floods obelisk, fountains, and all that vast elliptical piazza toward which are extended the sheltering arms of Bernini’s colonnade. How fair, beneath that roof, are the dazzling marbles, shining tombs, sculptured effigies, and glowing mosaics! But fairer far is this prospect from the hill, of Rome in her soft coat of many colors, the velvety ruins of the Palatine, the stone-pines in sentinel stiffness down the distant Appian Way, the sunny piazzas, the sparkling fountains, and the verdure and bloom of the slopes of the Janiculum, under the cloudless blue of a soft Italian sky. Ave, Roma eterna!

PRAGUE

4 P.M. TO 5 P.M.

A brooding, stolid city is Prague; the sombre capital of a restless, feverish people. It is the hotbed and “darling seat” of all Bohemia; and Bohemia languishes for her lost independence as Israel did by the waters of Babylon. She does not, however, pine in hopeless despair like the Hebrews, but nourishes a keen expectation of regaining her lost estate, and grits her teeth, in the mean while, with fiery impatience. She points, and with reason, to the fact that the Slavs—Czechs, Slovaks, and Moravians—easily outnumber the Hungarians; yet Hungary is free, and she in bondage. And so Bohemia, for all her exterior of gracious courtesy, is bitter and hard at heart; a people of a passionate, thwarted patriotism; a people that has suffered and been degraded, but that has never for a moment forgotten. Prague is an expression of all this; in her sullen, gloomy architecture; in the persistence of national types and characteristics; and peculiarly in the wild, reckless Moldau, which visualizes the traditional, savage intolerance that is bred in the bone of the fatalistic Slav.

There are too many daws about for Prague to wear her heart on her sleeve, so while she bides her time she presents a smiling mask. It may sometimes be a rather weary smile, and the forests that engulf her are gloomy and sinister; but her skies are not always lowering and overcast, and the peace of her fatigue from the national struggle is profound. It is just this deep, brooding peace that appeals to the stranger within her gates; and along with it he senses here a wonderful charm and underlying subtility that invests this curious old city with a lambent play of the imagination.

It was of Prague that Alexander von Humboldt said: “It is the most beautiful inland city I have ever seen.” And it must have been of some such spot that “R. L. S.” was mindful when he expressed the paradox that “any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.” Restfulness is surely one of the prime essentials of the “highly favored” few; and there is no restfulness at all comparable with that we feel in some venerated spot whose present hush and quiet is a reaction from its other days of fever and turmoil. One finds these qualities in Prague, whose calm and serenity seem doubly intense in contrast with its history of tumult and savagery and the hatred and violence that racked and convulsed it for hundreds of years. It has frequently been lightly disposed of as being an “out-of-the-way place”; but no place is more delightful than an “out-of-the-way” place, and particularly when it has the natural and architectural beauty of this one, or has been the theatre of such unusual and stirring occurrences.

Had we but one hour to spend in Prague we should certainly choose the charmed one between four and five o’clock of an afternoon. The sunshine is then most languid and golden, and the day declines slowly over the castled tops of the Hradschin-crowned slope, and the lengthening shadows of towers and turrets creep out on the river, and the copper domes and ruddy tiles of the Neustadt glow in bright spots against the darkling green of the wooded hillsides. If one does not then feel a profound and elevating sense of tranquillity and translating beauty, it will be because he has eyes to see yet sees not.

Since Prague rests under the imputation of being “out of the way,”—and even Shakespeare set this inland kingdom down as “a desert country near the sea,” and lost his compass completely in the shipwreck in the “Winter’s Tale” with Antigonus exclaiming: “Our ship hath touch’d upon the deserts of Bohemia”; and a confused mariner replying, “Aye, my lord; and fear we’ve landed in ill time,”—we may, perhaps, be pardoned for observing that in general appearance it is a wooded valley traversed in its full length by a swift, turbulent river, which follows a northerly course excepting where it bends sharply to the east in the very heart of the city. This stream, the Moldau, rushes along as if in desperate haste to throw itself into the Elbe, and seems to have the one idea, as it dashes through Prague, of getting done with its business and on its way at the earliest moment possible. It has scoured its islands into ovals, slashed the rocky bases of the hills, and continually assailed its bridges and quays. But through all its exhibitions of ill humor the Praguers have indulgently condoned and even extolled it; it was only when the beloved and venerated Karlsbrücke fell a partial victim to its violence, a dozen years ago, that patience ceased to be a virtue and the unnatural marauder was comprehensively anathematized with all the sibilant fury of the hissing tongue of the Czech. Speed apart, there is little to complain of with the Moldau; it is broad and of a pleasant deep blue, and the beauty it supplies to the setting of the city is supplemented by the importance of its traffic, the amusements on its many little wooded islands, and the delights of its boating and bathing. In a word, it is a noble stream—and none the less Bohemian, perhaps, for being a little proud and head-strong.

As the afternoon sun lies heavy over Prague one notes with delight how snugly the old city nestles along the river and up the hillsides of the valley, and with what a natural and comfortable air; not at all as though trying, as newer cities do, to shoulder its suburbs out of the way. It seems a perfect type of the mediæval town, with buildings of solid stone of an agreeable and universal creamy tone, four-square and enduring. It abounds in quaint, high pitched roofs; in curious, turreted spires; in red tiles and green copper domes; and in objects of antique and archaic fascination. Shade trees are everywhere. Indeed, from the thickly wooded heights of the surrounding hills right down to the river quays the gray of the houses and the red and green of the roofs make beautiful color combinations with the feathery foliage.

One stands on the old Karlsbrücke and looks upstream and there he sees the rocky heights of the Wyschehrad Hill on which the fair and wise Libussa reared her castle when she laid the foundations of the city, thirteen centuries ago, and which he will want to visit later to look over the fortifications and to study the glowing frescoes on the cloister walls of the Benedictine monastery of Emmaus. In the elbow of the Moldau, downstream, he will observe the old sections of Prague huddled together in cramped confusion, with no sign left of the ancient separating walls that once defined the original seven districts, though he is to learn, by and by, that the early names remain unchanged—the Aldstadt, and the Jewish Josephstadt, and around and above them the Neustadt, which, of course, from an American time-point, is really not “new” at all. On his left, along the river, he sees the Kleinseite spread out, and on the hillside above it that far-famed acropolis, the redoubtable Hradschin, with its dusty, barracks-like royal and state palaces, and the great bulk of the cathedral of St. Vitus rising out of it like some man-made mount. Such is the first bird’s-eye impression of Prague, set in its wooded slopes, stolid and softly colored. Later on one can scrape acquaintance with its rambling, flourishing, modern suburbs, to the eastward and downstream, and wrestle at his pleasure with such impressive nomenclature as Karolinenthal and Bubna-Holeschowitz.

