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IN HOLLAND 1

IN DENMARK 59

IN SWEDEN 83

IN NORWAY 105

At Roosendal, about an hour's railway journey from Antwerp, the boundary between Belgium and Holland is crossed, and a branch line diverges to Breda.

Somehow, like most travellers, we could not help expecting to see some marked change on reaching a new country, and in Holland one could not repress the expectation of beginning at once to see the pictures of Teniers and Gerard Dou in real life. We were certainly disappointed at first. Open heaths were succeeded by woods of stunted firs, and then by fields with thick hedges of beech or alder, till the towers of Breda came in sight. Here a commonplace omnibus took us to the comfortable inn of Zum Kroon, and we were shown into bedrooms reached by an open wooden staircase from the courtyard, and quickly joined the table d'h?te, at which the magnates of the town were seated with napkins well tucked up under their chins, talking, with full mouths, in Dutch, of which to our unaccustomed ears the words seemed all in one string. Most excellent was the dinner--roast meat and pears, quantities of delicious vegetables cooked in different ways, piles of ripe mulberries and cake, and across the little garden, with its statues and bright flower-beds, we could see the red sails of the barges going up and down the canals.

After a delicious breakfast of coffee and thick cream, with rusks, scones, and different kinds of cheese, always an indispensable in Dutch breakfasts, we took to the railway again and crossed Zealand, which chiefly consists of four islands, Noordt Beveland, Zuid Beveland, Schouwen, and Walcheren, and is less visited by the rest of the Netherlanders than any other part of the country. The land is all cut up into vast polders, as the huge meadows are called, which are recovered from the sea and protected by embankments. Here, if human care was withdrawn for six months, the whole country would be under the sea again. A corps of engineers called 'waterstaat' are continually employed to watch the waters, and to keep in constant repair the dykes, which are formed of clay at the bottom, as that is more waterproof than anything else, and thatched with willows, which are here grown extensively for the purpose. If the sea passes a dyke, ruin is imminent, an alarm bell rings, and the whole population rush to the rescue. The moment one dyke is even menaced, the people begin to build another inside it, and then rely upon the double defence, whilst they fortify the old one. But all their care has not preserved the islands of Zealand. Three centuries ago, Schouwen was entirely submerged, and every living creature was drowned. Soon after, Noordt Beveland was submerged, and remained for several years entirely under water, only the points of the church spires being visible. Zuid Beveland had been submerged in the fourteenth century. Walcheren was submerged as late as 1808, and Tholen even in 1825. It has been aptly asserted that the sea to the inhabitants of Holland is what Vesuvius is to Torre del Greco. How well its French name of Pays-Bas suits the country! De Amicis says that the Dutch have three enemies--the sea, the lakes, and the rivers; they repel the sea, they dry the lakes, and they imprison the rivers; but with the sea it is a combat which never ceases.

The story of the famous siege of 1749 made us linger at Bergen-op-Zoom, a clean, dull little town with bright white houses surrounding an irregular market-place, and surmounted by the heavy tower of the Church of S. Gertrude. In the Stadhuis is a fine carved stone chimney-piece; but there is little worth seeing, and we were soon speeding across the rich pastures of Zuid Beveland, and passing its capital of Goes, prettily situated amongst cherry orchards, the beautiful cruciform church with a low central spire rising above the trees on its ramparts. Every now and then the train seems scarcely out of the water, which covers a vast surface of the pink-green flats, and recalls the description in Hudibras of--

A country that draws fifty feet of water, In which men live as in the hold of nature, And when the sea does in upon them break, And drown a province, does but spring a leak.

The peasant women at the stations are a perpetual amusement, for there is far more costume here than in most parts of Holland, and peculiar square handsome gold ornaments, something like closed golden books, are universally worn on each side of the face.

