Chapter V: Part 5

Tasman was numbered among the foremost discoverers of the seventeenth century. In the year 1639 he was assigned to a voyage of exploration by Van Dieman, the governor general of the Dutch East Indies at the time, his cruise leading him to the Western Pacific. After exploring part of the coast of Luzon in the Philippine Islands, he sailed farther to the northward and around Japan, but, discovering no land not already nailed to the flag of some nation, he set sail again for home on October 15th of the same year.

The Hollanders having already discovered and explored a part of the west coast of Australia, the Dutch East India Company was desirous of obtaining fuller and more accurate information about the territory with a view of exploiting its natural resources and whatever others the company itself might develop. Accordingly, on August 14, 1642, Tasman was dispatched from Batavia in command of two ships and intrusted with the task of bringing back a full and authentic account of whatever he saw and conquered. Owing to the inaccuracy of his sailing charts, head winds that blew him from his prescribed course, and what not, he went south of his mark, and came upon a hitherto undiscovered country which he promptly named Van Dieman’s Land, in honor of his sponsor. But being unaware that what is now known as Tasmania was an island by its own right, he hoisted his flag and set to work exploring what he thought at the time to be the most of Australia. He set sail again from the newly discovered territory, bearing to the eastward with a vague idea of reaching the Solomon Islands. On the 13th of December he discovered a “high, mountainous country,” which he noted in his log book as “Staatenland.” For some unaccountable reason the English have allowed its name to remain as New Zealand, neglecting to change it when they took it over, as they did that of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.

William Schouten, having had an earlier relapse under the spell of the spray, was the first to sail round the southern extremity of South America, his goal being one and the same with that of Henry Hudson, who attempted a supposed route to China from Amsterdam, first by way of the Chesapeake Bay, and later, the Hudson River. Schouten, in passing, christened the point “Cape Hoorn,” latterly contracted to “Horn,” in honor of his birthplace.

In addition to these, Hoorn refers proudly to the exploits of another of her sons, John Haring by name, a Dutch Horatius whose signal courageous achievement consisted in holding in check, single-handed, a round thousand of Spaniards, while his compatriots gathered themselves together in order to retreat in a systematic manner at least.

It took place before Amsterdam in 1573, when the city was held in the grip of the Dons. The Prince of Orange had taken up a position to the south of the city, and Sonoy, his general, was encamped to the north. The operations of both were hampered by the lack of sufficient forces. Sonoy having gone to Edam for the purpose of gathering reinforcements, the Spaniards in his absence made a concentrated attack upon his division entrenched behind the Diemer Dike. Seeing the fight was going against his fellows, Haring of Hoorn, as Motley relates, “planted himself entirely alone upon the dike, where it was so narrow between the Y on the one side and the Diemer Lake on the other that two men could hardly stand abreast. Here, armed with a sword and a shield, he had actually opposed and held in check one thousand of the enemy, during a period long enough to enable his own men, if they had been willing, to rally and effectually to repel the attack. It was too late--the battle was too far lost to be restored; but still the brave soldier held his post, till, by his devotion, he enabled all those of his compatriots who still remained in the entrenchments to make good their retreat. He then plunged into the sea, and, untouched by spear or bullet, effected his escape.”

But John Haring survived only to suffer death in the attempt of an equally valiant feat a few months later before the sea-gates of his own native town.

The siege of Alkmaar having terminated unhappily for the Spaniards, they dispatched a fleet from Amsterdam under Count Bossu, to effect the surrender of Hoorn and Enkhuizen. No sooner had the project been contemplated than the Dutch got wind of it; Admiral Dirkzoon sailed in command of a fleet of twenty-five vessels, and, having had favorable winds and weather, bore down upon the Spanish armada near Hoorn.

“After a short and general engagement,” according to Motley, “nearly all the Spanish fleet retired with precipitation, closely pursued by most of the patriot Dutch vessels. Five of the King’s ships were eventually taken--the rest effected their escape. Only the Admiral remained, who scorned to yield, although his forces had thus basely deserted him. His ship, the _Inquisition_, for such was her insolent appellation, was far the largest and best manned of both fleets. Most of the enemy had gone in pursuit of the fugitives, but four vessels of inferior size had attacked the _Inquisition_ at the commencement of the action. Of these, one had soon been silenced, while the other three had grappled themselves inextricably to her sides and prow. The four drifted together, before wind and tide, a severe and savage action going on incessantly, during which the navigation of the ships was entirely abandoned. No scientific gunnery, no military or naval tactics, were displayed or required in such a conflict. It was a life-and-death combat, such as always occurred when Spaniard and Netherlander met, whether on land or water. Bossu and his men, armed with bullet-proof coats of mail, stood with shield and sword on the deck of the _Inquisition_, ready to repel all attempts to board. The Hollanders, as usual, attacked with pitch hoops, boiling oil, and molten lead. Repeatedly they effected their entrance to the Admiral’s ship, and as often they were repulsed and slain in heaps, or hurled into the sea. The battle began at three in the afternoon, and continued without intermission throughout the whole night. The vessels, drifting together, struck on the shoal called the Nek, near Wydeness. In the heat of the action the occurrence was hardly heeded. In the morning twilight, John Haring of Hoorn, the hero who had kept one thousand soldiers at bay upon the Diemer dike, clambered on board the _Inquisition_, and hauled her colors down. The gallant but premature achievement cost him his life. He was shot through the body, and died on the deck of the ship, which was not quite ready to strike her flag.... At eleven o’clock Admiral Bossu surrendered, and with three hundred prisoners was carried into Holland. Bossu was himself imprisoned at Hoorn, in which city he was received, on his arrival, with great demonstrations of popular hatred.”

