own with their bags and
baskets on their shoulders or drive in sledges. Skating to them is as
habitual and easy as walking, and they skim along so rapidly that one
can scarcely follow them with the eye. In past years bets were
commonly made between the best Dutch skaters that they would skate
down the canals on either side of the railway as fast as the train
could go; and usually the skaters not only kept abreast of the engine,
but even beat it. There are people who skate from the Hague to
Amsterdam and back again on the same day; university students leave
Utrecht in the morning, dine at Amsterdam, and return home before the
evening; and a bet has been made and won several times of going from
Amsterdam to Leyden in little more than an hour. Persons who have been
drawn by sticks held by skaters have told me that the speed with which
they skim over the ice is enough to turn one giddy; but this rapidity
is not the only remarkable thing about it: another point very much to
be admired is the security with which they traverse great distances.
Peasants will go from one town to another at night. Young men go from
Rotterdam to Gouda, where they buy very long clay pipes, and return to
Rotterdam carrying them unbroken in their hands. Sometimes as one is
walking along a canal one sees a figure flit by like an arrow, to
disappear immediately in the distance. It is a peasant-girl carrying
milk to a house in the city.

There are sledges of every size and shape, some pushed by skaters,
others drawn by horses, others propelled by means of two iron-tipped
sticks which are worked by the person seated in the sledge. One sees
carts and carriages taken off of their wheels and mounted on two
boards, on which they glide with the same rapidity as the other sleds.
On holiday occasions the boats from Scheveningen have been seen to
glide over the snow through the streets of the Hague. Sometimes ships
in full sail are seen skimming over the ice of the large rivers, going
so fast that the faces of the few who dare to make this experiment are
terribly cut by the wind.

The most beautiful fetes in Holland are given on the ice. When the
Meuse is frozen, Rotterdam becomes a place of reunions and amusements.
The snow is brushed away until the ice is made as clean as a crystal
floor; restaurants, coffee-houses, pavilions, and benches for
spectators are set up, and at night all is illuminated. During the day
a swarm of skaters of every age, sex, and clas