The crowd in the market-place was so great that it was impossible to sketch the Stadhuis as we should have wished, but the people themselves were delightfully picturesque. The women entirely conceal their hair under their white caps, but have golden corkscrews sticking out on either side the face, like weapons of defence, from which the golden slabs we have observed before were pendant. The Nieuwe Kerk is of little interest, though it contains the tomb of William of Holland, who was elected Emperor of Germany in 1250, and we wandered on through the quiet streets, till a Gothic arch in an ancient wall looked tempting. Passing through it we found ourselves in the enclosure of the old abbey, shaded by a grove of trees, and surrounded by ancient buildings, part of which are appropriated as the Hotel Abdij, where we arrived utterly famished, and found a table d'h?te at 2.30 P.M. unspeakably reviving.

Any one who sees Holland thoroughly ought also to visit Zieriksee, the capital of the island of Schouwen; but the water locomotion thither is so difficult and tedious that we preferred keeping to the railways, which took us back in the dark over the country we had already traversed, and a little more, to Dortrecht, where there is a convenient tramway to take travellers from the station into the town. Here, at the H?tel de Fries, we found comfortable bedrooms, with boarded floors and box-beds like those in Northumbrian cottages, and we had supper in the public room, separated into two parts by a da?s for strangers, whence we looked down into the humbler division, which recalled many homely scenes of Ostade and Teniers in its painted wooden ceiling, its bright, polished furniture, its cat and dog and quantity of birds and flowers, its groups of boors at round tables drinking out of tankards, and the landlady and her daughter in their gleaming gold ornaments, sitting knitting, with the waiter standing behind them amusing himself by the general conversation.

From the busy port, where nevertheless they are dredging, we cross another bridge and find ourselves in a quietude like that of a cathedral close in England. On one side is a wide pool half covered with floating timber, and, in the other half, reflecting like a mirror the houses on the opposite shore, with their bright gardens of lilies and hollyhocks, and trees of mountain ash, which bend their masses of scarlet berries to the still water. Between the houses are glints of blue river and of inevitable windmills on the opposite shore. And all this we observe standing in the shadow of a huge church, the Groote Kerk, with a nave of the fourteenth century, and a choir of the fifteenth, and a gigantic brick tower, in which three long Gothic arches, between octagonal tourelles, enclose several tiers of windows. At the top is a great clock, and below the church a grove of elms, through which fitful sunlight falls on the grass and the dead red of the brick pavement , where groups of fishermen are collecting in their blue shirts and white trousers.

There is little to see inside this or any other church in Holland; travellers will rather seek for the memorials, at the Kloveniers Doelen, of the famous Synod of Dort, which was held 1618-19, in the hope of effecting a compromise between the Gomarists, or disciples of Calvin, and the Arminians who followed Zwingli, and who had recently obtained the name of Remonstrants from the 'remonstrance' which they had addressed eight years before in defence of their doctrines. The Calvinists held that the greater part of mankind was excluded from grace, which the Arminians denied; but at the Synod of Dort the Calvinists proclaimed themselves as infallible as the Pope, and their resolutions became the law of the Dutch reformed Church. The Arminians were forthwith outlawed; a hundred ministers who refused to subscribe to the dictates of the Synod were banished; Hugo Grotius and Rombout Hoogerbeets were imprisoned for life at Loevestein; the body of the secretary Ledenberg, who committed suicide in prison, was hung; and Van Olden Barneveldt, the friend of William the Silent, was beheaded in his seventy-second year.

There is nothing in the quiet streets of Dortrecht to remind one that it was once one of the most important commercial cities of Holland, taking precedence even of Rotterdam, Delft, Leyden, and Amsterdam. It also possessed a privilege called the Staple of Dort, by which all the carriers on the Maas and Rhine were forced to unload their merchandise here, and pay all duties imposed, only using the boats or porters of the place in their work, and so bringing a great revenue to the town.

More than those in any of the other towns of Holland do the little water streets of Dortrecht recall Venice, the houses rising abruptly from the canals; only the luminous atmosphere and the shimmering water changing colour like a chameleon, are wanting.