It was on a feast-day that I came upon Hoorn, and the place was garbed in gala attire. Throughout the morning the hotel stableboys were kept busy tending the horses of rural arrivals, and every stable-yard was congested with wagonettes and carts. Never have I seen such a variety of vehicles. There was the painted produce wagon with its white canvas cover; there was the gayly decorated antique “two-wheeler,” its body swung upon heavy straps held fore and aft at the ends of great protruding springs; there was the commodious, shapely cart of plum-colored upholstery, belonging to the “gentleman farmer”; and there was a host of others too numerous to describe in detail.

Hoorn’s main street had been roped off, and the bricks covered with a thick layer of sand, in preparation for the series of horse races that was soon to take place up and down its length. Along about noon the Dutch David Harums led their horses down to the improvised race track behind the village band in all its glory, and the festivities were on.

Running races were of necessity tabooed on account of the danger to life and property--the actions of the horse being restricted to such an extent by the limited fairway of the course that, in event of the horse’s losing its head, even the side ropes along the street could not restrain it from dashing through the crowd and into the window of the nearest cheese shop. But there were sulky races between the Hal Pointers and the Palo Altos of the district, driven with rope reins by erstwhile jockeys, some of the costumes of whom were no less curious than the harness of the horses. Breeches, in some cases, and blouses, in others, looked as if they might have been recently redeemed from many years of confinement in Amsterdam’s municipal pawnshop, their public sale having been repeatedly overlooked.

Riding, instead of driving, would seem with us a less effective method of developing the speed of a trotting horse, and it certainly appears to be a less comfortable one, but ride them they do in many parts of Holland. I can imagine only one reason for the prevalence of the custom, and that is that the trotting horses are so rotund and ponderous that the shafts of no sulky would fit them, and if it did, no driver could spread his lower limbs so far apart as to drive the horse from the sulky’s seat. Large and ample as Percherons are some of these North Holland and Friesland horses, with long, well-groomed tails and manes; but they have a faster gait than they might be given credit for when seen hitched to a cart or a farm wagon. Pads with knee braces, which serve the riders in place of saddles, are strapped to the horses’ backs, and they trot the course with but little less action than blue grass Kentuckians. A singular thing is that they seldom “break,” their weight apparently holding them to the trot.

The express trains from Amsterdam to Leeuwarden make the run in just over three hours and a half, including the ferry passage of an hour and ten minutes across the neck of the Zuyder Zee from Enkhuizen to Stavoren. The line runs through Zaandam to Hoorn and thence to Enkhuizen through the richest farming district in North Holland. The farmhouses, somewhat more substantially built than those in the south, resemble what we rather ambiguously call “country residences.” They have their lawns and their gardens full of flowers, and each is surrounded with its little moat, bridged by a tiny archway which connects the house with the road at but a single point.

Enkhuizen is the unfortunate victim of what its inhabitants must consider to be a depraved taste for salmon rather than herring. The Rhine salmon has taken the place of the humble herring on the Dutch menu cards, and the town of Enkhuizen has dwindled accordingly. Of its fleet of four hundred herring vessels and its population of 40,000 souls in the seventeenth century, not a single fishing smack and only 6,300 descendants of its earlier inhabitants remain.

Aside from the magnitude of its one-time fishing industry, Enkhuizen courts the fickleness of fame by being the birthplace of Paul Potter. Born in 1625, he painted his most renowned canvas, “The Bull”--now in the Mauritshuis at The Hague--at the age of two-and-twenty, and died but seven years later--only another of the many instances where Death has chosen to lay his hand upon the shoulder of one so young and signally gifted in preference to an octogenarian dullard.

Waiting alongside the dock station at Enkhuizen will be the side-wheel steamer that ferries the passengers the fourteen miles across the Zuyder Zee to Stavoren in Friesland. The old Dromedary Tower, as they call it, at the harbor, diminishes rapidly into the general skyline of Enkhuizen, and you will be sailing out over what was once a broad isthmus of dry land--for the Zuyder Zee was not always the Zuyder Zee. Until the thirteenth century it consisted of but a comparatively small inland lake called Flevo. Near the close of that cycle--in 1282, to give the exact year--the German ocean burst over the land from the north, wiping the lives of 80,000 people out of existence and combining itself and Lake Flevo into one, which was henceforth called the Zuyder Zee. Above the ferry crossing, beginning at the eastern end of the little island of Wieringen, they will build the contemplated dam across it, the first process in the reclamation of more than a million acres of what was once a fertile, productive district.

In pleasant weather it is a beautiful trip across the neck of the Zee, but if the breeze blows from the north, bringing with it the customary cold drizzle of rain, the best method of putting in the time is to go below to the cabin and follow the invariable custom of the country of eating bread and great, thin slices of Dutch cheese.

