, turning their backs to the street with half
their bodies outside; others were kneeling on the pavement cleaning
the stones with rough cloths; others were standing in the middle of
the street armed with syringes, squirts, and pumps, with long rubber
tubes, like those used for watering gardens, and were sending against
the second-floor windows streams of water which were pouring down
again into the street; others were mopping the windows with sponges
and rags tied to the tops of long bamboo canes; others were burnishing
the door-knobs, rings, and door-plates; some were cleaning the
staircases, some the furniture, which they had carried out of the
houses. The pavements were blocked with buckets and pitchers, with
jugs, watering-pots, and benches; water ran down the walls and down
the street; jets of water were gushing out everywhere. It is a curious
thing that while labor in Holland is so slow and easy in all its
forms, this work presented an appearance altogether different. All
those girls with glowing faces were bustling indoors and hurrying out
again, rushing up stairs and down, tucking up their sleeves hastily,
assuming bold acrobatic attitudes and undergoing dangerous
contortions. They took no notice of those who passed by except when
with jealous eyes it was necessary to keep the profane race away from
the pavement and walls. In short, it was a furious rivalry of
cleanliness, a sort of general ablution of the city, which had about
it something childish and festive, and which made one fancy that it
was some rite of an eccentric religion which ordered its followers to
cleanse the town from a mysterious infection sent by malicious
spirits.

DELFT.

On my way from Rotterdam to Delft I saw for the first time the plains
of Holland.

The country is perfectly flat--a succession of green and flower-decked
meadows, broken by long rows of willows and clumps of alders and
poplars. Here and there appear the tops of steeples, the turning arms
of windmills, straggling herds of large black and white cattle, and an
occasional shepherd; then, for miles, only solitude. There is nothing
to attract the eye, there is neither hill nor valley. From time to
time the sail of a ship is seen in the distance, but as the vessel is
moving on an invisible canal, it seems to be gliding over the grass of
the meadows as it is hidden for a moment behind the trees and then
reappears. The wan light lends a gentle, melancholy influence to th