it to hear the sound
of our own voices, but prefer to rest our features and our minds."

"Some of these bargemen look as if they'd rested their minds so much
that vegetables had grown on them," mused Starr, which made Miss Van
Buren giggle; and somehow I was angry with her for finding wit in his
small sallies.

"You'll discover on this trip that as you treat the Dutch, so will they
treat you," I went on. "If you're impatient, they'll be rude; if you
show contempt, they'll pay you back in the same coin; but if you're
polite and considerate there's nothing they won't do for you in their
quiet way."

"We shall never be rude to any of them, shall we, Nell?" said Miss
Rivers.

"Not unless they deserve it," came back the answer. And I knew what
Dutchman in particular Miss Van Buren had in mind.

It was about two hours from Gouda when a blaze of color leaped from the
distant level to our eyes, and everybody cried out in admiration for
little Boskoop, which in summer is always _en fete_ among garlands and
bowers of bloom. The rhododendrons--that last longer with us than in
England, like all other flowers--were beautiful with a middle-aged
clinging to the glory of their youth; and the tall, straight flame of
azaleas shot up from every grass-plot against a background of
roses--roses white, and red, and amber; roses pale pink, and the crimson
that is purple in shadow.

Miss Rivers thought she would like to live there, and cultivate flowers;
but I told her that she had better not negotiate for the purchase of a
house, until she had seen the miles of blossom at Haarlem.

We had not kept up our average of speed to nine miles an hour; for,
though we made ten when the way was clear, and no yards of regulation
red-tape to get tangled in our steering-gear, the custom of these
waterways is to slow down near villages and in farming country. Besides,
we met barges loaded to the water's edge, and had we been going fast our
wash would have swamped them. As it was, we flung a wave over the low
dykes, and sent boats moored at the foot of garden steps knocking
against their landing-stages, in fear at our approach. But after Alphen
we turned into a green stream, so evidently not a canal that Aunt Fay
was moved to ask questions.

Her face fell when she heard it was the Rhine.

"What, _this_ the Rhine!" she echoed. "It's no wider than--than the
Thames at Marlow. I was there last summer----"

"You stayed with Lady Marchant," broke in St