Stavoren is the deadest of all the “dead cities of the Zuyder Zee.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century the merchants of Stavoren were prepotent among the rulers of the world of trade and commerce. Treasures from all the then known corners of the earth lay in their storehouses. The homes of these merchant princes were palaces comparable only with those of kings and furnished with the sumptuousness and incomputable grandeur of the famous abodes of the Sultan Harun-al-Rashid in the “Arabian Nights.” Previously, Stavoren had been the residence of all the Frisian princes. But riches contributed to the pride that came before its fall. To-day the census taker counts its population in three figures and its commerce is not worthy of mention in a trade report. The smoke of the lingering express train that will subsequently carry you to Friesland’s capital is the only evidence that the town may not be abandoned completely.

As you sail into the harbor, a wide, grass-grown embankment in front of the town can be seen plainly from the steamer’s deck. This is the Vrouwensand, and it recalls the legend that attributes the fall of Stavoren to the whims of a woman. The reader himself must be the judge whether or not the tale is worth the telling. One writer on Holland asserts that no author dealing previously with the country in a literary way has been gifted either with the independence or the imprudence to avoid it. His predecessors have been numerous and illustrious, and if the story be so important that each of them has seen fit to relate it, I can do naught but imitate.

Of all the inhabitants of the old city of Stavoren, none was so blessed with riches as the wife of a certain wealthy merchant. Continually bathed in the high lights of smiling fortune, she plucked one by one the treasures that were thrown daily at her feet. She owned everything of intrinsic value that the fabulous wealth of her husband could bestow upon her. But one thing she did not possess, and that was love. Her character was devoid of a woman’s tenderness. She was cold, indifferent, supercilious, insouciant. Exaggerated pride in her own wealth and an undying envy of those whose fortunes dared to compete with hers--these were the only passions of her life.

One day, while acting as hostess at a great banquet, a stranger from the Far East was ushered into the room. He had come, he said, to behold the marvelous wealth of Stavoren with his own eyes, and now that he had penetrated into this merchant’s house, he felt he had been amply rewarded.

The merchant’s wife, not impervious to flattery, requested the traveler to be seated and to partake of the banquet as her unbidden but welcome guest. He accepted the invitation in part, but asked, according to the custom of the Orient whence he came, for nothing but some bread and salt. Servants were dispatched to bring both, but returned, saying that no such simple articles of food could be found in the house. Thereupon the stranger, without further word, ate of the costly and unfamiliar dishes prepared for the banquet.

After the feast he told of his travels, he expatiated upon the successes and the failures of his life, he discoursed with much eloquent verbiage upon the instability of earthly fortunes, and he prognosticated the ultimate fall of wealth and splendor. His hostess became offended, not only because of his contumelious belittling the value of riches in her presence and before her guests, but because he had failed thus far to compliment her upon her personal beauty and the luxuries to be found in her home. Before he took his leave he mollified his views to this extent: “O gracious lady,” he said, “marvelous indeed is your home and fit for a queen; if you traveled far and near you could not find its equal. But, my lady, among your treasures I miss one thing, and that is the noblest that all the earth produces.” He departed forthwith, leaving the gathering in a state of perplexity.

To please the whim of his wife, the merchant dispatched a fleet of ships to cruise the world until it should find “The noblest thing that all the earth produces,” whereupon the fleet’s commander should fill the hulls and cover the decks with it and bring it to Stavoren. For months the ships sailed about, touching at one port and then at another, blindly searching for this most costly of all treasures.

One day a heavy sea came over one of the ships, flooding the ’tween decks and spoiling the provisions. The crew became in need of bread, but there was no flour with which to bake it. The men grew mutinous. The captain saw that neither gold nor silks nor precious jewels could outweigh the value of bread, and the occurrence led him to believe that bread was the most expensive thing in the world. He reported the matter to the commander, who agreed with his specious argument, and the whole fleet hurried to the nearest port, which happened to be Danzig. They loaded the vessels with the finest wheat, and set sail direct for Stavoren.

When the merchant’s wife heard of the nature of the cargo the fleet had brought home, she ordered the wheat thrown into the sea. The poor of the town begged and implored, stormed and reproached, but of no avail; the order of the woman was executed to the letter.

By and by myriads of blades of grainless wheat commenced to appear above the surface of the water. Their stocks and roots collected the sand as it was washed up by the tides of the German ocean, forming a great sand dune that blocked the port so that vessels could neither enter nor leave. The inhabitants of the place were suddenly brought face to face with the fact that commerce, the source of their wealth, had to be abandoned. Poverty and want reigned where riches ruled before. The wife of the once wealthy merchant wandered about from village to village, begging the bread which no one who had heard of her improvidence would give her. She suffered death from utter starvation. Then one night the sea began to boom and, bursting over the dunes, buried the town forever.

To this day the more superstitious of the fisher-folk who ply their vocation along that coast of the Zuyder Zee talk of the wonderful sunken city of Stavoren and how its pinnacles and palaces at the bottom glitter up through the pellucid waters under the rays of a summer’s sun.

