iced the western sky, the
masts, spars, and sails of the quay-side shipping silhouetted
themselves stereoscopically against this gleaming background, and the
roar and grime of the city's wheels of trade blended themselves into
a melange which was as intoxicating to the artist and rhapsodist as
would have been more hallowed ground.

We left Rotterdam at eight-thirty on a misty morning which augured
that we should be deluged with rain forthwith; but all signs fail in
Holland with regard to weather, for we hardly passed the Delftsche
Poort, the great Renaissance gateway through which one passes to
Delft, Schiedam, The Hague, and all the well-worn place names of
Dutch history, before a rift of sunlight streaked through the clouds
and framed a typical Holland landscape in as golden and yellow a
light as one might see in Venice. It was remarkable, in every sense
of the word, and we had good weather throughout a week of days when
storm was all around and about us.

Schiedam, with its windmills, is well within sight of Rotterdam. We
had all of us seen windmills before, but we never felt quite so
intimately acquainted with any as with these. Don Quixote's was but a
thing of the imagination, and Daudet's, in Provence, was but a
dismantled, unlovely, and unromantic ruin. These windmills of
Schiedam were very sturdy and practical things, broad of base and
long of arm, and would work even in a fog, an ancient mariner-looking
Dutchman with _sabots_ and peg-top trousers told us.

The windmills of Holland pump water, grind corn, make cheese and
butter, and have recently been adopted in some instances to the
making of electricity. It has been found that with a four-winged
mill, and the wind at a velocity of from twelve to thirty feet a
second, four to five horsepower can be obtained with the loss of only
fourteen per cent., caused by friction.

A plant has been constructed in Holland which lights 450 lamps,
earning about twelve per cent. interest on the capital invested. Of
course it is necessary to keep an oil-motor to provide for windless
days or nights and also to keep a reserve of electrical power on
hand, but this is but another evidence of the practicality and the
extreme cleverness of the Dutch. The cows that browse around the
windmills of Schiedam are of the same spotted black and white variety
that one sees on the canvasses of the Dutch painters. If you are not
fortunate enough to see Paul Potter's great Dutch bull in the