Through the street of wine--Wijnstraat--built over storehouses used for the staple, we went to the Museum to see the pictures. There were two schools of Dortrecht. Jacob Geritse Cuyp , Albert Cuyp , Ferdinand Bol , Nicolas Maas , and Schalken belonged to the former; Arend de Gelder, Arnold Houbraken, Dirk Stoop, and Ary Scheffer are of the latter. Sunshine and glow were the characteristics of the first school, greyness and sobriety of the second. But there are few good pictures at Dort now, and some of the best works of Cuyp are to be found in our National Gallery, executed at his native place and portraying the great brick tower of the church in the golden haze of evening, seen across rich pastures, where the cows are lying deep in the meadow grass. The works of Ary Scheffer are now the most interesting pictures in the Dortrecht Gallery. Of the subject 'Christus Consolator' there are two representations. In the more striking of these the pale Christ is seated amongst the sick, sorrowful, blind, maimed, and enslaved, who are all stretching out their hands to Him. Beneath is the tomb which the artist executed for his mother, Cornelia Scheffer, whose touching figure is represented lying with outstretched hands, in the utmost abandonment of repose.

An excursion should be made from Dortrecht to the castle of Loevestein on the Rhine, where Grotius, imprisoned in 1619, was concealed by his wife in the chest which brought in his books and linen. It was conveyed safely out of the castle by her courageous maid Elsje van Houwening, and was taken at first to the house of Jacob Daatselaer, a supposed friend of Grotius, who refused to render any assistance. But his wife consented to open the chest, and the philosopher, disguised as a mason, escaped to Brabant.

It is much best to visit Rotterdam as an excursion from Dortrecht. We thought it the most odious place we ever were in--immense, filthy, and not very picturesque. Its handsomest feature is the vast quay called the Boompjes, on the Maas. Here and there a great windmill reminds you unmistakably of where you are, and the land streets are intersected everywhere by water streets, the carriages being constantly stopped to let ships pass through the bridges. In the Groote Markt stands a bronze statue of Desiderius Erasmus--'Vir saeculi sui primarius, et civis omnium praestantissimus,' which is the work of Hendrik de Keyser , and in the Wijde Kerkstraat is the house where he was born, inscribed 'Haec est parva domus, magnus qua natus Erasmus, 1467,' but it is now a tavern. The great church of S. Lawrence--Groote Kerk--built in 1477-87, contains the tombs of a number of Dutch admirals, and has a grand pavement of monumental slabs, but is otherwise frightful. The portion used for service is said to be 'so conveniently constructed that the zealous Christians of Rotterdam prefer sleeping through a sermon there, to any other church in the city.' Part of the rest is used as a cart-house, the largest chapel is a commodious carpenter's shop, and the aisles round the part which is still a church, where there has been an attempt at restoration in painting the roof yellow and putting up some hideous yellow seats, are a playground for the children of the town, who are freely admitted in their perambulators, though for strangers there is a separate fee for each part of the edifice they enter.

We went to see the pictures in the Museum bequeathed to the town by Jacob Otto Boyman, but did not admire them much. It takes time to accustom one's mind to Dutch art, and the endless representations of family life, with domestic furniture, pots and pans, &c., or of the simple local landscapes--clipped avenues, sandy roads, dykes, and cottages, or even of the cows, and pigs, and poultry, which seem wonderfully executed, but, where one has too much of the originals, scarcely worth the immense amount of time and labour bestowed upon them. The calm seas of Van de Welde and Van der Capelle only afford a certain amount of relief. The scenes of village life are seldom pleasing, often coarse, and never have anything elevating to offer or ennobling to recall. We thought that the real charm of the Dutch school to outsiders consists in the immense power and variety of its portraits.

