bserved in other towns also),
have a decided taste for black clothes, which they wear proudly on
Sundays--black cravats, black breeches, and certain black over-coats
that reach almost to their knees. This costume, together with their
leisurely gait and solemn faces, gives them the air of village syndics
going to assist at an official _Te Deum_.

But what most surprised me was to see at that hour almost every one I
met, gentry and peasantry, men and boys, with cigars in their mouths.
This unfortunate habit of "_dreaming awake_," as Emile Girardin called
it when he made war on smokers, occupies such a large part of the life
of the Dutch people that it is necessary to say a few words about it.

The Dutch probably smoke more than any other northern nation. The
humidity of the climate makes it almost a necessity, and the cheapness of
tobacco puts it in everybody's power to satisfy this desire. To show how
inveterate is this habit, it will suffice to say that the boatmen of the
_trekschuit_ (the stage-coach of the canals) measure distance by smoke.
From here to such and such a town they say it is so many pipes, not so
many miles. When you enter a house, the host, after the usual greetings,
gives you a cigar; when you leave he gives you another, sometimes he
fills your pocket. In the streets one sees men lighting fresh cigars with
the stumps they have just smoked, with a hurried air, without stopping
for a moment, as if it were equally disagreeable to them to lose a
moment of time and a mouthful of smoke. A great many men go to bed with
their cigars in their mouths, light them if they awake in the night, and
relight them in the morning before leaving their beds. "The Dutchman is a
living alembic," writes Diderot; and it does really seem as though
smoking is to him one of the necessary functions of life. Many say that
much smoking clouds the brain. But, notwithstanding, if there is a people
whose intelligence is clear and precise in the highest degree, that
people is the Dutch. Moreover, smoking is no excuse for idleness among
the Hollanders,--they do not smoke "to dream awake." Every one does his
work while puffing white clouds of smoke from his mouth as if he were the
chimney of a factory, and, instead of the cigar being a distraction, it
is a stimulus and a help to labor. "Smoke is our second breath," said a
Dutchman to me, and another defined the cigar as "the sixth finger of our
hand."

Apropos of tobacco, I must tell of