PRAGUE, THE CASTLE FROM THE OLD BRIDGE

Between four and five o’clock the visitor will find an especial pleasure in noting the activities that prevail in the several little green islands that fret the impetuous Moldau as it hurries through this “hundred-towered, golden Prague.” The dearest of these to the sentimental Czech is bright Sophien-Insel, that you could almost leap onto from the stone coping of the neighboring Kaiser-Franzbrücke. It always wears a gay and inviting appearance, with café tables set under fine old oaks, but precisely at four, summer afternoons, the leader of its military band lifts his baton and launches some crashing prelude, and the noisy company instantly stills and with nervously tapping fingers and glowing eyes abandons itself to that music passion which is the deepest and most intense expression of the Bohemian temperament. It gives the dilettante a new conception of the power of this inspiring art to observe the significant and varying expressions that play over the faces of a Prague audience under its influence. He witnesses then the profoundest stirring of the Slavic nature and the moving of emotional depths beyond the conception of the reserved and impassive Anglo-Saxon. Especially is this so when the music is of a national character, such as the “Ma Vlast” symphonic poems of Smetana, or a Slavic dance of Dvorak’s. These Bohemian masters, with their fellow countryman, Fibich, constitute a trinity that is reverenced in their native land to an extent that almost passes belief, and that has done so much in making Prague one of the foremost centres of Europe.

The music from the Sophien-Insel floats down the river to our vantage-point on Karlsbrücke, mellowed and softened, and contributes just the right pleasing note to the agreeable mood these picturesque surroundings excite. The ponderous, antique old structure on which we stand has the appearance of some full-page color illustration for a charming Middle-Age romance. For half a millennium it has dug its broad arches into the bottom of the Moldau, stoutly defiant of flood or storm. Its massive buttresses are crowned with heroic statues so deeply revered that pilgrimages are made by the faithful to pay their devotions before them. For a third of a mile this old veteran strides the stream, and at each end he lifts an amazing mediæval tower well worth a journey to stare at. These ponderous structures, weathered by centuries of storm to a rich brownish black, are pierced by a deep Gothic archway through which the street traffic pours all day. Their sides are decorated with colonnades and traceries, armorial bearings and statues of ancient heroes of the city, and their tops are incredible creations of slender turrets and of pointed roofs so desperately precipitate that they seem like long narrow paving-stones tilted end to end.

Catholic legend and ceremonial run riot on the old bridge. The statues are almost altogether of a religious character, and two of them, the Crucifixion Group and the bronze one of St. John Nepomuc, are practically never passed without the sign of the cross and the raising of hat or cap; in the case of the latter the devout will touch the tablet that marks the spot from which he is said to have been cast into the river, and then kiss their fingers and bless themselves. For St. John Nepomuc, of all the holy martyrs, was Prague’s very own. The legend is dramatic. Father John was the queen’s confessor, five hundred years ago, and when he declined to oblige the king by revealing what the queen had told under the seal of the confessional, his Majesty had him summarily cast into the Moldau, from just where we are standing at the centre of this bridge. The result was far from the expectations of the king, for not only was the poor priest preserved from sinking, but—which is quite as hard to believe of so swift a stream as this—he actually remained floating for four days at the very spot where he fell, and five bright stars hung above him all the while! When they took him out he was dead, and to this extent only did the king succeed. As was perfectly natural, the amazed Praguers could see nothing in all this but an astounding miracle; and when Catholicism had finally displaced the Protestantism that followed the Hussite wars for two hundred years, their clamor for the canonization of Father John eventually resulted in placing the name of St. John Nepomuc in the catalogue of Rome. Equipped with a saint all their own, they adroitly converted the statues of the Protestant John Huss, that stood here and there about town, into St. John Nepomucs by the simple expedient of adding a five-starred halo to each.

Now, if to-day were the sixteenth of May, St. John Nepomuc’s special day, we should behold the greatest festival of all the year. An altar would be erected beside his statue, here on the bridge, and mass celebrated before enormous kneeling crowds. Bohemian peasants would flock into town from miles and miles around, in all the picturesque finery of the national dress, gala performances would be given at the theatres, an especial illumination of the city made at public expense, and fireworks displayed to-night on Schutzen-Insel. It would be an orderly celebration, too, for the Czechs are more fond of dancing than drinking; and religious enthusiasm would be practically universal, for Prague, which for two centuries was exclusively Protestant, now numbers at least nine Catholics out of every ten of its people.

As we look about us this afternoon we derive a vivid consciousness of being very far from home, set down in an environment that is, for Europe, oddly foreign and unfamiliar. The soft, sibilant prattle of the Czechish speech is heard on every hand, and the names on cars and corners are outlandish to us, with their profusion of consonants and curious accent marks like our o and v. One sees a great disproportion in numbers between the German and Czechish population; only thirteen to the hundred are said to be German, but in the opinion of Bohemians that is too many, for the stubborn struggle for the existence of the old national speech and spirit against the threatening usurpation of the Teutonic invaders is a real matter of life and death. As we watch the crowds throng along the bridge the prevalence of the Slavic type is very noticeable: short of body, heavy of head, and with high cheek bones and coarse features. The general expression is one of settled melancholy, bred of their peculiar fatalism. Having heard the “Bohemian Girl” and read the foundationless libels of popular French literature, one looks about for gypsies; he will be lucky if he finds one. Bohemia, as he should have known, is one of the leading industrial countries of Europe, and Prague is made up of hard-working, skillful mechanics. Energy and resolution are stamped on these serious, rugged faces; on the powerful men, the tall, strong women, and even on the little black-eyed children. And they can do many worthy things well: they market the country’s rich coal and iron deposits, make garnets to perfection, and manufacture beet-sugar by thousands of tons. Who has not heard of Bohemian glass, or Pilsener beer? And shall we belittle the resourcefulness of Bohemia, with the prosperous resorts of Karlsbad and Marienbad well within the western boundary of the Böhmer Wald? If this does not convince, one has only to run over to Dresden, seventy-five miles away, which he can reach by rail in four hours at an outlay of but eight florins, and ask any one where the finest farm produce comes from and what section yields the best fruit and honey, butter and eggs, milk and cheese.

If now we can manage to look away from the bridge and its crowds, we shall observe that the afternoon activities of the river-life of Prague are manifold and highly interesting. There is a prodigious bustling about of longshoremen on the fine, broad quays, and boats of many descriptions and diversified cargoes are laboriously struggling upstream or drifting guardedly down. From time to time huge, unwieldy rafts pass along to the din of vigorous shouting and hysterical warnings. Bathers at the riverside establishments are adding their share of laughter and frolic, their diversions watched with vast amusement by the afternoon idlers loitering along the embankments. On our right the shaded walks and trim lawns of the popular Rudolfs-Quai are comfortably filled with a leisurely company of promenaders and of nursemaids airing their charges. All this contributes an agreeable note of homeliness and contentment and seems eminently in harmony with the prevailing serenity and peace of the surrounding groves. There is at hand a little chain footbridge which they call the Kettensteg, and in a beautiful clump of lindens at its end rise the sculptured porticoes of the classic Rudolfinum, Prague’s noble home of the arts and industries. Enter it, and you find whole halls devoted to the work of Bohemian artists, with the school of old Theodoric of Prague represented in surprising completeness, an entire cabinet filled with the engravings of that famous Praguer, Wenzel Hollar, and many of the most beautiful paintings of such celebrated Bohemians as Gabriel Max, Václav Brozǐk and Josef Mánes.

