erdam is
among the most interesting; and it is to this refuge that the girls
and boys belong whom one sees so often in the streets of the city in
curious parti-coloured costume--red and black vertically divided. The
Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes, as the girls are called, make in
procession a very pretty and impressive sight--with their white
tippets and caps above their dresses of black and red.

This reminds me that one of the most agreeable performances that
I saw in any of the Dutch music halls (which are not good, and
which are rendered very tedious to English people by reason of the
interminable interval called the Pause in the middle of the evening),
was a series of folk songs and dances by eight girls known as the
Orange Blossoms, dressed in different traditional costumes of the
north and south--Friesland, Marken, and Zeeland. They were quite
charming. They sang and danced very prettily, as housewives, as fisher
girls, but particularly as Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes.

In the music halls both at Amsterdam and Rotterdam I listened to comic
singers inexorably endowed with too many songs apiece; but I saw also
some of those amazing feats of acrobatic skill and exhibitions of clean
strength which alone should cause people to encourage these places
of entertainment, where the standard of excellence in such displays
is now so high. I did not go to the theatre in Holland. My Dutch was
too elementary for that. My predecessor Ireland, however, did so,
and saw an amusing piece of literalness introduced into _Hamlet_. In
the impassioned scene, he tells us, between the prince and his mother,
"when the hero starts at the imagined appearance of his father, his
wig, by means of a concealed spring, jumped from 'the seat of his
distracted brain,' and left poor Hamlet as bare as a Dutch willow
in winter."

The Oude Kerk has very beautiful bells, but Amsterdam is no place in
which to hear such sweet sounds. The little towns for bells. Near the
church is the New Market, with the very charming old weigh-house with
little extinguisher spires called the St. Anthonysveeg. Here the fish
market is held; and the fish market of a city like Amsterdam should
certainly be visited. The Old Market is on the western side of the
Dam, under the western church. "It is said," remarks the author of
_Through Noord-Holland_, "that Rembrandt has been buried in this
church, though his grave has never been found."

Napoleon's sarcasm upon the Eng