XII

FRIESLAND AND ITS CAPITAL

Leeuwarden is the most important town in Friesland; therefore its capital. Also it is the only place in the province that is really worth a protracted visit. On the way from Stavoren you may wander up the coast a short distance to Hindeloopen, once famed for its highly decorated furniture and the many-colored costumes of its natives; you may stop off at Sneek and see its _stadthuis_ and its _waterpoort_, better examples of which you will have already seen in North Holland; you may journey over to the coast town of Harlingen--a much less interesting fishing port than Volendam--breaking the trip at Franeker to see the wonderfully ingenious astronomical model of the workings of the solar system which took one of the more inventive citizens of the place, Eise Eisenga by name, seven years to construct; but all of these especial features, and more, can be seen and studied in Leeuwarden.

When you enter the interior of Friesland you will be penetrating one of the three or four provinces of Holland that are not overrun with tourists. Even in its capital an American is more or less of a curiosity and he may expect to be stared at until the people stumble over each other, almost, in their well-meaning efforts to divine his nationality; but he may console himself in the thought that they will be just as curious, if not as humorous, to him as he is to them.

Before the time of the terrific geographical convulsion responsible for the formation of the Zuyder Zee, there had been but one Friesland, stretching over much of the entire territory later known as that of the Dutch Republic, including Holland. Its inhabitants, the Frisians, were renowned throughout Europe for their physical prowess. Imbued with an unquenchable love for political independence, they had shaken off the yokes of the imperial counts and had formed the league of the seven “Sea Lands” in the eleventh century. After being subjugated for a time by Charlemagne, they suddenly rebelled, and in 1256 defeated and put to death the German king, William II of Holland. When the German ocean rolled in over the land, engulfing considerably more than a thousand Frisian villages, it separated kindred peoples, creating not only a geographical but a political chasm between them. West Friesland became absorbed in Holland, but East Friesland continued its career as a confederation of independently governed maritime provinces, until Saxony, hard pressed for funds, sold its sovereignty to the house of Austria for a paltry 350,000 crowns.

Then Charles V, Count of Holland, Emperor of Germany, King of Jerusalem, Sicily, and Spain, Duke of Milan, dominator of much in Asia and Africa and “autocrat of half the world,” established his predatorial authority, and “this little country, whose statutes proclaimed her to be ‘free as the wind as long as it blew,’ whose institutions Charlemagne had honored and left unmolested, who had freed herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny, who had never bowed her neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke,” finally forfeited her independent existence. Her peoples are the only Germanic tribe that have preserved an unaltered nomenclature since the time of the Romans; they will be Frisians to-morrow, as they were the day before yesterday.

The most prominent and characteristic feature of the Frisian costume is the headdress of its women--in fact, it is the only one extant worthy of any notice whatever, for the remainder of the make-up, not only of the men but of the women also, is commonplace and unattractive. This headdress consists of a kind of metal skullcap, as often made of gold as of silver, fitting closely at the temples and embellished at these points with a pair of spiral ornaments. Over this is worn a cap of white or light blue lace, having a so-called “tail piece” dangling down the back of the neck like the scoop of a fireman’s helmet. On top of all this, many of the women--as if their violent efforts to adapt the modern were wrestling with a series of sturdy determinations to retain the antique--will crown the sublime with the ridiculous by wearing an old-fashioned black “poke bonnet,” with the strings tied in a bow under the chin. These gold and silver head-pieces are handed down from one generation to another, and the gold ones, especially, are expensive; but that item does not curb the desire and ambition of every mother’s daughter in Friesland to own one, where the usual heirloom has not been forthcoming.

An admirable collection showing the evolution of the Frisian metal skull plate is on view in the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden. Adapted first as a kind of hair ornament of two coin-sized flat pieces connected simply by a thin wire, its size developed gradually until the two small termini became consolidated into a single large one that covered the entire head of the wearer. The latest specimen in the Museum is decorated in front with a diamond-studded brooch, the whole costing in the neighborhood of $1,200.

The Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden contains also about the most valuable and comprehensive collection of old Delft, Chinese, and Japanese ware in Holland, tastefully cabineted in one of the large rooms on the ground floor. To the connoisseur in such matters this room is a treat that cannot be overlooked with impunity, for the character of its contents is unparalleled and its value indeterminable. Shelf after shelf there are of the most delicately tinted tea sets and table services, vases and urns of every description, and the wooden columns that support the floor above are hung with graduated festoons of plates and saucers, so that it would take the greater part of a week to inspect them all.

On the second floor are a number of tiled rooms furnished in authentic sixteenth and seventeenth century style, even to the sleeping bunks in the walls and the miniature ladders that once assisted in climbing into them. The models of these and most of their furnishings were found in Hindeloopen. To increase the realistic effect of these apartments the authorities have introduced groups of three or four stuffed figures attired in the costumes of the period, posed in front of the fireplace or about a center table, but they are so stiff and ludicrous-looking that they might well be dispensed with, and their costumes shown to better effect behind the glass of a cabinet. In the basement can be seen a few rooms finished and outfitted with the domestic and culinary implements of the same centuries.