With artistic bridges arching the river in whichever direction you look, with music and soft voices welling up from the gay islands, and with a full and virile life at cry along the quays, you find yourself about as far removed as possible from the atmosphere of Longfellow’s “Beleaguered City”:—

“Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream,

With the wan moon overhead,

There stood, as in an awful dream,

The army of the Dead.”

Assuredly, there is no “army of the dead” at this hour beside the Moldau, whatever there may be under the “wan moon” in a poet’s eye. On the contrary, there is an army of the living, a quarter-million of them, and it marches without resting, day in and day out, along the Graben and the stately Wenzels-Platz, and through the venerable Grosser Ring and the narrow, crooked alleys of old Josephstadt.

Walk east across Karlsbrücke, pass under the Gothic arch of the somnolent Aldstadt Tower, with the stony statue of Karl IV on your left, and you will shortly emerge on the Grosser Ring and can settle the matter for yourself. This fantastic Ring is the oldest and most famous square of the city, still preserving its ancient appearance. You find it an irregular quadrilateral, surrounded by quaint, gloomy, colonnaded houses, churches, and dilapidated palaces. There towers in its centre a sombre memorial column, called the Mariensäule, commemorating Prague’s liberation from the Swedes at the close of the Thirty Years’ War. The very first thing to catch the eye is the singular Teynkirche—the old Gothic church where John Huss so often preached, where the astronomer Tycho Brahe lies entombed in red marble, and in whose shadows, through five centuries, many of the bloodiest events of the city had their inception and execution. The influence of Huss on the Europe of his day was so great and has continued so long that it is hard to realize that he had only reached his forty-sixth year when the Council of Constance sent him and his friend, Jerome of Prague, to the stake. The old Teynkirche, where he so often attacked the doctrines of Rome, still rears its battered and darkened bulk from behind a melancholy row of colonnaded houses and gazes solemnly and patiently over them at the noisy Ring, its lofty spires curiously clustered with airy turrets like hornets’ nests on some old tree. Directly opposite, the modern Gothic Rathaus shoulders up to the moldering tower of its predecessor whose famous clock has delighted its thousands with the surprising things the automatic figures do when the hours and quarters roll around. Just at hand, a portion of the old Erkerkapelle still stands in excellent preservation, and you could not find more beautiful Gothic windows in all Prague, nor finer canopied saints nor more richly sculptured coats of arms. Before this building—a place of hideous history—the best blood of the city was spilled after the fall of Bohemian independence at the fateful battle of the White Hill, three centuries ago, when twenty-seven nobles were butchered here on the scaffold. A dozen years passed, and again blood soaked this earth, with the stony-hearted Wallenstein executing eleven of his chief officers for alleged cowardice at the battle of Lutzen. Prague still shows the palace of Wallenstein, and those of the other two famous generals of his period, Gallas and Piccolomini. The Clam-Gallas Palace is just at hand, in the Hussgasse, distinguished for its beautiful portal flanked with colossal caryatids and sculptured urns, and surmounted by a marble balustrade wrought with the perfection of life. A final note in the Old-World charm of the Grosser Ring is contributed by the ancient Kinsky Palace, adjoining the Teynkirche, in the elaborate baroque architecture despised of Mr. Ruskin. People in the manner and seeming of to-day walk and talk, barter and sell under the nodding brows of these historic buildings, but the visitor stands among them unconscious of their noisy presence in the spell such storied surroundings cast on every phase of fancy and imagination.

There is a peculiar fascination about aimless rambles in Prague. Modern improvements have come, of course, but many an old and rare landmark has been reverently preserved, with the result that you can scarcely turn a corner or cross a square without coming face to face with some fantastic and blackened architectural fragment that holds you spellbound with wonder and delight. Whole sections, indeed, are of such a character; as you would find were you to fare forth from the Grosser Ring and seek adventures by crossing the Kettensteg and invading the region beyond the Rudolfinum. With almost the suddenness of tumbling into a river you would find yourself groping, even at this bright hour of the afternoon, in the black and twisting mazes of the old Jewish Ghetto that still goes by the name of Josephstadt. Here you have at once all the detail and color of a romance of the crusades. Everything appears aged and eccentric. The time-weary, saddened, ramshackle houses project their upper stories feebly and seek to rest their wrinkled foreheads on one another; tortuous, winding alleys that you can almost span with your outstretched arms reel giddily all ways from a straight line, plodding wearily uphill and sliding helplessly down. On all sides there seems to be a general feeling that nothing matters, that everything comes by accident or caprice. Over the frowzy heads of slovenly children quarreling in the doorways, glimpses are to be had of dark and filthy interiors, from which foul odors escape to the street. Long-coated, unkempt patriarchs of Israel lope solemnly by, with rounded shoulders and hands clasped behind; and if you follow in their wake you will sooner or later arrive at a curious, melancholy Rathaus that is a rare jumble of architectural orders and has an extraordinary steeple that might once have done time on a Chinese temple. This very inclusive structure, persisting in its oddities to the end, makes a great point of staring down at the gaping crowds out of a big belfry clock that has one dial Hebrew and one Christian. But a single marvel is as nothing in this old wonderland where, as Alice would have remarked, things become “curiouser and curiouser.” If your eyes popped at the Rathaus what will they do at the gaunt, barnlike synagogue next door! Here is the thing that every visitor to Prague goes straight to see. Its early history is lost in legends, but you will be disposed to credit them all—even to that one about the Prague Jews fleeing from Jerusalem to escape the persecutions of Titus—once you have seen its doleful walls and breakneck roof, and have passed through the narrow black doorway into that shadowy tomb of an interior. Brass lamps depend by long chains from the smoky ceiling, but they only intensify the gloom with their feeble light and deepen the feeling of creepy depression. Visitors are told that during the horrors of the Hussite wars this black hole was literally packed with the bloody corpses of Jews and that, in a bitter spirit of defiance, no attempt was made for three hundred years to efface the frightful stains. Little wonder that the Prague Jews evolved out of their hatred an ancient malediction that ran: “May your head be as thick as the walls of the Hradschin, your body grow as big as the city of Prague; may your limbs wither away to birds’ claws, and may you flee around the world for a thousand years!”

It is like escaping from a sick-bed to come out of this chamber of horrors and cross the street to the quiet and hush of the wonderful old Ghetto cemetery. Here we have another of the “sights” of the Josephstadt. In the refreshing coolness of its elder-trees one looks about on as extraordinary a three acres as can be found anywhere in all Europe. The Jews insist that they have buried here for twelve or fourteen hundred years, and inscriptions can be found that date back at least half that far. By the simple process of spreading new layers of earth, this plot has been packed with graves six deep; and all that was accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the cemetery not having been in use since the middle of the eighteenth century. The closeness of the black, mossy tombstones, and their toppled and huddled look, suggest the troubled shouldering of some gigantic, ghoulish mole at work deep down in the horror-crowded darkness underground. The ancient tribal insignia of Israel are found graven on these tottering slabs,—the Hands of Aaron, the Cup of Levi, the Double Triangle of David, the Stag, the Fish, etc.,—and here and there you come across those little piles of stones heaped on graves that mark a Jewish act of reverence for the resting-place of some long-buried ancestor.

