Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

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

6 P.M. TO 7 P.M.

While the sun is still sinking behind the Potsdam hills that victorious old Fighting Fritz loved so well, and the hero himself, astride his bronze charger, in cloak and cocked hat in the statue group on the Linden, seems riding slowly home to his neighboring palace with the lengthening shadows, the vast industrial army of the German capital issues in myriad units from its individual barracks and debouches on the spacious squares and broad avenues in quest of the evening’s diversions. It is the lull hour. The long, hard day’s work over, the amusements of the night are shortly to begin. In this pleasant interval the bustling, aggressive city seems pervaded with a spirit of relaxation, and no more opportune moment presents for catching the Berliner off his guard and really seeing him as his intimates know him.