In addition to all these there are two adjoining rooms on the second floor of the Museum containing old furniture and decorations bequeathed to the State by the artist Bisschop. The most conspicuous object in one of these rooms is an immense cabinet of beautifully carved oak, black and glossy with age, that would excite the envy of any lover of the antique. Built in 1610, it was purchased thirty-five years ago by Bisschop for something like twelve or fifteen dollars; to-day it has a valuation of $2,000. On its top stand two pieces of old Delft for which the artist originally gave as little as ten gulden.

The remaining rooms of the Museum contain collections of Roman and Frisian coins and medals, Roman curiosities found in the neighborhood, fine old silver plate and flagons, remarkably carved ivory hunting horns, and, since the early Frisians were alleged by some to be the first pipe smokers in Europe, an instructive conglomeration of pipes and tobacco pouches and all the accessory appurtenances necessary to the full enjoyment of the weed.

The Chancellerie, a large building just around the corner from the Museum, erected in the reign of Philip II and used originally as a law court, still serves the government by housing the national archives and the provincial library. With its handsome Gothic façade, this building is Friesland’s architectural masterpiece and one of the best preserved of ancient buildings in all Holland. In forceful contrast to it is Leeuwarden’s structural curiosity, an unfinished church tower of brick, called the Olde-Hove, one hundred and thirty feet in height and marking the western boundary of the city proper. Just when it will take it into its head to topple over is a problem of uncertain solution, but, judging from this Dutch Leaning Tower of Pisa’s utter disregard for the perpendicular, it looks as though it might bury a part of Leeuwarden’s pretty park under its débris almost any minute.

The city of Leeuwarden is entirely surrounded by the cobra-like coil of a wide canal, the quays of which afford loading and unloading facilities for the many boats that ply to and from Leeuwarden from and to almost every point in Holland. Along the north and west edges of this canal on the town side they have planted lawns and flower beds on the site of the old city bastions. And, speaking about flower beds, the largest geraniums I think I ever saw were growing in a little plot near the station in Leeuwarden; each cluster of blossoms seemed as great in diameter as the head of a small cabbage. Friesland is also the land of begonias, but in Groningen the plants seem to bear a larger flower than they do in Leeuwarden.

Distant as it is from the great centers of Dutch life and activity, Leeuwarden seems of more recent vintage than any city of its size you will have seen so far in the Netherlands; its types are fewer than in almost any town on the other side of the Zuyder Zee and its old buildings and churches are less numerous. Most of the former they have adapted to modern usage, and even the old weigh-house that stands severely alone beside the canal in the Waagsplein has been turned into a fire station. The canal that sweeps through the town from west to east is lined where the space permits with little colonies of shops on wheels, built of corrugated iron and capable of being closed at night against the mischievous pranks of young Holland--peripatetic shopping and marketing districts, offering anything and everything for sale that may be found in the permanent stores.

Hotel accommodations, however, are more provincial. In the dining-room everyone is seated at one long table, as in the smaller hotels in The Hague, so that an ordinary mealtime looks more like a banquet. The business and social phases of the hotel are conducted in one large room wherein the men gather after dinner to sit and smoke, read, or play chess. Here in a corner at a little desk holds forth the head waiter. Although he is the functionary who assigns you to your room and to whom you pay your bill, he is not so preëminent as the head waiters of most of the hotels in the south, for the proprietor usually shows a preference to manage the place according to his own ideas. As a general rule he will do his own marketing and, if conditions require it, he is not above helping to wait upon the table and making himself useful in many other ways.

Not far from Leeuwarden, in the village of Dronrijp, was born, in 1836, one of Holland’s most eminent modern artists, although a naturalized subject of Great Britain since 1873--Sir Laurens Alma Tadema, some noted examples of whose work are to be seen in the Mesdag Museum in The Hague.

Another town, Marssum, a few miles distant, is famous as the center of the cattle district, and dealers and breeders come to some of the large farms in the vicinity from all over the world, including America, to purchase blooded Frisian stock. Indeed, all along the thirty-three miles of railway between Leeuwarden and Groningen the pastures are dotted with fine, healthy-looking black and white cows. Each field being surrounded by a small canal eight or ten feet in width, the cattle may be segregated, one herd from another, by simply closing the gates on top of the narrow hills that lead across the intervening canal from one pasture to its neighbor; thus the labor and expense of building fences is saved. As much as North Holland is noted for its cheese, just so much is Friesland famed for its butter, and between 130,000,000 and 140,000,000 pounds of it are churned annually. The conditions of the trade are exceptionally sanitary and at all times under government inspection.

Here and there through Friesland--in fact, through almost any part of the Netherlands--you will see a high wooden tripod topped with the usual cartload of débris that constitutes a stork’s nest; for the stork, be it remembered, is the national bird of Holland, and if the farmhouse offers no suitable place, such as a chimney pot, for example, for the stork to build its summer home, the farmer is wont to court the luck that a nesting stork about the place is thought to be sure to bring, and builds a nesting place for it.

They wend their migratory way northward, these storks, from the interior of Africa near the sources of the Nile, and make their appearance in Holland contemporaneous with the first signs of approaching spring. Their coming is regarded as a veritable Godsend by the Netherlander and the various Dutch journals feature the “stories” of first reported arrivals, and devote to them an amount of space commensurate with the importance of the event, while any decrease in the numbers of the birds is quickly observed and promptly linotyped.

