uld be exempted from
future taxation or should be endowed with a university. The citizens
themselves chose the latter dignity.

Leaving Leyden and following the flat roadway by the glimmering
canals, which chop the _polders_, and tulip gardens off into
checker-board squares, one reaches Haarlem, less than thirty
kilometres away.

The country was becoming more and more like what one imagines Holland
ought to be; the whole country practically a vast, sandy, sea-girt
land of dykes and canals, and dunes and sunken gardens.

Holland has an area of about twenty thousand square miles, and
something over five million inhabitants, with the greatest density of
population on the coast between Amsterdam, in the north, and
Rotterdam, in the south, and the fewest in numbers in the region
immediately to the northward of the Zuyder-Zee.

Wherever in Holland one strikes the brick roads, made from little red
bricks standing on end, he is happy. There is no dust and there are
no depressions in the surface which will upset the carburation and
jar the bolts off your machine. It is an expensive way of
road-building, one thinks, but it is highly satisfactory. Near
Haarlem these brick roadways extend for miles into the open country
in every direction.

Haarlem is the centre of the bulb country, the gardens where are
grown the best varieties of tulips and hyacinths known over all the
world as "Dutch bulbs." The tulip beds of the _polders_ and sunken
gardens of the neighbourhood of Haarlem are one of the great sights
of Holland.

Besides bulbs, Haarlem is noted for its shiphung church, and the
pictures by Franz Hals in the local gallery. There are other good
Hals elsewhere, but the portraits of rotund, jolly men and women of
his day, in the Haarlem Town Hall, are unapproached by those of any
of his contemporaries. Fat, laughing burghers, roystering,
knickerbockered Dutchmen and _vrous_ gossiping, smoking, laughing, or
drinking, are human documents of the time more graphic than whole
volumes of fine writing or mere repetitions of historical fact. All
these attributes has Haarlem's collection of paintings by Franz Hals.

There are all sorts of ways of getting from Haarlem to Amsterdam, by
train, by boat, by electric tram, or by automobile over an idyllic
road, tree-shaded, canal-bordered, and dustless. It is sixteen
kilometres only, and it is like running over a causeway laid out
between villas and gardens. Nothing quite like it exists e