played the tender national anthem, which is always so unlike what one
expects it to be, as her train steamed away, and then all the grave
bearded gentlemen in uniforms and frock coats who had attended her
drove in their open carriages back to the town. Not even the presence
of the mounted guard made it more formal than a family party. Everybody
seemed on the best of friendly terms of equality with everybody else.

Tom Hood, who had it in him to be so good a poet, but living in a
country where art and literature do not count, was permitted to coarsen
his delicate genius in the hunt for bread, wrote one of his comic
poems on Rotterdam. In it are many happy touches of description:--

Before me lie dark waters
In broad canals and deep,
Whereon the silver moonbeams
Sleep, restless in their sleep;
A sort of vulgar Venice
Reminds me where I am;
Yes, yes, you are in England,
And I'm at Rotterdam.

Tall houses with quaint gables,
Where frequent windows shine,
And quays that lead to bridges,
And trees in formal line,
And masts of spicy vessels
From western Surinam,
All tell me you're in England,
But I'm in Rotterdam.

With headquarters at Rotterdam one may make certain small journeys
into the neighbourhood--to Dordrecht by river, to Delft by canal,
to Gouda by canal; or one may take longer voyages, even to Cologne if
one wishes. But I do not recommend it as a city to linger in. Better
than Rotterdam's large hotels are, I think, the smaller, humbler
and more Dutch inns of the less commercial towns. This indeed is the
case all over Holland: the plain Dutch inn of the neighbouring small
town is pleasanter than the large hotels of the city; and, as I have
remarked in the chapter on Amsterdam, the distances are so short,
and the trains so numerous, that one suffers no inconvenience from
staying in the smaller places.

Gouda (pronounced Howda) it is well to visit from Rotterdam, for it
has not enough to repay a sojourn in its midst. It has a Groote Kerk
and a pretty isolated white stadhuis. But Gouda's fame rests on its
stained glass--gigantic representations of myth, history and scripture,
chiefly by the brothers Crabeth. The windows are interesting rather
than beautiful. They lack the richness and mystery which one likes
to find in old stained glass, and the church itself is bare and cold
and unfriendly. Hemmed in by all this coloured glass, so able and