Dutchy

“ The shootin' didn't begin.
"Probably Dutchy didn't take no note of what the locoed little dogie DID say," thinks I to myself.
The Irishman bellied up to the bar again, and pounded on it with his fist.
"Look here!" he yells. "Listen to what I'm tellin' ye! God bless the Irish and let the Dutch rustle! Do ye hear me?"
"Sure, I hear ye," says Dutchy, and goes on swabbin' his bar with a towel.
At that my soul just grew sick. I asked the man next to me why Dutchy didn't kill the little fellow.
"Kill him!" says this man. "What for?" ”

“ Monday morning, bright and early, found us on the smooth, slippery surface of the canal. “Us” here includes, in addition to Bill and myself, my two younger brothers, Jack and Fred, and also Dutchy Van Syckel and Reddy Schreiner, neighbors of ours. It was the custom at the first of December every year to drain out most of the water in the canal, in order to prevent possible injury to the canal banks from the pressure of the ice. ”

“ Dutch and English work together like brothers. An Englishman rescues and handles a child of Dutch parents as tenderly as if it were his own. A Dutchman pulls out of the ruins a ‘rooinek,’ and supports his head as tenderly as if it was his own father, while he holds the restoring cup to his lips. When God wishes our hearts to be softened towards each other, he sends us affliction. ”

“ They became, like Switzerland, and unlike Poland and Hungary, a neutral region, which it was for the interest of Europe at large to let alone. None cared to meddle with them; and, on the other hand, they had native virtue and force enough to resist being absorbed into other peoples; the character of the Dutch is as distinct to-day as ever it had been. Their language, their literature, their art, and their personal traits, are unimpaired. They are, in their own degree, remarkably prosperous and comfortable; and they have the good sense to be content with their condition. ”

“ Here in Java the Dutch have been longer settled than the English in India; they more often remain in the island, and the effect of course is more marked from generation to generation. The Dutchman is a placid, easy-going creature, even in his native Holland, except when roused by some great crisis, like a Spanish invasion, and then he fights with a courage which has given him a proud name in history. But ordinarily he is of a calm and even temper, and likes to sit quietly and survey his broad acres, and smoke his pipe in blissful content with himself and all the world beside. ”

“ The Dutch, like the English, do not possess the genius of outdoor refreshment. The cafés and beer-houses are mostly under cover, and in all but the larger establishments you sit close, and are not over-burthened with light; but the Dutch enjoy themselves, and cling to old customs and old costumes with a conservatism which is part and parcel of the national character. They have had to fight the ocean for every inch of Holland, and they are a brave and a grand people who have triumphed over difficulties which might have caused Hercules to throw up the sponge. ”

“ FOUR miles away from Hull, by a slanting course across the Humber, is the village of New Holland: which preserves in its name its tradition that old-time Dutchmen—fishers and traders—in some forgotten century were its founders.
Both name and tradition were spurs to my too mettlesome imagination—and off it went at a canter with the fancy that over there on the Lincolnshire shore I should find a proper little Dutch town: Rows of gabled squat Dutch houses; a Dutch little snug tavern where I could have bread and cheese and beer and smoke a comfortable pipe with the broad-beamed Dutch landlord ”

“ Only, a few weeks ago I heard that in their contest for liberty with the cruel Spaniards, the Hollanders had cut these same dykes, and let in the salt sea on their grand farms and beautiful towns. Any one who has ever lived in Holland will understand what must have been their zeal for liberty to make them willing to let so much dirt into their houses. I hope with all my heart they may succeed, for if any people on earth have the right to their own country it is the Dutch.
"When shall we be at Rotterdam?" asked my uncle. ”

“ A Dutchman with his variegated goods and chattels is an odd sight. I have noticed him and his wife, with four, six, eight, and even ten children, hardly more than a year between their ages, driving their poultry, pigs, and cattle on board the boat, and, after distributing themselves as pilots, draggers, feeders, cooks, cleaners, and general directors, glide off on the canals as if they were sailing on purple seas to the Islands of the Blessed.
The foundations of Amsterdam no longer rest on herring bones. ”

“ It is the rarest thing in the world to meet with a gentleman in Holland. The Dutch are equally devoid of that acquired good breeding which distinguishes the well educated English, and that native politeness and winning courtesy which is so irresistibly engaging among the French, and even the Belgic people. ”

“ They can see over the heads of the tallest. It is strange to see those little bodies high in the air, carried about on mysterious legs. They have such a resolute look on their round faces, what wonder that nervous old gentlemen with tender feet wince and tremble while the long-legged little monsters stride past them.
You will read in certain books that the Dutch are a quiet people--so they are generally. ”

“ He is the intimate fireside friend, the faithful companion of the invalid; his is the first book over which the faces of affianced lovers bend; his verses are the first that children lisp and the last that grand-sires repeat. No poet is so loved as he. Every Dutchman smiles when he hears his name spoken, and no foreigner who has been in Holland can help naming it with a feeling of sympathy and respect. ”

“ Now, it is obvious that in a country so extraordinary the inhabitants must be very different from those of other lands. Indeed, few peoples have been more influenced by the nature of the country they inhabit, than the Dutch. Their genius is in perfect harmony with the physical character of Holland. ”

“ A Genuine Dutchman EVER since the great poet, Willem Bilderdijk, more than a hundred years ago, finding the intellectual life of his country submerged in Teutonic sentimentality, turned the German doves out of the temple of the Dutch Muses, Holland has followed the intellectual example of France more than that of any other country. The Dutch have a passion for individualism which carries them in a direction exactly opposite to the moral and artistic tyranny of Prussian Kultur, and gives a totally different coloring to their respect for mental distinction. ”