Hold to a generally southern direction in your afternoon stroll through the narrow Ghetto alleys, and shortly you will meet with a fine reward in the shape of a face-to-face contemplation of one of Prague’s most cherished antiquities, the Pulverturm. They may have once stored powder here, as the name implies, or they may not; but almost anything looks to have been possible to this sturdy, brown survivor of the Middle Ages, under whose broad Gothic archway the twentieth-century crowds are passing day and night. Set solidly down in the thickest stream of traffic, it has the look of those unconquerable obstructions that have to be tunneled through. It looms above you, a great, dark, dusty mass, out-of-time in every particularity of design and decoration. Stubbornness and defiance are expressed in every line; and with its atmosphere of drowsy aloofness and mystery there is such an element of loneliness among such modern surroundings that one could almost believe he sometimes hears the old veteran sigh. Certainly you would say it is brooding over memories centuries dead, so incongruous and distrait is its seeming, so anachronous are its whimsical turrets, fantastic roof, statues, arms, and sculptured traceries. This impression of isolation is enhanced as one reflects that the most ultra-modern of Prague’s new buildings all stand within easy range, could one of the Pulverturm’s ancient archers take up a position in any of those lofty turrets and wing an arrow from his stout crossbow toward what quarter of the heavens he chose.

When you have passed under the arch of the Pulverturm, you have entered the Graben, and so reached the business heart of the city. The Graben has nothing to-day to suggest the “Ditch” that its derivative source implies, unless you fancifully regard it as a moat of the modern commercial ramparts. On the contrary, it presents a busy array of all the leading hotels, shops, restaurants, and cafés. Overhead-trolley cars splutter along it, and you see gray stone buildings of irregular roof-lines with skylight dormers in the tiles, and Venetian blinds in the windows, narrow sidewalks decorated in mosaic designs, and active throngs of strong-featured men, and bareheaded, vigorous women whose chief pride of dress concerns itself with capacious aprons elaborately embroidered. Were you to visit the second-story cafés, whose gay window-boxes look so inviting from the street, you would find games of chess and checkers in progress at this hour, and more than one merchant who had stolen from his shop to have a look at the “Prager Tagblatt” over a glass of Pilsener or “three fingers” of the plum brandy they call slivovitz or a dram of tshai—which is tea and rum—or a cup of tee—which is just plain tea and cream. Coffee and chocolate, of course, would be found in general demand.

One passes out of the Graben into the fine boulevard of the Wenzelsplatz, and at once exchanges bustle and uproar for the quiet and dignity of the most beautiful and stately avenue of the city. It is broad and well-paved, with buildings of elaborate design, with shop fronts protected by bright awnings and with fine shade-trees every few yards along its entire length. At the corner of the Stadt Park, one finds a beautiful cascade fountain, and beside it a noble building which is the centre of all that is best and most intense in the new movement for the reviving and vitalizing of the national spirit among Bohemians—the new Bohemian Museum. Were you to enter it you would doubtless be astonished to see how many souvenirs of Bohemian history have already been assembled there,—autographs and documents, ancient musical instruments, art objects, flails of the Hussites, and scientific collections. Such is the intellectual Bohemia of to-day.

From this pleasant stroll one wends his way back to the Karlsbrücke, and as he passes the buildings that still remain of the ancient famous university, thoughts are kindled of the wonderful renown this institution had, six centuries ago, when it was easily the foremost educational institution of the world. Fifteen thousand students, from every quarter of the earth, gathered to hear its celebrated savants, and the revels and achievements of those days have gone down in prose and rhyme. Five thousand students still attend, two thirds of them Czechs and the others German; but the revelry of to-day is largely the bitter and bruising encounters that are continually arising between these conflicting hot-heads. The intellectual impulse is strong in Prague. It has poly-technic institutes, art schools, and learned societies, and one of the most famous conservatories of music in the whole of Europe.

The west bank of the Moldau, the Kleinseite district, was royalty’s region in the olden time when Bohemian kings and queens dwelt in the huge Hradschin on the ridge of the hill. Seen from the Karlsbrücke, toward five o’clock, the long slope rises toward the declining sun with many more suggestions, even now, of the pomp and circumstance that have departed than of the modernism that has taken their place. There is a dreary and saddening array of closed and boarded palaces, arcaded and many-windowed, whose owners are rich and powerful Bohemian nobles with a preference for the gayeties and frivolities of the court life of Vienna. One regards with especial interest the long, rambling one of Wallenstein, to make room for which one hundred houses had to be torn down, where this rival of royalty retired in the interval of imperial disfavor and held magnificent court with hundreds of followers and attendants. Among the many chambers of that great honeycomb was one equipped as an astrological cabinet—for Wallenstein always had faith in his star. How vividly it recalls the Schiller dramas and the operations of the uncanny Ceni! “Such a man!” exclaims a character at the conclusion of “Wallensteins Tod.” Born a Protestant, he well-nigh became their exterminator; turned Jesuit, the Jesuits distrusted and hated him. With his sword he made and unmade kings and carved out principalities for himself—and yet he was but fifty-one years old at the time of his assassination!

Like an aged soldier nodding in his armchair in the sun, the Wallenstein Palace, once passion-rocked and treachery-haunted, basks this afternoon in an atmosphere of the intensest calm and peace. To ramble through it is to learn history from a participant. One courtyard, in particular, is so serene and lovely as to be really unforgettable. One entire side of this enclosure is a lofty, echoing loggia three stories high, with arching spans for a roof supported on graceful, towering columns. Within the loggia are heavy sculptured balustrades, and a broad flight of marble steps flanked by huge stone urns leads to a beautiful open space of soft lawns bordered with simple flowers. It was a favorite resort of Wallenstein’s, and he called it his sala terrina. In its present mellow and half-deserted beauty it is a place for a poet to dream away a life in.

Staring gloomily down on the Kleinseite, and set solidly far above it on a precipitous hill, the rugged old Hradschin, Prague’s acropolis, warms into mild ruddy tones in the afternoon sun. I have said it reminds one of a barracks, such an enormous, rambling affair as it is; though its commanding situation and impressive proportions would immediately suggest to a stranger some more consequential employment in other days. Undoubtedly it is the most striking feature of Prague. One might think it a solid architectural mass, as seen from the Karlsbrücke, but on closer inspection it resolves itself into a series of separate structures falling into irregular groups, but which, taken together, composed the setting of the imperial court during the long period of Bohemia’s independence. That splendid fragment, the vast cathedral of St. Vitus, supplies a worthy centrepiece; and is full of interest, too, with its rich Gothic windows, chapel walls set with precious stones, marble tombs of the Bohemian kings, and the wonderful silver monument to St. John Nepomuc. Indeed, the whole Hradschin abounds in rich surprises. Such, for instance, is the venerable church of St. George, awkward and archaic, which has stood for nine hundred years and is the sole memorial in Bohemia of the earliest period of Romanic architecture. Every one, of course, hurries to see the rude royal palace of the Hofburg, on the edge of an adjacent steep hill, from the windows of whose Kanzlei Zimmer the Imperial Councillors were “defenestrated” and the Thirty Years’ War, in consequence, precipitated upon the troubled states of Europe. And then there is the archbishop’s palace, across the quadrangle from the Hofburg, in whose courtyard the church authorities impotently burned the two hundred Wycliffe books that John Huss had loaned them with the challenge to read and, if they could, refute. Two grim towers on the eastern extremity, the Daliborka and the Black Tower, have no end of creepy legends of tortures and prison horrors. The former takes its name from a romantic knight, Dalibor, who is said to have been long confined there and of whom and his solacing violin we hear at pleasant length in Smetana’s opera of that name. One of the most curious sights of the Hradschin is the low, drawn-out Loretto church, with a maximum of frontage and a minimum of depth, like city seminaries for young ladies. Among the red tiles of its steep roof, giant stone saints perform miracles of precarious footing, and out of the centre of the façade, on a base of colossal spirals, rises an antique belfry spire set with domes and turrets and bearing aloft a huge clock dial like a burnished shield. Surely, somewhere in this Hradschin-wonderland occurred the unrecounted events of that much-interrupted narrative of the “King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles,” which Trim tried so hard to tell to Uncle Toby Shandy; and may we not be confident that the charming Prince Florizel, whose strange adventures Stevenson has so gracefully recounted, once lived and courted perils in these romantic surroundings!

