avagery; and in the craft and duplicity of the
Stadtholder; but if ever a French philosopher and a French grisette
masqueraded as a Dutch horticulturist and a Frisian waiting-maid they
are Cornelius van Baerle and his Rosa; and if ever a tulip grew by
magic rather than by the laws of nature it was the tulipe noire. No
matter; there is but one Dumas. According to Flotow the composer,
William III. of Holland told Dumas the story of the black tulip at
his coronation in 1849, remarking that it was time that the novelist
turned his attention to Holland; but two arguments are urged against
this origin, one being that Paul Lacroix--the "Bibliophile Jacob"--is
said, on better authority, to have supplied the germ of the romance,
and the other (which is even better evidence), that had the stimulus
come from a monarch Dumas would hardly have refrained from saying so
(and more) in the preface of the book.

Cornelius de Witt, whose tragedy is at the threshold of the romance,
was apprehended at Dort, on his bed of sickness, and carried thence
to the Hague, to be imprisoned in the Gevangenpoort, which we shall
visit, and torn to pieces by the populace close by.

Another literary association. From Dort came the English cynical writer
Bernard Mandeville, born in 1670, author of _The Fable of the Bees_,
that very shrewd and advanced commentary upon national hypocrisies--so
advanced, indeed, that several of the more revolutionary of the
thinkers of the present day, whose ideas are thought peculiarly modern,
have not really got beyond it. After leaving Leyden as a doctor of
medicine, Mandeville settled in England, somewhen at the end of the
seventeenth century, and became well known in the Coffee Houses as
a wit and good fellow.

We are a curious people when we travel. At Dort I heard a young
Englishman inquiring of the landlord how best to spend his Sunday. "One
can hardly go on one of the river excursions," he remarked; "they
are so mixed." And the landlord, with a lunch at two florins, fifty,
in his mind, which it was desirable that as many persons as possible
should eat and pay for, heartily agreed with him. None the less it
seemed well to join the excursion to Gorinchem; and thence we steamed
on a fine cloudy Sunday, the river whipped grey by a strong cross
wind, and the little ships that beat up and passed us, all aslant. At
Gorinchem (pronounced Gorcum) we changed at once into another steamer,
a sorry tub, as wide as it was short