“ I said to myself as I went away from the galleries, that Dutch painting would stand for me henceforth as an epitome of the Dutch people. No one but the Dutch could have painted pictures like theirs—so quaint, so painstaking, and at the same time so splendid. Their love of rich brown shadow and amber light was learned in the dim little rooms of their own homes, and of inns where the brass and pewter gleamed in the mellow dusk of raftered kitchens, and piles of fruit and vegetables fell like jewels, from paniers such as Gerard Douw took three days to paint on a scale of three inches. ”

“ The Dutchesses Rotterdam, July 24.
The secret of the success of the Dutch is no secret at all. Everybody works, not excepting father, grandfather and grandmother. I suppose this habit began with the unceasing fight against the sea, the building of the dikes, the pumping out of the water, and the construction of a soil. It has continued until there is no other people more persistently industrious. They rise early and get busy. ”

“ The Dutchman seldom owns an acre of land without having a fish-pond. He so delights in still and semi-stagnant water that, not content to be surrounded on every side by canals, ditches, and sluices, he must have an additional pool as impure as odorous under his very nose. In the neighborhood of all the large towns the tradesmen and merchants, having their shops and counting-houses in narrow streets, own a little garden in the outskirts, where, if they have no house, they can at least retire after business and spend a few hours with their families. ”

“ Of the white races in the Colony the French element has been completely absorbed in the Dutch. They and the German settlers are mainly pastoral people. The Dutch, who have retained in a debased form their own language, also engage largely in agriculture and viticulture. Of fine physique and hardy constitution, they are of strongly independent character; patriarchal in their family life; shrewd, slim and courageous; in religion Protestants of a somewhat austere type. Education is somewhat neglected by them, and the percentage of illiteracy among adults is high. ”

“ If we Americans, who after all, are homeopathic preparations of Holland stock, can laugh at the Dutch, and call them human beavers, and hint that their country may float off any day at high tide, we can also feel proud, and say they have proved themselves heroes, and that their country will not float off while there is a Dutchman left to grapple it. ”

“ Mob; for certainly there are other Things to be seen in the rest of Holland, where there are as many genteel People as in any Country in the World. Nay, I dare affirm, that a certain Candour prevails here, which is perhaps not so general elsewhere. ’Tis rare for a Dutchman to know the Arts of Tricking and Cheating, and he is of a friendly Disposition, if his Purse be out of the Question. If they were not so much in Love with their Money, there would be as few Faults to find with this Nation as any. ”

“ The Dutch appear to me to be sincere and honest; they have the politeness of the French without their levity. Their peasantry and mechanics are the most industrious set of people I have ever seen, and so honest, that it is as safe in the evening and night in the streets as in the houses. We hear of no duels, murders, or robberies ”

“ Addie, how Dutch you are! For a boy born on the Riviera, brought up in Brussels, who had never been in Holland before his thirteenth year, how is it possible that you should be the most Dutch of us all! You have nothing of the cosmopolitan about you! ”

“ There is a tremendous lot of the English character about the Dutch. Hoogstraat, Rotterdam, on Sunday night might be High Street, Islington, at the same time. The boys yell, the girls scream and rush about, and a dense black crowd surges and shoves up and down and sings and walks arm-in-arm a dozen wide, and generally comports itself with high spirits and low habits. A Dutch crowd is English in its rough unconcern for the delicate shades of etiquette. But individually the Dutch are kind, hospitable, and most courteous to strangers. ”

“ Thanks to one thing or another, — to their temperament, to their climate, to their having located themselves in an out-of-the-way corner of Europe, — the Dutch have changed but little, unless when change has been indispensable to their well-being. No doubt they have been kept moving by the irresistible forces of civilization, competition, and invention; and sometimes, being far-sighted men of business, they have even anticipated the pressure. ”

“ The Dutch are still notorious for their partiality to them, and continue to pay higher prices for them than any other people. As the rich Englishman boasts of his fine race-horses or his old pictures, so does the wealthy Dutchman vaunt him of his tulips. ”

“ So that we may truly say of the Dutch, that although they are amongst us, yet certainly they are not of us, no not they who are born and bred here in our own Countrey, for stil they will be Dutch, not having so much as one drop of English bloud in their hearts. ”

“ With regard to the affairs of his country generally, the state of mind of the average Dutchman has been well described as that of a man well on in years, who has amassed a fair fortune, and now takes things easily, and loves to talk over the somewhat wild doings of his youth. Nothing is more common than to hear the remarks from both old and young, 'We have been great,' 'We have had our time,' 'Every nation reaches a climax;' and certainly Holland has been very great in statesmen, patriots, theologians, artists, explorers, colonizers, soldiers, sailors, and martyrs. ”

“ The air of the sea is life-giving, bracing, oxydized; the air inland is soft, relaxing, and warm. In the same way there are two Hollands in every Dutchman: there is the man of the polder, heavy, pale, phlegmatic, slow, patient himself, and trying to the patience of others, and there is the man of the dune, of the harbor, the shore, the sea, who is tenacious, seasoned, persevering, sunburned, daring. ”

“ About these three poets, who have in them the three principal vices of Dutch literature - to lose itself in the clouds, or to graze the earth too near, or to be caught in the net of mysticism - are grouped numbers of others, epic, comic, satiric, lyric, most of them of the seventeenth century, very few of the eighteenth; many of whom enjoy great fame in Holland, but none of whom stands out in relief from the rest sufficient to draw the attention of a foreigner. ”

“ No one need go to Holland to know the country, and if you do find yourself there you may follow out your study of its social history without going farther than its picture galleries. You may rely with absolute confidence on the realism of Dutch art, and, strange to say, the most capable artists have been as faithful as their less gifted fellows. ”