It is to be hoped that every visitor will have more than one hour in Prague; and then, of course, he will want to go up to the Hradschin and loiter through and about it at his leisure. He will find large and beautiful gardens where he can rest under noble trees and enjoy an inspiring view of the city in the pleasant companionship of statuary and fountains. When he has exhausted this viewpoint he can secure quite another from the colonnaded verandas of the Renaissance Belvedere; or, perhaps better still, he will journey out to the picturesque Abbey of Strahow, embowered in blooming orchards that are vocal with blackbirds, and from its yellow stuccoed walls look down on the dense forests of the Laurenzberg sweeping in billowy green to the very banks of the Moldau.

At this hour a sharp point of light, seen from the observation tower on the summit of the Hasenberg, marks the location of a little white church on a distant hilltop—and when you have been told all about what happened there at the fatal battle of the White Hill you will have listened to the bitterest chapter in the whole history of Bohemia and will know how the national life of this kingdom gasped itself out, three centuries ago, in the panic and rout of the “Winter King’s” ill-managed soldiery before the fierce infantry of Bavaria. There fell the state won by the flails of a fanatical peasantry whose sonorous war-hymn, “Ye Who Are God’s Warriors,” had so often struck terror into the ranks of the finest armies of Europe. Those were the men whom the furious Ziska led—Ziska, the squat and one-eyed, the friend and avenger of Huss; “John Ziska of the Chalice, Commander in the Hope of God of the Taborites.” Such was the terror in which this dread chieftain was held by his foes that they feared him even after his death and declared that his skin had been stretched for drum-heads to summon his followers on to victory.

Since the battle of the White Hill there has been little for Prague in the way of war except sieges and captures; and it has mattered little to her whether it was Maria Theresa come to be crowned, or Frederick the Great come to destroy, or the Swedes of Gustavus Adolphus come to plague and offend. Suffering has been her regular portion. During the Thirty Years’ War alone, Bohemia’s population declined from four millions to fewer than seven hundred thousand.

The stranger on the Karlsbrücke will turn from thoughts of Ziska’s peasants to regard with increased interest the occasional specimen of the countryman who strides past along the bridge with no embarrassment at appearing in the streets of his capital in the costume of his nation. Behold him in his high boots, tight buff trousers, well-embroidered, blue bolero jacket with many buttons, broad lapels and embroidered cuffs, his soft shirt puffed out like a pigeon, and the jaunty Astrachan cap cocked to one side. And there, too, marches his wife; boots laced high, bodice bright and abbreviated, petticoats short and broad and covered by a wide-bordered apron, her arms bare to the shoulders, and her headdress of white linen very starchy and stiff. Sometimes one passes wearing a hat that suggests Spain, but he, too, as they all do, wears the tight trousers and the close-fitting knee boots. In time one learns to distinguish the Slovaks and Moravians by their long, sleeveless white coats, tight blue trousers, and white jackets with lapels and cuffs embroidered in red.

One hears many interesting things about these peasants. Throughout the year, it is said, they fare frugally on black bread and a cheese made of sheeps’ milk, to which is added an occasional trout from the mountain streams. The great age some of them attain speaks well for the diet. Strangers who go up into the hills to stalk chamois and have a go at the big game come back with surprising stories of the inherited deference that is still paid in the country to caste. They will tell you that the peasant still kisses the hand of the lord of the soil. The Praguer thinks highly of his country brother, though he finds a vast amusement in observing his rustic antics when he comes to town on St. John Nepomuc’s Day and shuffles about the streets, wide-eyed and gaping, after the manner of rus in urbe the world over.

Curious stories are told of peasant customs. Christmas is their day of days, and preparations for its proper observance are made long in advance. They believe it to be a season when evil spirits are powerless to injure and may even be made to aid. When the great day arrives, the cottages are scrupulously cleaned, fresh straw laid on the earthen floor, and the entire household assembled for a processional round of the outbuildings. In the course of this ceremonial parade, beans are carefully dropped into cracks and chinks of the buildings, with elaborate incantations for protection against fires. Bread and salt are offered to every animal on the place. The unmarried daughters are sprinkled with honey-water to insure them faithful and sweet-natured husbands. The family drink of celebration is the plum-distilled slivovitz.

What effective use the great national composers of Bohemia—Smetana, Dvorak, and Fibich—have made of the native melodies and costumes! Smetana, a friend and protégé of Liszt,—the master utilizer of Hungarian folk-themes,—was determined that Bohemia, too, should have music of a distinctively national character; and in his eight operas and six symphonic poems, as well as in his beautiful stringed quartette, the “Carnival of Prague,” he abundantly realized his ambition. There is no more popular opera played in Prague to-day than his “Bartered Bride.” One hears a great deal of Smetana in talking with the people of this city; of his poverty and sadness, his final deafness, and of how, when fame at last crowned him so completely, he was dying in an asylum here. Music is a favorite topic of conversation in Prague. A violin player in one of the local theatre orchestras was no less a person than the great Dvorak, a pupil of Smetana’s; and he, too, added to Bohemian musical glory with his Slavonic rhapsodies and dances and the splendid overture that he constructed on the folk-melody “Kde Domov Muj.” There was a sort of Bach-like foundation for all these composers in the early litanies of the talented Bishop of Prague. The Czech temperament finds its natural expression in music. It is even insisted that their most popular movement, the polka, was invented by a Bohemian servant girl.

Certainly there has been no lack of beautiful legendary material on which to construct effective compositions. These traditional stories are all full of sadness and superstition, and they always revolve about simple, natural elements—the rain, the mountains, the valleys, ghosts, and wild hunters, and, above all, that most recurrent and universal of themes, love.