Hating Rotterdam, we thankfully felt ourselves speeding over the flat, rich lands to Gouda, where we found an agricultural f?te going on, banners half way down the houses, and a triumphal arch as the entrance to the square, formed of spades, rakes, and forks, with a plough at the top, and decorated with corn, potatoes, turnips, and carrots, and cornucopias pouring out flowers at the sides. In the square--a great cheese market, for the Gouda cheese is esteemed the best in Holland--is a Gothic Stadhuis, and beyond it, the Groote Kerk of 1552, of which the bare interior is enlivened by the stained windows executed by Wonter and Dirk Crabeth in 1555-57. We were the better able to understand the design of these noble windows because the cartoon for each was spread upon the pavement in front of it; but one could not help one's attention being unpleasantly distracted by the number of men of the burgher class, smoking and with their hats on, who were allowed to use the church as a promenade. Gouda also made an unpleasant impression upon us, because, expensive as we found every hotel in Holland, we were nowhere so outrageously cheated as here.

It is a brief journey to the Hague--La Haye, Gravenhage--most delightful of little capitals, with its comfortable hotels and pleasant surroundings. The town is still so small that it seems to merit the name of 'the largest village in Europe,' which was given to it because the jealousy of other towns prevented its having any vote in the States General till the time of Louis Bonaparte, who gave it the privileges of a city. It is said that the Hague, more than any other place, may recall what Versailles was just before the great revolution. It has thoroughly the aspect of a little royal city. Without any of the crowd and bustle of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, it is not dead like the smaller towns of Holland; indeed, it even seems to have a quiet gaiety, without dissipation, of its own. All around are parks and gardens, whence wide streets lead speedily through the new town of the rich bourgeoisie to the old central town of stadholders, where a beautiful lake, the Vijver, or fish-pond, comes as a surprise, with the eccentric old palace of the Binnenhof rising straight out of its waters. We had been told it was picturesque, but were prepared for nothing so charming as the variety of steep roofs and towers, the clear reflections, the tufted islet, and the beautiful colouring of the whole scene of the Vijver. Skirting the lake, we entered the precincts of the palace through the picturesque Gudevangen Poort, where Cornelius de Witte, Burgomaster of Dort, was imprisoned in 1672, on a false accusation of having suborned the surgeon William Tichelaur to murder the Prince of Orange. He was dragged out hence and torn to pieces by the people, together with his brother Jean de Witte, Grand Pensioner, whose house remains hard by in the Kneuterdijk.

The court of the Binnenhof is exceedingly handsome, and contains the ancient Gothic Hall of the Knights, where Johann van Olden Barneveld, Grand Pensioner, or Prime Minister, was condemned to death 'for having conspired to dismember the States of the Netherlands, and greatly troubled God's Church,' and in the front of which he was beheaded.

Close to the north-east gate of the Binnenhof is the handsome house called Mauritshuis, containing the inestimable Picture Gallery of the Hague, which will bear many visits, and has the great charm of not being huge beyond the powers of endurance. On the ground floor are chiefly portraits, amongst which a simple dignified priest by Philippe de Champaigne, with a far-away expression, will certainly arrest attention. Deeply interesting is the portrait by Ravesteyn of William the Silent, in his ruff and steel armour embossed with gold--a deeply lined face, with a slight peaked beard. His widow, Louise de Coligny, is also represented. There is a fine portrait by Schalcken of our William the Third. Noble likenesses of Sir George Sheffield and his wife Anna Wake, by Vandyke, are a pleasing contrast to the many works of Rubens. There are deeply interesting portraits by Albert D?rer and Holbein.

On the first floor we must sit down before the great picture which Rembrandt painted in his twenty-sixth year of the School of Anatomy. Here the shrewd professor, Nicholaus Tulp, with a face brimming with knowledge and intelligence, is expounding the anatomy of a corpse to a number of members of the guild of surgeons, some of whom are full of eager interest and inquiry, whilst others are inattentive: the dead figure is greatly foreshortened and not repulsive. In another room, a fine work of Thomas de Keyser represents the Four Burgomasters of Amsterdam hearing of the arrival of Marie de Medicis. A beautiful work of Adrian van Ostade is full of light and character--but only represents a stolid boor drinking to the health of a fiddler, while a child plays with a dog in the background.

