able to an outsider.

Soon we are stopped at a toll-gate. The toll-gate keeper still exists
in Holland, chiefly on private bridges. He loses a good deal of his
monetary return, however, as he has a lazy habit of putting out a
great wooden _sabot_ to collect the fees, he, meanwhile, fishing or
dozing some distance away.

If you are a bad shot your coin sometimes goes overboard, or being an
automobilist, and therefore down on all impositions, you simply do
not put any more coins in the _sabots_ and think to depend on your
speed to take you out of any brewing trouble. This old relic of the
middle ages is sure to decrease in Holland with the progress of the
automobile.

[Illustration: "As Far As We Go"]

Holland is a beautiful country, one of Nature's daintiest creations,
where the sun and the moon and the sky seem to take the greatest
delight in revealing their manifold charms, where the green fields
and the clear-cut trees and the rushing rivers and the sluggish
canals all seem to have been put in their place to conform to an
artistic landscape design--for, truly, Holland is a vast picture. Its
cattle are picture cattle, its myriad windmills seem to stand as
alluring models to attract the artist, its sunsets, the haze that
rests over its fields, its farms, its spick and span houses, its
costumes--all seem to belong to the paraphernalia of pictorial art.
It is a paradise for motorists who behave themselves, and do not
rouse the ire of the Dutchman. The regulations are exceedingly
lenient, but the laws against fast speeding must not be disregarded,
and the loud blowing of horns, on deserted streets in the middle of
the night, is entirely forbidden.

When tourists have scaled every peak and trodden every pass, let them
descend once again to the lowlands and see if they cannot find
pleasurable profit in a land whose very proximity to the borders of
the sea gives it a character all its own. This is Holland, and this
is the attitude with which a party of four faced it, at Breda and
planned the tour outlined in the following pages.

We stopped at Breda to take breath and to reconnoitre a little. Breda
has a population of twenty thousand, and a good hotel, "Der Kroon,"
which knows well how to care for automobilists. Breda to Dordrecht is
perhaps twenty-five kilometres in a straight line, but by the
highroad, via Gorinchem it is sixty-eight. Since there are no
amphibious automobiles as yet, and there are no facile means of