Blair Jaekel

“ Rotterdam cannot be said to be noted for its cleanliness; in fact, it crowds Amsterdam for first place as the dirtiest city in Holland. But still Rotterdam as well as Amsterdam has its beauty spots. Some of the residence streets in the newer part of the city are veritable gardens in themselves. The Parklaan, with the Park at one end and the Grooteveerhaven, the latter crowded with private motor boats and yachts that gleam in their innocence of dirt, at the other, is lined with beautiful homes. ”

“ 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 town’s two parks, named appropriately Oranje and Wilhelmina, present effects in landscape gardening incomparable with those of almost any other parks in Holland, and the broad avenues that lead out to Her Majesty’s palace are barely surpassed in beauty even by the Old Way from The Hague to Scheveningen. Like the spokes of a wheel [190] their shaded roadways stretch straight as a die, with the palace of Het Loo as their common hub.
Pensions and private villas are as thick in and about Apeldoorn as seventeen-year locusts. Each has its velvety lawn; each its variegated flower garden. ”

“ Prefaced by an open, sunny, brick-paved space, a long avenue of great trees stretches away directly in front, while back in their shade stands the peripatetic horse car, as if loath to attempt the transfer of passengers in the heat of the day. On either side of the avenue are beautiful residences, their lawns encircled, not by the inappropriate and unsightly fence, but with a narrow canal, like a miniature moat, which is bridged only at the front and the rear entrances to the grounds. ”

“ If he does not agree, he slaps the merchant’s hand a whack that resounds across the square. By eleven-fifteen the walls of the surrounding houses reverberate with what a stranger around the corner might easily suppose to be the premature explosion of a number of toy balloons—for cheese makers are but human and would rather wait in the hope of being offered more for their stock. Competition is the essence of trade, even in Holland. ”

“ He who avers that the romance of steel is played out and defunct has never straddled an I-beam of a New York skyscraper in the building high above the vortexes of street traffic, above the flirt of a housemaid hanging out clothes on a lower roof. He who claims that the romance of shipping has succumbed under the pressure of modern methods has never been to Rotterdam.
They have a pretty park in that San Francisco of Holland that fringes the bank of the Maas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The most distinguishable feature of the Volendam feminine attire from that found on the Island of Walcheren or at Scheveningen, for example, is the immaculate white cap, somewhat of the shape of a miniature miter, terminating at the sides in two stiffly starched points that curl out from the ears like the horns of a water buffalo. The hair is cropped close and, according to the prevailing rules of decorum, only a fringe of it is allowed to be visible. Never under any conditions should a man see an unmarried member of Volendam’s gentler sex with her head uncovered. ”

“ Excursions About Amsterdam It is doubtful indeed if any other city in Holland than Amsterdam can tempt the tourist with a greater number of pleasant day’s excursions. Lying at the very feet of North Holland—a travel territory no larger in area than the state of Rhode Island, but replete with picturesque nooks and corners, congested with types and abounding in peculiar customs—every part of the province is readily accessible to Amsterdam by rail or by water. Back of its central railway station there is a long line of docks which berth the boats that only await your patronage. ”

“ The Island of Walcheren It must be because the province of Zeeland seems too fearfully close to be interesting that the average traveler through Holland, if he enter by Flushing—one of the little country’s two principal sea gates—hurries from deck to dock like a somnambulist, and fights for his compartment in the four-something a.m. train, bound for Amsterdam or The Hague. Perhaps, after being wakened most unsympathetically, if not rudely, at three-thirty in the morning, he feels disagreeable enough to take the first train out, no matter whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. ”

“ Down at the bottom is a duck-dotted lake bordered with the benches that constitute the trysting places of many a young Nymwegen couple, so unconscious of any but their own affairs that they suffer old ladies to sit upon the same bench and knit and spy with generous eyes upon the lovers’ advances. At the farther edge of the lake they have mercifully preserved one of the sixteen towers that once strengthened the town walls.
The Waal, one of the many branches of the Rhine, is a busier river at Nymwegen than the real Rhine is at Arnhem. ”

“ Can you imagine the linemen for a telegraph company or an electric light corporation coming along the streets of a German city, exercising the right of eminent domain by ripping up the pavements of the property holders and digging holes big enough to bury a horse, in which to plant the unsightly wooden poles that seem to them, on account of their comparative cheapness, the only known method of carrying wires? ”

