Chapter III: Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

LEYDEN AND HAARLEM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

THE CITY OF NINETY ISLANDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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