lsewhere,
in Holland or out of it. An automobile can be very high-geared, for
there are no hills except the donkey-back bridges over the canals.

Amsterdam may properly enough be called the Venice of the North, and
the automobilist will speedily find that an automobile boat will do
him much better service in town than anything that runs on land.

There are half a million souls in Amsterdam, and hotels of all ranks
and prices. The Bible Hotel is as good as any, but they have no
garage, nor indeed have any of the others. There are half a dozen
"Grands Garages" in the city (with their signs written in French--the
universal language of automobilism), and the hotel porter will jump
up on the seat beside you and pilot you on your way, around sharp
corners, over bridges, and through arcades until finally you plump
down in as up-to-date and conveniently arranged an establishment for
housing your machine as you will find in any land.

Amsterdam's sights will occupy the visitor for a couple of days, and
its art gallery for a day longer. We were taking only a bird's-eye
view, or review, and stayed only over one night, not making even the
classic excursion to those artists' haunts of Volendam, Monnikendam,
and Marken, of which no book on Holland should fail to make mention.

[Illustration: Pictures of Amsterdam]

These old Dutch towns of the Zuyder-Zee are unique in all the world,
and Amsterdam is the gateway to them. An automobile is useless for
reaching them. The best means are those offered by existing boat and
tram lines.

For Utrecht one leaves Amsterdam via the Amstel Dyke and the
Utrechtsche Zyde, and after forty kilometres of roadway, mostly
brick-paved like that between Haarlem and Amsterdam, he reaches
suburban Utrecht. Utrecht, with but a hundred thousand inhabitants,
has suburbs, reaching out in every direction, that would do justice
to a city five times it size. Most of Utrecht's population is
apparently suburban, and is housed in little brick houses and villas
with white trimmings and door-steps, a bulb garden, an iron fence,
and a miniature canal flowing through the back yard. This is the
formula for laying out a Utrecht suburban villa.

The Het Kasteel van Antwerpen, on the Oude Gracht, is a hotel which
treats you very well for five or six florins a day, and allows you
also to put your automobile under roof, charging nothing for the
service. This is worth making a note of in a country where it usually
costs