When the storks, so high in the air that they appear as mere specks, approach the familiar scenes and nesting places of previous summers, they descend to the earth in pairs to hunt about for their old abodes. Having finally discovered these, a deal of repairing will have to be done to render them once more habitable. Both the male and the female labor with a great deal of energy and no little resourcefulness in the reconstruction of the old nest, collecting sticks and twigs, and weaving them together with much mathematical precision. Endowed with no vocal power of calling each other or criticising their work, their silence while at the task is punctuated only with a comical snapping of bill and a suggestive flapping of wings. If a certain pair has been a little premature, perhaps, and chosen, not always by mistake, another pair’s nest, the ensuing imbroglio often results in such a complete destruction of the point at issue that both pairs instead of one must build anew.

The story of the “Stork’s Judgment” is one of the best known among the Dutch with regard to these birds. It is that in the fall, prior to the departure of the storks for southern climes, all the old and decrepit ones, too weakly to stand the long trip, are killed off so that the general migration may not be delayed or impeded. Another belief held by the Hollander, more or less a child of the imagination but not without at least a tinge of fact, is that among the stork communities a certain number of picked birds are detailed each season to act in the capacity of a regular police force to preserve the peace and protect the interests of the colony at large.

A stork’s nest on the roof serves, according to the superstitions of many Dutch farmers, as a prevention to the ravages of lightning and the contraction of contagious diseases by their families. Misfortune in some form or other is sure to follow if the stork does not see fit to nest somewhere near the house, and simply because of this, land holders have been known to pack up, bag, baggage, and agricultural implements, and move into another district.

XIII

THE HINTERLAND OF HOLLAND

If Friesland be considered the frontier of Holland’s tourist territory, the provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, and Over-Yssel certainly constitute its hinterland.

With the exception of one or two towns they lack the symmetry of scenery, the quaintness of costumes, the masterpieces of art that adapt the provinces west of the Zuyder Zee to intensive sight-seeing, so to speak, while their peoples differ in manner so much from those in the west that you seem to be traveling through another country altogether. Old buildings they have in plenty, and rural and urban beauty spots may be discovered here and there, but taken by and large, they offer fewer attractions for and cater less to the invasion of the tourist than any portion of Holland.

For the above reason, in planning a trip through this land of the brave and the home of the sea, it might be well, if practicable, to tap these three provinces at the beginning, embellishing first impressions by reversing the time-honored route and returning, instead of advancing, through North and South Holland, Utrecht, North Brabant, and Zeeland, and spending a profitable day at least on the Island of Walcheren as a kind of tasteful cordial after the seven course tour.

Groningen, the capital of the province of the same name, shares the distinction with Leyden and Utrecht in being one of the three university towns in Holland. Although twice as large as Leeuwarden, it is barely half as interesting. It seems, too, a vastly more modern place, with its trolley service, its large assortment of wide streets, its apparent dearth of silent canals, while its narrow, busy Heerestraat emulates the examples set by the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam and the Spuistraat in The Hague.

Its university, established in 1614, is attended by half a thousand students, and has within recent years moved into more commodious and modern quarters in the form of an appropriate and handsome building erected in 1850. Among the treasures of its library, housed in a separate building, is to be found a copy of the revised New Testament by Erasmus, bearing marginal annotations in the handwriting of Martin Luther. This much for learning. With respect to art, Groningen is the birthplace of two of Holland’s best known modern painters, H. W. Mesdag and Josef Israels, the latter being especially distinguished for his ability to record upon canvas the sadder aspects of humble life. At the advanced age of eighty-seven this master of his craft died during the past summer in The Hague, where he had resided for a number of years.

At the foot of the tower of the church of St. Martin on the edge of the market square stands the old _regthuis_, a small brick building of early sixteenth century erection, lately restored and put into use as a guardhouse. With its green and white shutters of diamond design it looks strangely out of place as the opponent of a building of such conglomerate architecture as the columned _stadthuis_, on the western side of the square. Grain being one of the staple commodities of the place, one end of the _visch-markt_ is bounded by the corn exchange. Behind this stands the Aa-Kerk, of Gothic construction and thirteenth century origin. And, as is the habit with many of the towns in this section of Holland, Groningen has made the most of the site of her old ramparts and city fortifications by transforming it into a public park.

Without the least savor of favoritism, Groningen might easily capture the palm for supporting about the most uninteresting market in Holland. Held in the great square that serves the town as a center for outdoor business transactions and trolley service, it is a market of everything and a market of nothing. It looks as if all the shopkeepers had put up tents and transferred their stock from their shops to the street. Here they sell anything from cucumbers to cocoanuts, from stepladders to safety matches--a nondescript assortment of edibles, cooking utensils, secondhand clothing, cheap crockery, old books, and umbrellas. There are no types to speak of, and the place reeks with the essence of small and insignificant bargaining. The hotel at which I registered in Groningen was centrally located--too centrally, in fact--on the market square. Just in front along the curb a purveyor of dried fish held forth in his tent. The breeze was blowing gently, and the hotel stood to the leeward of the dried fish purveyor. As Sam Bernard would say, “Sufficiency!”

