nearly all the bustle and the business, quite scorning the tame fields stretching damply beside them. One is tempted to ask, "Which is Holland,—the shores, or the water?" The very verdure that should be confined to the land has made a mistake, and settled upon the fish-ponds. In fact, the entire country is a kind of saturated sponge, or, as the English poet Butler called it,—
"A land that rides at anchor, and is moored;
In which they do not live, but go aboard."
Persons are born, live, and die, and even have their gardens, on canal-boats. Farmhouses, with roofs like great slouched hats pulled over their eyes, stand on wooden legs with a tucked-up sort of air, as if to say, "We intend to keep dry if we can." Even the horses wear a wide stool on each hoof to lift them out of the mire. In short, the landscape everywhere suggests a paradise for ducks. It is a glorious country in summer for barefooted girls and boys. Such wadings! such mimic ship-sailing! such rowing, fishing, and swimming! Only think of a chain of puddles, where one can launch chip boats all day long, and never make a return-trip! But enough. A full recital would set all young America rushing in a body toward the Zuyder-Zee.
Dutch cities seem at first sight to be a bewildering jungle of houses, bridges, churches, and ships, sprouting into masts, steeples, and trees. In some cities, vessels are hitched, like horses, to their owners' door-posts, and receive their freight from the upper windows. Mothers scream to Lodewyk and Kassy not to swing on the garden-gate, for fear they may be drowned. Water-roads are more frequent there than common roads and railways. Water-fences, in the form of lazy green ditches, enclose pleasure-ground, polder, and garden.
Sometimes fine green hedges are seen; but wooden fences,
