r like wooden posts driven in the sand in the above picture,
are wicker-basket chairs, with roofs to keep off the sun. Scores
of canvas tents line the shore, and thousands of people lie on
the beach from early morning until late at night.]

[Illustration: AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND.--This is the largest and most
important city in Holland, and constitutionally its capital. It
stands on a soft, wet ground, under which, at a depth of fifty
feet, is a bed of sand. Into this sand piles are driven, on which
buildings are reared, a fact which gave rise to the jest of Erasmus
of Rotterdam, that he knew a city whose inhabitants dwelt on tops
of trees like rooks. The city is surrounded by grassy meadows.
Amsterdam ranks much higher as a trading than as a manufacturing
town. The photograph represents St. Antoine Street.]

[Illustration: WIND-MILL, HOLLAND.--Millions wonder that a country
so situated as Holland can exist; and the stranger is almost unable
to decide whether land or water predominates. Those broken and
compressed coasts, those deep bays and great rivers, the lakes
and canals crossing each other, all combine to give the idea of
a country that may at any time disintegrate and disappear. In the
thirteenth century the sea broke the dykes in northern Holland
and formed the Zuyder Zee, destroying many villages and causing
the death of eighty thousand people. To drain the lakes, and save
the country from destructive inundations, the Hollanders press
the air into their service, which is represented by the above
wind-mill.]

[Illustration: CHRISTIANSAND, NORWAY.--Christiansand is the largest
town on the south coast of the Scandinavian peninsula, and the
residence of one of the five Norwegian Bishops. It is beautifully
situated at the mouth of the Otteraa, on the Christiansand Fjord.
The town is named after Christian IV., by whom it was founded in
1641, and is regularly laid out with streets intersecting at right
angles. It possesses an excellent harbor, at which all the coasting
steamers of that country, and those from England, Germany and Denmark,
arrive regularly.]

[Illustration: BERGEN, NORWAY.--Bergen is one of the oldest and
most picturesque cities in Norway. The general aspect of the town
is modern, though traces of its antiquity are not wanting. The
older part adjoins the spacious harbor called Vaagen, and spreads
over the rocky heights at the base of the Florfjeld and over the
peninsula of Mordanes. Fish has always bee