The railway line from Groningen down through Assen and Meppel to Zwolle penetrates a flat, barren, unattractive-looking country which, in places, might be mistaken for the “meadows” near Atlantic City. The roadbed of the railway itself is the worst in the world--at least I _think_ it is the worst in the world, although the allegation may arouse the envy of one or two Mexican roadbeds that I am no longer on speaking terms with, each of which claims the same distinction. The engineers who were responsible for this piece of track, through a perfectly flat country with no curves or grades to cope with, could hardly have done much worse. It is even beyond the powers of the imagination how they contrived to make it as bad as it is. Its construction reminds one vaguely of the story of the “jealous pie,” whose top and lower crusts grew jealous of each other for fear something might come between them. So with this railway. If one rail bulges outward a little the other rail bulges inward sympathetically. And it is fortunate that they are so attached to each other, because if one rail bulged outward and the other rail likewise bulged outward at the same point we might not be here to tell of it.

Neither is the tediousness of the two-hour ride relieved at all by the congeniality of one’s traveling companions. For the information of the prospective tourist through Holland it might be well to state in this connection that smoking is only forbidden in those few and far-between compartments of the railway carriage marked “_Niet Rooken_.” In all others, whether labeled “_Rooken_” or not, whether occupied by men, women, or children, smoking is not only permitted but encouraged; and however vigorous and healthy a Hollander may be, his one weak point is his aversion to ventilation. In this matter he may be likened to the elephant afraid of a mouse. Consequently, the first move he makes when he enters the compartment is to close both windows. If he lacks the boorishness to reach over deliberately and try to curtail _your_ supply of fresh air, which is not often, he will huddle himself in a corner as far from the offending draft as possible, and eye you up and down for your failure to appreciate his position.

For the full distance from Groningen to Zwolle I traveled in the same compartment with three of the most rabid stale air agitators I have ever run afoul of. To make matters worse, one was highly perfumed with a mixture of musk and mint, and wore the nails of his little fingers long--half an inch would not be an exaggeration--as some sort of a mark of caste, possibly borrowed from the Chinese. During the trip they tried to make things as blithe and agreeable for me as possible--although with the opposite intent, judging from several remarks which I finally succeeded in translating--by giving a variety of imitations of various barnyard animals because I guarded one open window with my life.

All through the province of Drenthe the sources of another industry in which little Holland is preëminent may be seen from the car windows--the great peat bogs. Upon peat the Dutch housewife must rely for her fuel, for the coal mines in the Netherlands are next thing to null and void; so the preparation of peat has become at once an art and an industry. Towns and hamlets are named for it--“_veen_” with an appropriate prefix. It is as indigent to Holland as the wild turkey to the mountains of Virginia. But, instead of striving to eliminate as quickly as possible a very essential natural resource, the Dutch have developed the scientific cultivation of peat and made the vast bogs into almost inexhaustible producers of fuel.

The lighter, more fibrous peat, _laagveen_, in Dutch--found several feet in thickness in the eastern part of Groningen, all through Drenthe, and even stretching well across the German border--is contrasted with the dry peat, or _hoogeveen_, underlying a thick layer of clay. In the case of the latter, the layer of clay is removed carefully, the peat is dredged from under it, and what water remains is drained off. The peat is then spread upon the ground and worked by foot pressure until the process, assisted by exposure to the sun, brings it to a certain consistency. It is then cut into convenient lengths, stacked, and allowed to dry. In the meantime the layer of clay has been mixed with sand, replaced, and planted with crops. With respect to the bog peat, the fen is first surrounded with a canal for drainage purposes; also the plant putrefaction is assisted by successive reformations of soil from city refuse, laden with which the peat boats return to the fens.

The bait with which Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe, should lure the tourist to stop off, if only between trains, is the church of an ancient nunnery suppressed during the Reformation. This relic, with a fragment of the old cloisters still attached to it, has been transformed into Assen’s Town Hall, and forms a part of the adjoining provincial offices erected on the site of the nunnery. The great tumuli, or so-called “giants’ caves,” within half an hour’s drive from Assen, and marked with huge boulders borne down by the glaciers from Scandinavia, are of interest more to the profound archeologist than to the ordinary sight-seer.

Meppel, farther down, is a peat town of no artistic or historical importance, although it is the junction of the peat and the butter routes through the hinterland. From it the traveler may journey up through the butter district direct to Leeuwarden, or he may break through the peat country on another line to Groningen.

Zwolle, the first stop below Meppel, is an attractive town, but with fewer types even than Groningen. Here the familiar windmills and wooden shoes begin to diminish perceptibly in numbers. With its 32,000 inhabitants, Zwolle is but a shade smaller than Leeuwarden. It is the capital of the province of Over-Yssel and was the birthplace of Gerard Terburg, one of Holland’s celebrated seventeenth century wielders of the brush and crayon. But like too many other towns in the Netherlands, Zwolle has been so short-sighted and so remiss in her duty that she has failed to preserve for public appreciation a single example of the work of her most famous son.

The most striking architectural feature of the town is her old Sassen-Poort, or Saxon gateway, the five Gothic spires of which tend to relieve any monotony of city skyline. It stands but a short distance from the station, framed behind a green mat of trees that lends a pleasant contrast to its diamond window shutters of delicate blue and spotless white. The modern stone bridge across the canal just in front, although forming rather an inappropriate approach to the old tower, is one of the most artistic in all Holland.

