gallery
at The Hague, you may see the same sort of thing hereabouts at any
glance of the eye--the real living thing.

From Rotterdam to Delft, all the way by the canal, allowing for the
detour via Schiedam, is less than twenty kilometres, and the journey
is short for any sort of an automobile that will go beyond a snail's
pace.

Visions of blue and white delftware passed through our minds as we
entered the old town, which hardly looks as though worldly
automobilists would be well received. Delftware there is, in
abundance, for the delectation of the tourist and the profit of the
curio merchant, who will sell it unblushingly as a rare old piece,
when it was made but a year ago. If you know delftware you will know
from the delicate colouring of the blues and whites which is old and
which is not.

Delft and Delftshaven, near Schiedam, in South Holland, have a
sentimental interest for all descendants of the Puritans who fled to
America in 1620. Delftshaven is an unattractive place enough to-day,
but Delft itself is more dignified, and, in a way, takes on many of
the attributes of a metropolis. Nearly destroyed by a fire in 1526,
the present city has almost entirely been built up since the
sixteenth century.

The old Gothic church of the fifteenth century, one of the few
remains of so early a date, shelters the tomb of the redoubtable Van
Tromp, the vanquisher of the English.

It was easy going along the road out of Delft and we reached The
Hague in time for lunch at the Hotel des Indes, where, although it is
the leading hotel of the Dutch capital, everything is as French as it
would be in Lyons, or at any rate in Brussels. You pay the
astonishingly outrageous sum of five francs for housing your machine
over night, but nothing for the time you are eating lunch. We got
away from the gay little capital, one of the daintiest of all the
courts of Europe, as soon as we had made a round of the stock sights
of which the guide-books tell, not omitting, of course, the paintings
of the Hague Gallery, the Rubens, the Van Dycks and the Holbeins.

The Binnenhof drew the romanticist of our party to it by reason of
the memories of the brothers De Witt. It is an irregular collection
of buildings of all ages, most of them remodeled, but once the
conglomerate residence of the Counts of Holland and the Stadtholders.

The Binnenhof will interest all readers of Dumas. It was here that
there took place the culminating scenes in the live