“ Back somewhere in the fourteenth century, when the only maritime means of access to Amsterdam was down the Zuyder Zee, Edam held the strategical position of being its picket port. Since those good old days its 25,000 population has depreciated four-fifths in numbers. Were it not for its brand of cheese, flourishing before the gastronomic world a perpetual advertisement of the place, Edam would soon find itself mentioned in the same breath with Broek and Monnikendam. ”

“ The Hague and Scheveningen A Dutch saw has it that you “make your fortune in Rotterdam, consolidate it in Amsterdam, and spend it at The Hague.” I am not so sure about the veracity of the first two clauses, but you can certainly spend it at The Hague.
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 ”

“ How she has conquered would fill a book in itself. Since the Frisian monks first commenced to dike in the country, successive inundations have blotted out the lives of more of her people than all her conquests at arms put together. But still the Dutch fought on, resolutely, unflinchingly, persistently, until they dredged what land they needed from the bottom of the sea and grew grass and flowers and vegetables where kelp and cockle-shells thrived before. After hundreds of years of dredging and diking, by 1833 Holland had attained an acreage of 8,768 square miles. ”

“ The view from here is several times more magnetic than it is from the neighborhood of the café, and so here, about dusk, come those wizened warriors upon whom the sea has cast her spell once and for all time, to sit and smoke their pipes upside down and dream, perhaps, of other days, of other ships, of other seas. Three or four may occupy a single bench, but it will be an hour before a word is passed between them. It is their only method of rejuvenation, and they are loath to be reminded that their day is almost done. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Surrounding Utrecht and penetrating far to the east and the south are the great fortifications, of whose presence the casual observer is entirely unaware, belonging to the first line of national defense that might be used to protect the Dutch capital from invasion—a defense in which she seeks the assistance of her mortal enemy, and discovers him weighed in the balance and not found wanting. Upon a process of general inundation, by fresh water wherever possible so as not to impair the future productiveness of the fields, does Holland depend for her safety from invasion both by land and by sea. ”

“ The train shed of the Beurs railway station in the heart of the city has an outside cornice of flower boxes filled with pink geraniums. But then, you will remember about the Dutch locomotives—which accounts for much.
As you enter Rotterdam or Amsterdam on the railway you pass row after row of what we please to call tenement houses. Even these are not devoid of a cozy, homelike aspect that our tenements and even reasonably inexpensive apartment houses know not. Each apartment can boast of a balcony in the rear that is partitioned off from its neighbors. ”

“ Even in its capital an American is more or less of [166] 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. ”

“ For the bicycle, be it known, is the natural—and it has therefore become the national—means of locomotion in Holland. Everybody rides bicycles; and since the only hills are the approaches to the dikes [24] or across the humpbacked span of a canal drawbridge, their invention has been no less a boon to the populace at large than it has been a bane to the sight-seer. In The Hague, for example, they have become a veritable pest, and to be constantly dodging them in the streets keeps a person very much on the jump. ”

“ 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 [100] 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. ”

“ Hard by the town of Goes the tourist will obtain a comprehensive idea of what a real polder looks like, although it is scarcely distinguishable from the fact that all of the scenery along the route from Flushing east is typical, below-sea-level Dutch, lavishly cut by canals into triangles, trapezoids, and parallelograms.
A polder, by way of explanation, is the reclaimed bed of a sheet of water; and since the greater part of Holland lies below the level of the sea, the most of it is polder. ”

“ From Long John one can see plainly the towns on the north and west coasts of Walcheren, and often even the spires of Antwerp are visible, while directly below—a mass of red roofs punctured here and there with patches of trees—stretches Middelburg. To the left is the market place, bounded on the north by the handsome Town Hall begun in the sixteenth century, the embellishment of whose façade by twenty-five ancient statues of the counts and countesses of Holland helps it to hold its place as one of the finest and most interesting late-Gothic edifices in the Netherlands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Water is Holland’s perpetual and merciless enemy; so much so that if all the dikes that protect her from the waters of the ocean burst to-night, to-morrow there would be but a third of the country left. ”