There is not much to discover in the streets of the Hague. In the great square called the Plein is the statue of William the Silent, with his finger raised, erected in 1848 'by the grateful people to the father of their fatherland.' In the fish-market, tame storks are kept, for the same reason that bears are kept at Berne, because storks are the arms of the town. But the chief attraction of the place lies in its lovely walks amid the noble beeches and oaks of the Bosch, beyond which on the left is Huis ten Bosch, the Petit Trianon of the Hague, the favourite palace of Queen Sophie, who held her literary court and died there. It is a quiet country house, looking out upon flats, with dykes and a windmill. All travellers seem to visit it,--which must be a ceaseless surprise to the extortionate custode to whom they have to pay a gulden a head, and who will hurry them rapidly through some commonplace rooms in which there is nothing really worth seeing. One room is covered with paintings of the Rubens school, amid which, high in the dome, is a portrait of the Princess Amalia of Solms, who built the house in 1647.

Balthazar reached the rampart of the town in safety, hoping to swim to the other side of the moat, where a horse awaited him. But he had dropped his hat and his second pistol in his flight, and so he was traced and seized before he could leap from the wall. Amid horrible tortures, he not only confessed, but continued to triumph in his crime. His judges believed him to be possessed of the devil. The next day he was executed. His right hand was burnt off in a tube of red-hot iron: the flesh of his arms and legs was torn off with red-hot pincers; but he never made a cry. It was not till his breast was cut open, and his heart torn out and flung in his face, that he expired. His head was then fixed on a pike, and his body cut into four quarters, exposed on the four gates of the town.

Close to the Prinsenhof is the Oude Kerk with a leaning tower. It is arranged like a very ugly theatre inside, but contains, with other tombs of celebrities, the monument of Admiral van Tromp, 1650--'Martinus Harberti Trompius'--whose effigy lies upon his back, with swollen feet. It was this Van Tromp who defeated the English fleet under Blake, and perished, as represented on the monument, in an engagement off Scheveningen. It was he who, after his victory over the English, caused a broom to be hoisted at his mast-head to typify that he had swept the Channel clear of his enemies.

On leaving the Hague a few hours should be given to the dull university town of Leyden, unless it has been seen as an afternoon excursion from the capital. This melancholy and mildewed little town, mouldering from a century of stagnation, the birthplace of Rembrandt, surrounds the central tower of its Burg--standing in the grounds of an inn, which exacts payment from those who visit it. Close by is the huge church of S. Pancras--Houglansche Kerk--of the fifteenth century, containing the tomb of Van der Werff, burgomaster during the famous siege, who answered the starving people, when they came demanding bread or surrender, that he had 'sworn to defend the city, and, with God's help, he meant to keep his oath, but that if his body would help them to prolong the defence, they might take it and share it amongst those who were most hungry.' A covered bridge over a canal leads to the Bredenstrasse, where there is a picturesque grey stone Stadhuis of the sixteenth century. It contains the principal work of Cornelius Engelbrechtsen of Leyden , one of the earliest of Dutch painters--an altarpiece representing the Crucifixion, with the Sacrifice of Abraham and Worship of the Brazen Serpent in the side panels, as symbols of the Atonement: on the pedestal is a naked body, out of which springs a tree--the tree of life--and beside it kneel the donors. The neighbouring church of S. Peter contains the tomb of Boerhaave, the physician, whose lectures in the University were attended by Peter the Great, and for whom a Chinese mandarin found '? l'illustre M. Boerhaave, m?decin, en Europe,' quite sufficient direction. Boerhaave was the doctor who said that the poor were his best patients, for God paid for them.