Could we win favor with some old Praguer this afternoon and entice him into the sunny corner of Karl IV’s monument place, beside the bridge, we should close out our hour with many a captivating and romantic story that would alone have made our visit well worth while. Such, for example, is the legend of the “Spinning Girl.” Deserted by her lover, she wove a wonderful shroud threaded with moonbeams, and in this she was buried, and by its magic she appeared to him on his wedding night and lured him to leap to his death in the river. And there is the story of the “Wedding Shirt”: A girl implores the Virgin either to let her die or restore her absent lover who, unknown to her, has been dead some time. The Virgin bows from the holy picture, and forthwith the pallid lover appears and conducts his sweetheart by a midnight journey to the spot where his body lies buried. Thereupon ensues a desperate struggle by fiends and ghouls to capture the soul of the girl, who is finally rescued by the interposition of the Virgin to whom in her terror she appeals. The wedding shirts that she had brought as her bridal portion are found scattered in fragments by the sinister spirits on the surrounding graves. The flight of the maid and her ghostly lover is vividly depicted at length, and is expressed, in translation, by such lurid lines as—

“O’er the marshes the corpse-lights shone,

Ghastly blue they glimmered alone.”

One of the most romantic of these legends is the “Golden Spinning-Wheel.” A king loses his way while hunting and stops for a drink at a peasant’s cottage. There he finds a marvelously beautiful girl, to whom he eagerly offers himself in marriage. This girl is an orphan, with a stepmother and stepsister who are cruel and jealous. Under pretense of accompanying her to the king’s castle they lure her into a black forest and slay her, taking great pains to conceal her identity by removing and carrying with them her eyes, hands, and feet. They then proceed to the castle and the wicked daughter successfully impersonates the good one, whom she closely resembles. Seven days of wedding festivities ensue, at the end of which the king is called away to the wars. In the mean while a mysterious hermit—a heavenly messenger in disguise—takes up the dead body in the forest, dispatches his lad to the castle and secures the eyes, hands, and feet by bartering for them a golden spinning-wheel, a golden distaff, and a magic whirl. Thus equipped, he miraculously restores the girl to life and limb. When the king returns from the wars he invites his false bride to spin for him with her new golden wheel, and forthwith the magic instrument sings aloud the whole miserable story. The furious king rushes to the forest, finds his real sweetheart, and installs her in his castle, while the murderers are mutilated as she had been, and cast to the wild wolves.

It may be thought that I have gone somewhat out of my allotted way in taking such notice as I have of the superstitions, customs, and music passion of the Bohemians, but I cannot believe that a satisfactory idea of Prague can be had in this, or any other hour, without some conception of the fundamental traits that so powerfully sway this people. For the real significance of the city lies deeper than its surface-showing of wooded hillsides sown with quaint buildings and a broad blue river rushing under many bridges; it is its peculiar raciness of the soil that underlies the Czech’s mad devotion to his capital. Expressing, as only Prague does, so much that is dear and beautiful to him, it centres in itself the most burning and passionate interests of the race. Without some knowledge of this desperate attachment one would fail utterly to grasp the force and truth of such a fine observation as Mr. Arthur Symons has made on the devotion of the Bohemian to this city: “He sees it, as a man sees the woman he loves, with her first beauty; and he loves it, as a man loves a woman, more for what she has suffered.”

SCHEVENINGEN

5 P.M. TO 6 P.M.

Nurtured in the salt sadness of the sea, Scheveningen is a Whistler nocturne. Its prevailing and distinctive tones are neutral and elusive. There are, of course, days when the sun is as clear and powerful here as elsewhere, but more often it is obscured; then the sky becomes pearly, the sea opalescent, the shore drab and dun. Presently a thin fog drifts in, or vapors steal over the trees from the inland marshes, and all tints are rapidly neutralized into a common dimness of that vague and sentimental mistland so dear to the heart of the painter. This is the characteristic suspended color note of the average day at Scheveningen. It harmonizes to perfection with the sentiment of the environment and invests the region with a marvelous charm—peculiar, distinctive, and of the finest dignity.

The power of Scheveningen’s attraction, the force of its appeal, lies largely in its grim aloofness and self-sufficiency. It is unsympathetic, discouraging. It consistently dominates its visitors, and, indeed, with an easy insolence and indifference. Wealth and fashion may abide with it for a few days, under tolerance, but the impression of the temporary and migratory character of their sojourn is always present. Undistracted, the fierce and gaunt sea assails the stark and surly shore, and the grim fishermen stand by and have their toll of both. Of the presence of the strangers they are all but unaware. In a brief day the incongruous invaders will have gone, but this relentless warfare will continue unabated. All the way from Helder to the Hook glistening seas will hiss over the flat beaches, snarling and biting at the shoulders of the dunes. All through the long, bitter winter, without an instant’s intermission, the struggle will go on. It is, consequently, of the very heart of the charm of the place that one has the feeling of intruding on battle; of tolerated propinquity to Titanic contenders.

Loafing at Scheveningen is the apotheosis of idleness. The strong wind stimulates, the broad beaches delight, the solemn sea inspires. To this must be added the sense of strong contrasts. It emphasizes the impression of having dropped, for a time, out of the familiar monotony of Life’s treadmill; of being away from home; of both resting and recreating. It is present to the eyes in the eloquent disproportion between the vast Kurhaus and the diminutive homes of the villagers; in the incongruity of Parisian finery invading the savage haunts of the gull and the curlew. In the novel and bizarre activities of the fisher-folk, as in their theatrical surroundings as well, one finds just the right touch of the picturesque and the unfamiliar to complete the full realization of dolce far niente.

Of the fabled monsters of the wild North Sea the imaginative man will believe he sees one certain survivor in that languid sea-serpent of a pier—the “Jetée Königin Wilhelmina”—that stretches its delicate length a quarter mile over the waves from off the drab sand dunes of Scheveningen. Its pavilion-crowned head snuggles flatly on the water. In the afternoon and evening, when its orchestra is playing, one fancies the monster is actually singing. At five o’clock, precisely, we have its last drowsy utterance as it drops off into a three-hours’ nap—quite as Fafner, in the opera, yawns at Alberich and mutters “lasst mich schlafen!” It must be admitted it is a highly pleasing song he sings,—a Waldteufel waltz, more than likely,—and we come in time to recognize in it the closing number of the matinée musicale. And then, like Jonah’s captor, he wearies of his living contents; and we see them emerge by hundreds, scathless and unafraid, gay with parasols and immaculate of raiment, and pick their way leisurely along his back until they have rejoined their friends in the voluble company that crowds the cafés of the Kurhaus. In a moment more the abandoned monster is fast asleep; which, by a familiar association of ideas, is a sign to the multitudes on the beaches that surf-bathing ends in just one hour.

Forthwith, there is a great bustling all along the shore side of the broad boulevard they call the “Standweg.” Bathers pick themselves up regretfully from sunbaths in the soft, powdery sand and trot down for a final dip in the surf, and those already in hasten to convert pleasure into work with increased energy and enthusiasm. To all such the implacable watchman shall come within the hour and beckon them out with stern and remorseless gestures, and the curious little wagons they call bath-cars will engulf each in turn and trundle them up out of the water, while the nervous old women who look after the bathing-suits will hover about with anxious eyes and lay violent hands on the dripping and discarded garments.

