oing about the city. The
Burgher Orphan Asylum affords a comfortable home to several hundred boys
and girls. Holland is famous for its charitable institutions.} There
were old-fashioned gentlemen in cocked hats and velvet knee breeches;
old-fashioned ladies, too, in stiff quilted skirts and bodices of
dazzling brocade. These were accompanied by servants bearing foot stoves
and cloaks. There were the peasant folk arrayed in every possible Dutch
costume, shy young rustics in brazen buckles; simple village maidens
concealing their flaxen hair under fillets of gold; women whose long,
narrow aprons were stiff with embroidery; women with short corkscrew
curls hanging over their foreheads; women with shaved heads and
close-fitting caps; and women in striped skirts and windmill bonnets.
Men in leather, in homespun, in velvet, and in broadcloth; burghers in
model European attire, and burghers in short jackets, wide trousers, and
steeple-crowned hats.

There were beautiful Friesland girls in wooden shoes and coarse
petticoats, with solid gold crescents encircling their heads, finished
at each temple with a golden rosette and hung with lace a century old.
Some wore necklaces, pendants, and earrings of the purest gold. Many
were content with gilt or even with brass, but it is not an uncommon
thing for a Friesland woman to have all the family treasure in her
headgear. More than one rustic lass displayed the value of two thousand
guilders upon her head that day.

Scattered throughout the crowd were peasants from the Island or Marken,
with sabots, black stockings, and the widest of breeches; also women
from Marken with short blue petticoats, and black jackets, gaily figured
in front. They wore red sleeves, white aprons, and a cap like a bishop's
miter over their golden hair.

The children often were as quaint and odd-looking as their elders.
In short, one-third of the crowd seemed to have stepped bodily from a
collection of Dutch paintings.

Everywhere could be seen tall women and stumpy men, lively-faced girls,
and youths whose expression never changed from sunrise to sunset.

There seemed to be at least one specimen from every known town in
Holland. There were Utrecht water bearers, Gouda cheesemakers, Delft
pottery men, Schiedam distillers, Amsterdam diamond cutters, Rotterdam
merchants, dried-up herring packers, and two sleepy-eyes shepherds from
Texel. Every man of them had his pipe and tobacco pouch. Some carried
what migh