Today a number of the Dutch spellings for place names, people’s names and specific words have changed but the colloquial spellings of the era have been retained, however where the name has been spelt two or more different ways, the spellings have been altered to the most prolific usage. CHAPTER XV Utrecht and ’S Hertogenbosch. This chapter is the only one with the word Chapter before it, and this has been retained. The spelling of the word æsophagus on p. 30, appears to be acceptable in the late

To put before the prospective visitor the many delights and few disadvantages of a territory with which he may be already more or less familiar; to help him to form a comprehensive idea of the most of Holland within a reasonably short space of travel time; to refocus the lens, to readjust the vernier of his memory, providing he has already been there, so that he may take a truer reading of the country upon a second visit; to recant the praises of a people whose very existence has been and ever w

Take , if you will, the state of Delaware, something less than half of Maryland and the lower end of New Jersey; turn them upside down; drive Delaware and Jersey and the most of Maryland below the level of the sea; let the waters of the Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay seep in over the low-level territory; dike up the edges at the weak and exposed parts along the coast; pump the country dry, and keep it pumped dry, as far as possible—then, with a little less regularity of contour, you will have a

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 t

If the American traveler expects to stop off along the line from Middelburg at a little place called Goes, he will undergo his first operation with the Dutch language. Should he fail to catch sight of the signboard that proclaims in print the name of the station, or to compare his watch with his timetable in order to ascertain in this manner the exact bearings of the point of stoppage, he will probably be carried on through, for it will not occur to him that he had planned to detrain when the ti

He who says the romance of the West is dead has never mingled much with the “eight-section man” down in the southwestern corner of Texas. 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 Rot

Nineteen minutes in the train from Rotterdam, and you are in Delft—such are the distances between towns in South Holland. The population of Delft amounts, numerically, to some 32,000, but this is an item that is farthest from your thoughts. It is one of the quietest, quaintest cities in the Netherlands. Up and down its narrow, lime shaded canals the boatmen of Delft pole their barges laboriously, yet noiselessly, walking along the decks from stem to stern against their padded means of propulsion

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; like

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.

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 fa

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

It is as imperative that the traveler through Holland should journey from Amsterdam to Alkmaar by canal as it is that he should not overlook the steam tram trip between The Hague and Leyden. The twenty-four and a half miles between the commercial metropolis and the cheese capital of North Holland is made in a little less than three hours. Taking all things into consideration, it is one of the most enjoyable steamboat excursions in the kingdom. Bearing up through the North Sea Canal and the River

In the matter of ancient buildings, Hoorn is one of the gems of all the towns of Holland. Its fine old harbor tower, its Town Hall, its weigh-house, its Oosterpoort—the most prominent remaining factor of the walls that once surrounded the town—its assortment of quaint old gateways and entrances, its steep-roofed dwellings and warehouses that lean forward or backward at more acute angles than even the oldest buildings in Amsterdam—all combine in contributing to Hoorn a medieval charm that is puis

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 t

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 alt

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. Apeldoorn is a beautiful little city, very much unlike what might be expected of Holland, since its canals are few and its windmills at a premium. Its streets remind one more of those of an English village. Its

There can be only one reason for my clearing my conscience of Utrecht and ’S Hertogenbosch in one and the same chapter. This may or may not be apparent to him who has already toured Holland, for the two towns cannot be said to be on the same line of traffic; they are not even in the same province; neither are they alike in appearance. Utrecht, the capital of the province of that name, with its canals and old houses, its lime avenues and its shady parks, has more of the typical Dutch element in i