Upon a certain warm, sunlit morning I crossed this bridge and turned down along the canal, following one of the many labyrinthian pathways under the spreading trees. Soon I came upon what anyone on not too familiar terms with the customs of the country might have supposed to be a public café. It was neither fenced nor hedged in, and the path I was following led straight as a die to its low, broad veranda, carpeted and freely sprinkled with comfortable wicker chairs. Little round tables were scattered here and there, and I concluded that the place lacked nothing for the enjoyment of a glass of liquid refreshment.

Accordingly, I followed the course of least resistance, and presently found myself reclining deeply and luxuriously in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.

After a short struggle, my thirst overcame my lethargy, and I summoned enough energy to push a convenient electric button.

No response.

A second, and then a third push at the button.

Still no response.

As a drastic last resort, I arose with no little effort, and wended my angry way into the building to ascertain the cause for such delinquent service.

I was approached by a gentleman who, having observed my impatience, had come to my rescue from his little secluded corner in the reading room.

In my very best Dutch--my vocabulary consists of some three or four words--I asked the gentleman where on earth the waiter might be in hiding. In his very best English the gentleman replied politely that the place was a private club and not a public grogshop. Whereupon, I could have accomplished an exit through any convenient keyhole without the least pinching.

Near Zwolle, in a monastery on the Agnetenberg, reached after a drive of three or four miles from the town, lived and died Thomas à Kempis, the author of “The Imitation of Christ”--a work that has been translated into almost every tongue.

A short ride in the train from Zwolle brings you to Kampen, on the broad Yssel at its point of discharge into the Zuyder Zee. It is Holland’s home town of ancient gateways, no less than three of which, leading out into the park that has superseded the old fortifications, are in excellent state of preservation and worthy of study from an architectural point of view. Originally the town possessed seven of these gates, and there might have been fourteen, had the City Council listened to a learned one of its members who arose at a certain meeting and proposed that they double the original number; for, he argued, had not each of the seven gates contributed its 10,000,000 florins a year to the town treasury in the shape of taxes upon merchandise and produce passing through it? Therefore, it would be a simple matter to double the town’s revenue, for all they had to do was to double the number of gates.

But the rank and file of tourists that include Kampen in their itineraries come to view its Town Hall, a venerable building erected in the fourteenth century, restored after a devastating fire in 1543, and which may be numbered to-day among the most characteristic curiosities in the Netherlands. Among the features of its Gothic façade are six statues in stone, dating from the original building. From left to right these may be recognized as the effigies of Charlemagne and Alexander the Great and the characterizations of Moderation, Fidelity, Justice, and Neighborly Love. One of the windows of the weather-stained edifice still remains trellised with iron as in the days of Kampen’s olden time importance. The interior contains a medieval council room with magistrates’ seats of oak, handsomely carved, and a gigantic chimney piece, unfortunately overladen with ornaments.

Kampen stripped of its gateways and its Town Hall would scarcely be worth the time spent to reach it. The town itself seems to be given up to small manufacturing establishments, and its people made up of the class that keeps them in operation. But the fine architectural relics of its earlier days raise its instructive power to as high a degree as that of any town now within Holland’s tourist area.

From Kampen you may take a steamer out across the Zuyder Zee to the Island of Urk, inhabited by a colony of daring fishermen who are less spoiled, yet whose costumes and customs are less interesting, than those of the people of Marken. But you will have to hurry if you wish to pay it a visit, for Urk will soon go the way of Schokland, an island nearer to Kampen, the habitation of which has recently been forbidden by the government on account of the imminent prospects of total encroachment by the sea. To-day Urk is tussling for life with every tide; it may be merely a question of months, perhaps of weeks or days, before its people will be compelled to give up their homes and move to the less dangerous mainland.

Eighteen and a half miles south of Zwolle, still on the river Yssel, and just across the frontier of Gelderland, lies Deventer, noted commercially for a rather incongruous assortment of enterprises: iron, carpets, and honey cakes. A weigh-house, abnormally large for a town of Deventer’s size, having a great flight of steps ascending to its entrance from the Brink, the principal square of the town, has been converted into a gymnasium. Also facing the Brink are several handsome private houses of seventeenth century erection. Deventer, strange to say, seems to be most athletically inclined; it maintains no less than fifty different association football clubs, which strive with each other for the title of champion on the many athletic fields along the banks of the Yssel.

After years of study in Spain and other foreign lands, after a lengthy residence in Haarlem, and his experiences in the studio as co-worker with Franz Hals, to Deventer came Gerard Terburg, where he finally settled down and where he died in 1681 at the age of sixty-four. Unlike Rembrandt, Hals Holbein, and Jan Steen, Terburg took a lively interest in public and municipal affairs, and in his later years he served his adopted city as Burgomaster.

XIV

GELDERLAND

From Deventer to Apeldoorn is simply a matter of a quarter of an hour in a railway carriage which now darts past so many fields of grain, now past so many fine old woods and terraced summer homes that the effect upon the tourist is kaleidoscopic--like being shot through a Christmas wreath.