The canal is really much more
the high road of the country than the road itself. The barge is the
Pickford van of Holland. Here we see some of the secret of the Dutch
deliberateness. A country which must wait for its goods until a barge
brings them has every opportunity of acquiring philosophic phlegm.

After a while one gets accustomed to the ever-present canal and the odd
spectacle (to us) of masts in the streets and sails in the fields. All
the Dutch towns are amphibious, but some are more watery than others.

The Dutch do not use their wealth of water as we should. They do not
swim in it, they do not race on it, they do not row for pleasure at
all. Water is their servant, never a light-hearted companion.

I can think of no more reposeful holiday than to step on board one of
these barges wedged together in a Rotterdam canal, and never lifting
a finger to alter the natural course of events--to accelerate or
divert--be earned by it to, say, Harlingen, in Friesland: between the
meadows; under the noses of the great black and white cows; past herons
fishing in the rushes; through little villages with dazzling milk-cans
being scoured on the banks, and the good-wives washing, and saturnine
smokers in black velvet slippers passing the time of day; through
big towns, by rows of sombre houses seen through a delicate screen of
leaves; under low bridges crowded with children; through narrow locks;
ever moving, moving, slowly and surely, sometimes sailing, sometimes
quanting, sometimes being towed, with the wide Dutch sky overhead,
and the plovers crying in it, and the clean west wind driving the
windmills, and everything just as it was in Rembrandt's day and just
as it will be five hundred years hence.

Holland when all is said is a country of canals. It may have cities
and pictures, windmills and cows, quaint buildings, and quainter
costumes, but it is a country of canals before all. The canals set
the tune. The canals keep it deliberate and wise.

One can be in Rotterdam, or in whatever town one's travels really
begin, but a very short time without discovering that the Dutch
unit--the florin--is a very unsatisfactory servant. The dearness
of Holland strikes one continually, but it does so with peculiar
force if one has crossed the frontier from Belgium, where the unit
is a franc. It is too much to say that a sovereign in Holland is
worth only twelve shillings: the case is not quite so extreme as
that; but a sovereign in