The streets are grass-grown, the houses damp, the canals green with weed. The University has fallen into decadence since others were established at Utrecht, Groningen, and Amsterdam; but Leyden is still the most flourishing of the four. When William of Orange offered the citizens freedom from taxes, as a reward for their endurance of the famous siege, they thanked him, but said they would rather have a university. Grotius and Cartesius , Arminius and Gomar, were amongst its professors, and the University possesses an admirable botanical museum and a famous collection of Japanese curiosities.

The Rhine cuts up the town of Leyden into endless islands, connected by a hundred and fifty bridges. On a quiet canal near the Beesten Markt is the Museum, which contains the 'Last Judgment' of Lucas van Leyden , a scholar of Engelbrechtsen, and one of the patriarchs of Dutch painting.

A few minutes bring us from Leyden to Haarlem by the railway. It crosses an isthmus between the sea and a lake which covered the whole country between Leyden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam till 1839, when it became troublesome, and the States-General forthwith, after the fashion of Holland, voted its destruction. Enormous engines were at once employed to drain it by pumping the water into canals, which carried it to the sea, and the country was the richer by a new province.

Amongst a crowd of natives with their hats on, talking in church as in the market-place, we waited to hear the famous organ of Christian Muller , and grievously were we disappointed with its discordant noises. All the men smoked in church, and this we saw repeatedly; but it would be difficult to say where we ever saw a Dutchman with a pipe out of his mouth. Every man seemed to be systematically smoking away the few wits he possessed.

Opposite the Groote Kerk is the Stadhuis, an old palace of the Counts of Holland remodelled. It contains a delightful little gallery of the works of Franz Hals, which at once transports the spectator into the Holland of two hundred years ago--such is the marvellous variety of life and vigour impressed into its endless figures of stalwart officers and handsome young archers pledging each other at banquet tables and seeming to welcome the visitor with jovial smiles as he enters the chamber, or of serene old ladies, 'regents' of hospitals, seated at their council boards. The immense power of the artist is shown in nothing so much as in the hands, often gloved, dashed in with instantaneous power, yet always having the effect of the most consummate finish at a distance. Behind one of the pictures is the entrance to the famous 'secret-room of Haarlem,' seldom seen, but containing an inestimable collection of historic relics of the time of the famous siege of Leyden.

April and May are the best months for visiting Haarlem, which is the bulb nursery garden of the world. 'Oignons ? fleurs' are advertised for sale everywhere. Tulips are more cultivated than any other flowers, as ministering most to the national craving for colour; but times are changed since a single bulb of the tulip 'L'Amiral Liefkenshoch' sold for 4,500 florins, one of 'Viceroy' for 4,200, and one of 'Semper Augustus' for 13,000.

Now we entered Amsterdam, to which we had looked forward as the climax of our tour, having read of it and pondered upon it as 'the Venice of the north;' but our expectations were raised much too high. Anything more unlike Venice it would be difficult to imagine: and there is a terrible want of variety and colour; many of the smaller towns of Holland are far more interesting and infinitely more picturesque.

A castle was built at Amsterdam in 1204, but the town only became important in the sixteenth century, since which it has been the most commercial of ancient European cities. It is situated upon the influx of the Amstel to the Y, as the arm of the Zuider Zee which forms the harbour is called, and it occupies a huge semicircle, its walls being enclosed by the broad moat, six and a half miles long, which is known as Buitensingel. The greater part of the houses are built on piles, causing Erasmus to say that the inhabitants lived on trees like rooks. In the centre of the town is the great square called Dam, one side of which is occupied by the handsome Royal Palace--Het Palais--built by J. van Kampen in 1648. The Nieuwe Kerk contains a number of monuments to admirals, including those of Van Ruiter--'immensi tremor oceani'--who commanded at the battle of Solbay, and Van Speyk, who blew himself up with his ship in 1831, rather than yield to the Belgians. In the Oude Kerk of 1300 there are more tombs of admirals. Hard by, in the Nieuwe Markt, is the picturesque cluster of fifteenth-century towers called S. Anthonieswaag, once a city gate and now a weighing-house.

