dable for nervous people. The number
of those who sought cure and found it here is enormous. It is the
vacation-place by excellence. There is a church with square tower
and organ. About the tower, the spire of which is failing, various
opinions go round how this occured, by war, by shooting or storm.

The beautiful beech-grove in the center of the village, where a lot
of forest-giants are rising in the sky in severe rows, is a favorite
place, in the middle of which is a hill with fine pond.

A couple of years ago Geertruida Carelsen wrote in her Berlin letters
that Muiderberg perhaps is the only bathing-place where sea and wood
are united. There are three well-known graveyards.

Of Muiden's very picturesque moated castle--the ideal castle of
a romance--Peter Cornellissen Hooft, the poet and historian, was
once custodian. It was built in the thirteenth century and restored
by Florence V., who was subsequently incarcerated there. As the
Noord-Holland guide-book sardonically remarks, "He will never have
thought that he built his own prison by it".

Chapter XIII

Around Amsterdam: North

To Marken--An _opera-bouffe_ island--Cultivated and
profitable simplicity--Broek-in-Waterland--Cow-damp--The two
doors--Gingerbread and love--Dead cities--Monnickendam--The
overturned camera--Dutch phlegm--Brabant the
quarrelsome--Edam--Holland's great churches--Edam's
roll of honour--A beard of note--A Dutch Daniel
Lambert--A virgin colossus--A ship-owner indeed--The
mermaid--Volendam--Taciturnity and tobacco--Purmerend--The
land of windmills--Zaandam--Green paint at its highest power--A
riverside inn--Peter the Great.

An excursion which every one will say is indispensable takes one to
Marken (pronounced Marriker); but I have my doubts. The island may
be reached from Amsterdam either by boat, going by way of canal and
returning by sea, or one may take the steam-tram to Monnickendam or
Edam, and then fall into the hands of a Marken mariner. To escape
his invitations to sail thither is a piece of good fortune that few
visitors succeed in achieving.

Marken in winter wears perhaps a genuine air; in the season of tourists
it has too much the suggestion of _opera bouffe_. The men's costume is
comic beyond reason; the inhabitants are picturesque of set design;
the old women at their doorways are too consciously the owners of
quaint habitations, glimpses of which catch the eye by well-studie