SCHEVENINGEN BEACH

And now a tremendous clamor arises from all the little Holland children, who, from early morning, have been indulging the national instinct for dike-building and surrounding their mothers’ beach-chairs with scientific sand-bulwarks against the imaginary encroachments of the sea. For lo! their nurses approach, wonderful in white streamers and golden head-ornaments, and visions of the odious ante-prandial toilet rise like North Sea fogs in every youngster’s eye until even dinner itself appears abhorrent. Vagabond jugglers run through their final tricks, fold their carpets and steal away. Itinerant peddlers redouble their efforts and retire disgusted or jubilant as Fortune may have hidden or shown her face. More than ever does the sea front take on the appearance of a long apiary, with the hundreds of tall, shrouded beehives of beach-chairs emptying themselves of their comfortable occupants and being bundled by bee-men in white linen to safety for the night. And of all the odd sights of Scheveningen certainly no other will remain longer in mind than this curious, huddled colony of beach-chairs. What a pleasing and cheerful spectacle! Thronging the shore for quite a mile they contribute to the local picture decidedly its most jolly and fantastic feature. Between the beach-chairs and the boulevard there is a picket line of prim little peaked white tents, with the top of each precisely matching all the others in an edging of stiff, woodeny scallops; now that the flaps are thrown back and the sides rolled up, we see tables and chairs inside, with evidence of recent and jovial occupancy.

To the eye of a man taking his comfort at the pretty little Café de la Plage on the Kurhaus terrace, all this bustle and late afternoon animation is bound to prove decidedly diverting. The broad, paved plazas that lie like carpets between him and the dunes are steadily filling with a considerable proportion of the thirty thousand Hollanders and Germans who summer here, and acquaintances are exchanging civilities and joining and taking leave of little groups in a way to make the general picture a brilliant, restless, and bewildering interweaving of color. As the open-air tables are filling, the activity of the waiters approaches hysteria, and the verandas and saloons of the ponderous Kurhaus begin to hum with the advent of the evening guests. Copies of “Le Courrier de Schéveningue” pass from hand to hand as the curious scan the lists of the latest arrivals or look over the various musical programmes of the evening. Out on the terraces, the ornate little newspaper kiosks attract groups of loiterers and gradually take on the character of social centres, and as these companies increase, one thinks of stock exchanges and the rallying about the trading standards. The matinée at the Seinpost concludes and out troops its audience to swell the human high tide. Bright bits of color are afforded by the blue uniforms and yellow facings of Holland infantrymen dotted here and there in the press. It is odd to see the usually arid and monotonous dunes grow brilliant with an artificial blossoming of fashionable millinery, where by nature there is nothing better than a scraggy growth of stringy heather, a little rosemary and broom, or the dry stem of the “miller.”

It is at this hour, when “the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,” that the stolid natives array themselves and sally forth, like Delft tiles come to life, to the amused amazement of the visitors. Your Scheveningen man is wont to go about his duties, during the day, flopping vigorously in vivid red knickerbockers, voluminous as sails and quite as crudely patched; but when he makes a point of toilet he appears in gray homespun, the knickerbockers cut from the same pattern as the red ones, but there is a jacket closed up to the chin with two rows of large buttons, a red handkerchief twisted about the neck, a small cap with a glazed peak, and, of course, the wooden klompen. Such a display richly deserves attention, but what can the poor man expect when his wife appears in her full regalia! She, too, is shod with klompen,—though you have to take that on faith in view of the dozen or two of petticoats that balloon above them,—and her waist is a gay butterfly of variegated embroidery, while her headgear is about the most incredible thing conceivable. You might, at a distance, mistake them for bishops with their mitres tilted back at a rakish angle. Nor is it always of the one pattern. Usually it is a sort of long white cap of linen, embroidered at the edges; and the wearer adds a touch of coquetry in the shape of a long curl hanging at either side. But not infrequently you see a formidable contrivance of vastly more consequence; it consists, first, of a skullcap of polished gold or silver, technically known as a hoofdijzer, pierced at the top for ventilation and cut to leave room for the exposure of the forehead, and over this is drawn an elaborate cape of lace, with gold ornaments of spirals and squares dangling over the ears. This triumph of millinery never fails to elicit cries of delight from feminine visitors, or to set mere man to chuckling. It is most likely to form a part of the impressive gear of the nurses from the provinces, who have more money for such uses than the wives of the fishermen; and the things that are told to newcomers as to the significance of this or that ornament is the boldest advantage ever taken of innocent credulity. They undertook to tell me that you could distinguish between married, single, and engaged women by glancing at the ornaments—I wonder if you can! It is said that parents present their daughters with this headdress on the day of their confirmation; and that it is a fine sight to behold the array of them at kermesstime with their wearers, six or eight abreast, arm in arm, rushing down the streets in the odd dances peculiar to those festivals, droning monotonous tunes.

To my way of thinking the unflagging industry of the Scheveningen women is a matter of quite as much note. One seldom sees them without their knitting, even when they are recreating, and as they stroll along, laughing and chatting together, their fingers, all unnoticed by them, are flashing with extraordinary speed like things of an independent volition. Many of the women wear no sleeves and take great pride in their strong, round arms; and this, I am told, is the case even in winter when they are cracked and purple from exposure to the cold.

The faces of the elder fisher-folk are studies in wrinkles. Their eyes are brave and quizzical, but with a certain settled hardness, not perhaps to be unlooked-for in men and women who come of a stock that for five hundred years has forced even the savage North Sea to yield them a livelihood. They show next to nothing of humor, but rather a stern and weary hopelessness. Strong faces are these, hard, weather-beaten faces, but eloquent of tenacity and desperate courage. They have been called “the most poetic and original of all Hollanders.” They are grave, dignified, and self-reliant; and as they pass you by they show their invariable courtesy in a bow and a quiet “Goe ’n Dag.” One has only to see them to feel the propriety and justification of the boast in their national song:—

“Wilhelmus van Nassouwe,

Ben ick van Duijtschen Bloedt!”

Fishermen naturally suggest ships, and if you glance down the beach you will usually see several of them drawn up to the edge of the water, with the red, white, and blue of Holland at the masthead. During the mid-summer season the fishing-fleet is away on the cruise for red herring off the coasts of Scotland, but there are always a few that could not get away, and so we have the famous Scheveningen bom on its native strand. How the artists have delighted in these lumbering, flat-bottomed tubs, ponderous of mast and weathered of sail! Mesdag, Maris, Alfred Stevens, and the rest have familiarized the world with this fantastic and picturesque craft. Who would buy a painting of Scheveningen unless it showed a bom or two hauled up on the beach? And that is precisely the raison d’ être of the bom—it can be hauled up on the beach. Otherwise, what should a Scheveningen fisherman do with a boat, having no deep-water harbor at hand nor anchorage facility? There have, through the centuries, been many other styles of Dutch fishing-boats,—busses, loggers, hookers, sloops, pinken, etc.,—and at times, when the forehanded Hollanders have made away with the lion’s share of the foreign catch, outsiders have lost patience and classed them all as “Dutch toads”; but there have been no boms but Scheveningen boms. Nowadays they have had to build them larger and they do not beach so easily, and it is probably only a matter of time when steam vessels will supplant them altogether; but when that evil hour strikes the chiefest picturesque glory of this little village will have forever departed.

