in the street what their narrow and close dwellings could not give them,
travellers being seen off at the harbourside or on the canal-quays,
costermongers praising their wares. There was, for example, the daily
fishmarket behind the Dam, Amsterdam's central square, of which the poet
Brederode has left us such vivid pictures, bringing to our ears all the
bargaining, shouting, and quarrelling of former days; there were numerous
other markets necessitated, not only by the town's trade, but by its
every-day needs: the weekly market for butter and cheese, which until 1669
enlivened the Dam, where now electric cars circulate and a much
less-varied traffic passes by; the apple- and fruit-market on the Singel,
opposite the house where Rembrandt's only son Titus passed the few months
of his married life; the flower-market, where the middleclass people found
the cheap floral decorations for their often gloomy interiors: the
meat-market in the Nes: the Monday's market, on the Singel, of small
furniture and kitchen-utensils: the vegetable- and peat-market on the
Prinsengracht, etc. That all good housewives, even those of middle and
upper classes, made it a rule to frequent these markets is revealed to us
not only by contemporary pictures but also by a passage in one of
Huygens's letters to the Prince of Orange, in which this refined diplomat
from The Hague expresses his astonishment at seeing the wife of Admiral de
Ruyter go daily to market " le panier au bras. "

[Plate 24. The Star of the Kings. ]

Plate 24. The Star of the Kings. Children before a street door on
Epiphany-evening. After the drawing by Rembrandt, in the British Museum,
London. Salting Bequest.

All these thousands of people, business-men, workmen, housewives, small
traders, went about in comparatively simple dresses, in which the black
and discreet colours predominated. Against this sober background, the
multi-coloured garments of the numerous strangers from over-seas were set
off sharply: those of the Levantines, Persians, Poles, and others, who
congregated in this international mart. What was said of the citizens'
dress does not imply that luxurious costumes were unknown in Amsterdam;
the younger people of course donned lighter and more elegant clothes, and
married ladies at home knew very well how to charm the eyes of their
visitors. Gradually, as Amsterdam's wealth increased, the upper classes
became mor