But the great attraction of Amsterdam is the Picture Gallery of the Trippenhuis, called the Rijks Museum, and it deserves many visits. Amongst the portraits in the first room we were especially attracted by that of William the Silent in his skull-cap, by Miereveld, but all the House of Orange are represented here from the first to the last. We also see all the worthies of the nation--Ruyter, Van Tromp and his wife, Grotius and his wife, Johann and Cornelis de Witt, Johann van Oldenharneveldt, and his wife Maria of Utrecht, a peaceful old lady in a ruff and brown dress edged with fur, by Moreelse. The two great pictures of the gallery hang opposite each other. That by Bartholomew van der Helst, the most famous of Dutch portrait-painters, represents the Banquet of the Musqueteers, who thus celebrated the Peace of Westphalia, June 18, 1648. It contains twenty-five life-size portraits, is the best work of the master, and was pronounced by Sir Joshua Reynolds to be the 'first picture of portraits in the world.' The canvas is a mirror faithfully representing a scene of actual life. In the centre sits the jovial, rollicking Captain de Wits with his legs crossed. The delicate imitation of reality is equally shown in the Rhenish wine-glasses, and in the ham to which one of the guests is helping himself.

The rival picture is the 'Night Watch' of Rembrandt , representing Captain Frans Banning Kok of Purmerland and his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenberg of Vlaardingen, emerging from their watch-house on the Singel. A joyous troop pursue their leader, who is in a black dress. A strange light comes upon the scene, who can tell whence? Half society has always said that this picture was the marvel of the world, half that it is unworthy of its artist; but no one has ever been quite indifferent to it.

Through the labyrinthine quays we found our way to the Westerhoof to take the afternoon steamer to Purmerende for an excursion to Broek, 'the cleanest village in the world.' Crossing the broad Amstel, the vessel soon enters a canal, which sometimes lies at a great depth, nothing being visible but the tops of masts and points of steeples; and which then, after passing locks, becomes level with the tops of the trees and the roofs of the houses. We left the steamer at T Schouw, and entered, on a side canal, one of the trekschuiten, which, until the time of railroads, were the usual means of travel--a long narrow cabin, encircled by seats, forms the whole vessel, and is drawn by a horse ridden by a boy --a most agreeable easy means of locomotion, for movement is absolutely imperceptible.

No place was ever more exaggerated than Broek. There is really very little remarkable in it, except even a greater sense of dampness and ooziness than in the other Dutch villages. It was autumn, and there seemed no particular attempt to remove the decaying vegetation or trim the little gardens, or to sweep up the dead leaves upon the pathways, yet there used to be a law that no animal was to enter Broek for fear of its being polluted. A brick path winds amongst the low wooden cottages, painted blue, green, and white, and ends at the church, with its miniature tombstones.

The most interesting excursion to be made from Amsterdam is that to the Island of Marken in the Zuider Zee--a huge meadow, where the peasant women pass their whole lives without ever seeing anything beyond their island, whilst their husbands, who with very few exceptions are fishermen, see nothing beyond the fisher-towns of the Zuider Zee. There are very picturesque costumes here, the men wearing red woollen shirts, brown vests, wooden shoes, fur caps, and gold buttons to their collars and knickerbockers; the women, embroidered stomachers, which are handed down for generations, and enormous white caps, lined with brown to show off the lace, and with a chintz cover for week days, and their own hair flowing below the cap over their shoulders and backs.

