how in the gardens. But
to have taken "Lorelei" that way would have made it too late for a visit
to Zaandam; and I thought Zaandam, despite its miles of windmills and
the boasted hut of Peter the Great, not worth a separate expedition.
So I turned back to Halfweg, and from there slid into a side canal which
bore us toward that immense waterway cut for great ships--the North Sea
Canal. There was a smell of salt in the air, and a heavy perfume from
slow-going peat-boats. Gulls wheeled over "Lorelei" so low that we could
have reached up and caught their dangling coral feet. A passing cloud
veiled the sun with gray tissue which streaked the water with purple
shadow, and freckled it with rain. Passengers on Amsterdam-bound ships
that loomed above us like leviathans, stared down at our little craft
and the bluff-browed barge we towed. Here we were in the full stream of
sea-going traffic and commerce; and afar off a mass of towers showed
where Amsterdam toiled and made merry.

But we were not yet bound for Amsterdam. Twisting northward as the
details of the city were sketched upon the sky, we turned into the canal
which leads to Zaandam of the self-satisfied, painted houses. There was
just time for a swift run down the river, and a call at one of that
famous battalion of windmills whose whirling sails fill the air with a
ceaseless whirr, like the flight of birds at sunset; then a walk to the
hovel where Peter the Great lived and learned to be a shipwright. But
when they had seen it, the ladies would not allow it to be called by so
mean a name.

"What a shame they found out who he was so soon!" said Nell. "And he had
to leave this dear little bandbox to go back to a mere every-day palace.
_I_ wouldn't have been driven away by a curious crowd. I should just
have marched through with my nose in the air."

"His nose wasn't of that kind," said I. "I suppose he's the earliest
martyr to notoriety on record. But perhaps he had learned all he wanted
to know; and I'm not sure he was sorry to go back to his palace, which,
judging by all accounts, wasn't a grand one in those days. You'll see
finer houses even in Amsterdam."

And an hour later she was seeing them.

XV

Amsterdam was in full glory that evening, in the strange radiance that
shines for her, as for Venice, when red wine of sunset and purple wine
of night mingle together in the gold cup of the west.

At such a time she is a second Venice, not because she is buil