There used to be vast excitement, in the old days, over the first herring catch of the season, and it was always hurried ashore and conveyed to the king’s table with no end of flourish and punctilio. Over at Vlaardingen they used to post a watchman on the church tower, and when he made out the first boat coming in he would hoist a blue flag and all the people trooped joyfully down to the wharves shouting a song called “De Nieuwe Haring.” Scheveningen, indeed, still presents one of its most picturesque scenes when the returning fishermen arrive and their catch is auctioned off, down the beach near the lighthouse, with much more of gusto and excitement than you would imagine these phlegmatic people could muster. The shrewd Scheveningen fishermen have learned how to eke out the bare three hundred florins they realize from a year’s fishing by turning new tricks in the way of rope-spinning, sail-making, ship-building, and curing and smoking the herring. The fish go into this latter process as “steur haring” and emerge as “bokking”—if that means anything to anybody!

The long-beaked curlew that flashes overhead with hoarse, raucous news of the sea looks down at this hour on pleasant and curious sights as he wings his swift circle above the Scheveningen neighborhood. The placid village of twisted alleys, of innumerable “Tabak te Koop” signs, of queer little gabled houses and unpainted fishermen’s huts, has emptied its good folk into its narrow main street which, fickle of name, starts out as Keizer-Straat, almost immediately becomes Willem-Straat, and within a moment is the Oud-Weg. Here one sees in actual life the fascinating things he has marveled over in the canvases of Teniers, Jan Steen, and Gerard Dou,—good Dutch vrows supper-marketing. There they go, ballooning along, bargaining and bustling from shop to shop, storing capacious hampers with game and cheeses, and every grim line in their faces shouts a challenge to the shopmen to best them by so much as a stuiver if they can. From time to time, quaint little children like sturdy Dutch toys escape from the press and clatter off home, with an air of vast responsibility, hugging in both arms a brown loaf of bread a yard long. How it recalls the bright pages of “Hans Brinker”; and as you catch a glimpse of the broad canal down the street it is natural enough to speculate upon the probability of Gretel’s winning another pair of silver skates before you get back to Scheveningen next summer.

In the meadows back of the village women in blue shawls are drying and mending fishing-nets, nor do they so much as raise their heads as the yellow, double-decked tramway car rumbles past on its trip to The Hague. If all seats are occupied the car will display a large sign marked “Vol,” and rattle along oblivious to appeals from any and all who ask to get on. It is but three scant miles to the beautiful capital of Holland and the tramway makes it in ten minutes—a notable concession by leisurely Holland to the time-saving spirit of the age, in view of other days when they devoted a half-hour to making the same journey by canal barge. The broad, smooth highway that the yellow car follows is, as every one knows, one of the favorite roads of Europe. As the curlew looks down, between five and six o’clock of any bright summer afternoon, he is sure to find it thronged with handsome equipages and to see gay companies in each little wayside inn that peeps out from the deep shade of the noble trees. The desired touch of the foreign and unusual is supplied to the visitor in the scores of heavy carts drawn by frisking, barking dogs; in the ever-present windmills beating the air with long, awkward arms; and in dozens of storks that cock their wise heads over the edges of their nests and regard the passing show with philosophic amusement, patient as the old apple-women of Amsterdam.

The Scheveningen Bosch is one of the most delightful woods imaginable. It is national property, and no private park could be more beautifully kept up. A ball would roll with perfect smoothness down its driveways of crushed gravel, and even Ireland would be taxed to equal the vivid greenness of its lawns. This whole fair forest is studded with villas of the aristocracy and even of royalty. Their wide verandas and orchards and flowery lawns move the most contented to envy a Hollander the comfort he takes in his zomerhuis. To know the Bosch rightly it must be walked through; and the more leisurely and the oftener, the better. It is not only a lovely woodland set with charming homes, but everything a fine forest should be. The green and coppery beeches, the hardy oaks and elms, and the living embroidery of bright flowers perfume the air with delicate odors; and the wind in the lofty tops makes sweet and haunting music. Deep down in the clear mirror of the canals, splotches of broad leaf shadows lazily float and dapple like drowsy fishes. Through the deep foliage you catch occasional glimpses of open, sunny meadows, with cows contentedly grazing; and you come to revel in every vague and tranquil sensation.

In the midst of this beautiful forest, two centuries and a half ago, the best-beloved and most widely read of Holland’s poets—the venerable Jacob Cats—composed his madrigals and moral fables, and so passed the last eight years of his eventful career. Rembrandt loved and painted him, and a monument stands to his memory in his native town of Brouwershaven. They say his books are in every peasants’ hut and his verses in every peasant’s heart. His cottage was at Zorgvliet, a few steps from Scheveningen, near where the Queen Mother now has her summer home, and there in the garden of the Café de la Promenade they will show you the old stone table at which he wrote, with the hole he cut in it for his inkstand.

Wild game throng the wooded inner dunes. Partridges, hares, and rabbits abound in the underbrush, and the polder meadows yield the finest grade of mallard ducks. The pines and firs are resonant with the calls of cuckoos, pheasants, and nightingales. Farmers clear patches of ground to serve as finch flats, which they call vinkie baans; and there, in the autumn, they snare chaffinches which they sell for a cent apiece, to be used as a garnishment in serving other game.

As you look out across the Scheveningen dunes and watch the day declining, stirring thoughts come trooping to mind of the gallant scenes these bleak shores have witnessed. Off yonder, two centuries and a half ago, fell the brave Tromp, hero of thirty-three sea fights. On the bridge of his lofty-sterned Brederode he died, as every true warrior longs to die, in the foremost thick of the fray. “I am done; but keep up a good heart,” were his last words as they carried him into his cabin. Next day they brought his body to these shores and bore it away to lie in the old gray church at Delft beside the revered William the Silent. “The bravest are the tenderest,” and his war-hardened sailors were not ashamed to weep as heartily for him as the little children, fifty years before, had wept in the streets for the great William. Half a dozen years later a shouting multitude thronged this beach and waved a bon voyage to Charles II of England as he sailed homeward to his recovered throne, to restore a licentious court and renew such royal revels as had already cost England a revolution. Another dozen years roll around, and Scheveningen looks on while the fleets of France and England are battered to wreckage by the cannon of Holland’s pet hero, the intrepid De Ruyter. A century or so more, and once again this village is the storm centre of Holland’s hopes and fears as William Frederick I eludes the pursuing French troops and a little Scheveningen fishing-smack bears the whole royal family away in safety to Germany. And when he came back in triumph, twenty years later, it was at Scheveningen that he landed, and at the very spot where yonder gray obelisk now stands in commemoration.

And now through chilly mists the sun, a vast bloated orange, settles down into the glowing wastes of the desolate North Sea. The roaring surf spreads glittering carpets far up the beach. It has suddenly become a region of placid power and glory, something quite other than the fabled home of monsters and terrors, of tempest and shipwreck. That vessel in the offing, with the black hull and the crimson sails, may be the very Flying Dutchman’s own; but still you would like to be on it and so much nearer the sinking sun. The sky is astounding; like a glorified Holland! There you see cloud-islands more wonderful than Walcheren; gray wastes that beggar the Zuyder Zee; sky dunes that stretch beyond Helder or the Hook; meadows more gorgeous than the tulip fields of Haarlem; celestial flora more pure and palpitating than any fairest, faintest bloom in any rarest, dimmest glade throughout the whole woodland of The Hague. It is Holland in excelsis.

BERLIN