An evening train, with an old lady, in a diamond tiara and gold pins, for our companion, took us to the Helder, and we awoke next morning at the pleasant little inn of Du Burg upon a view of boats and nets and the low-lying Island of Texel in the distance. The boats and the fishermen are extremely picturesque, but there is nothing else to see, after the visitor has examined the huge granite Helder Dyke, the artificial fortification of north Holland, which contends successfully to preserve the land against the sea. There is an admirably managed Naval Institute here. It was by an expedition from the Helder that Nova Zembla was discovered, and it was near this that Admirals Ruyter and Tromp repulsed the English fleet. Texel, which lies opposite the Helder, is the first of a chain of islands--Vlieland, Terschelling, and Ameland, which protect the entrance of the Zuider Zee.

It is three hours' drive from Alkmaar to Hoorn, a charming old town with bastions, gardens, and semi-ruined gates. On the West Poort a relief commemorates the filial devotion of a poor boy, who arrived here in 1579, laboriously dragging his old mother in a sledge, when all were flying from the Spaniards. Opposite the weighing-house for the cheeses is the State College, which bears a shield with the arms of England, sustained by two negroes. It commemorates the fact that when Van Tromp defeated the English squadron, his ships came from Hoorn and on board were two negroes, who took from the English flagship the shield which it was then the custom to fix to the stern of a vessel, and brought it back here as a trophy. Hoorn was one of the first places in Holland to embrace the reformed religion, which spread from hence all over the country, but now not above half the inhabitants are Calvinists.

In returning from Alkmaar we stopped to see Zaandam, quite in the centre of the land of windmills, of which we counted eighty as visible from the station alone. They are of every shade of colour, and are mounted on poles, on towers, on farm buildings, and made picturesque by every conceivable variety of prop, balcony, gallery, and insertion. Zaandam is a very pretty village on the Zaan which flows into the Y, with gaily painted houses, and gay little gardens, and perpetual movement to and from its landing-stage. Turning south from thence, a little entry on the right leads down some steps and over a bridge to some cottages on the bank of a ditch, and inside the last of these is the tiny venerable hovel where Peter the Great stayed in 1697 as Peter Michaeloff. It retains its tiled roof and contains some old chairs and a box-bed, but unfortunately Peter was only here a week.

The interesting Moravian establishment of Zeist may be visited from Utrecht.

At Zwolle, however, we found the Kroon an excellent hotel with an obliging landlord; and Zwolle, the native place of Terburg , is a charming old town with a girdle of gardens, a fine church , and a noble brick gateway called the Sassenpoort.

It was more the desire of seeing something of the whole country than anything else, and a certain degree of misplaced confidence in the pleasant volumes of Harvard, which took us up from Zwolle, through Friesland, the cow-paradise, to Leeuwarden, its ancient capital. Sad and gloomy as most other towns of Holland are, Leeuwarden is sadder and gloomier still. Its streets are wide and not otherwise than handsome, but they are almost deserted, and there are no objects of interest to see unless a leaning tower can be called so, with a top, like that at Pisa, inclined the other way, to keep it from toppling over. An hour's walk from the town there is said to be a fine still-inhabited castle, and, if time had allowed, respect for S. Boniface would have taken us to Murmerwoude, where he was martyred , with his fifty-three companions. King Pepin raised a hermitage on the spot, and an ancient brick chapel still exists there.

In the late evening we went on to Groningen, a university town with a good hotel , an enormous square, and a noble tall Gothic tower of 1627, whence the watchman still sounds his bugle. Not far off is Midwolde, where the village church has fine tombs of Charles Jerome, Baron d'Inhausen and his wife, Anna von Ewsum.

On leaving Groningen we traversed the grey, monotonous, desolate district of the Drenthe, sprinkled over at intervals by the curious ancient groups of stones called Hunnebedden, or beds of death , beneath which urns of clay containing human ashes have been found. From Deventer , time did not allow us to make an excursion to the great royal palace of Het Loo, the favourite residence of the sovereigns. The descriptions in Harvard rather made us linger unnecessarily at Zutphen, a dull town, with a brick Groote Kerk which has little remaining of its original twelfth-century date, and a rather picturesque 'bit' on the walls, where the 'Waterpoort' crosses the river like a bridge.

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