t upon
piles and stands upon many islands linked by intricate bridges, but
because of her glow and dazzle, her myriad lights breaking suddenly
through falling dusk, to splash the rose and violet of the clouds with
gilded flecks, and drop silver into glimmering canals, as if there were
some festive illumination; because of her huge, colorful buildings, and
her old, old houses bowing and bending backward and forward to whisper
into each other's windows across the darkness of narrow streets and
burning lines of water.

The fierce traffic of the day was over, but the dam roared and rumbled,
in vast confusion, with its enormous structures black against the
moldering ashes of sunset.

"A cathedral without a tower; a palace without a king; a bishop's house
without a bishop; a girl without a lover," is the saying that
Amsterdammers have about the dam; and I repeated it as we drove through,
while my friends searched the verification of the saw. All was plain
enough, except the "girl without a lover"; but when they learned that
she was a stone girl on a pedestal too constricted for two figures they
pronounced her part of the distich far-fetched.

Undaunted by all they had done that day, they would go out again after
dinner, when Amsterdam was blue and silver and shining steel in the
quiet streets, with a flare of yellow light in the lively ones, where
people crowded the roadways, listening to the crash of huge hand-organs,
or shopping until ten o'clock.

We supped at the biggest _cafe_ in Europe; and then for contrast, since
we were in a city of contrasts, I took them to the quaintest inn of
Amsterdam--a queer little pointed-roofed house hiding the painted
"Wilderman" over his low-roofed door, behind a big archway, in the midst
of all that is most modern, but with an interior of a rich gold-brown
gloom, lit by glints of brass and gleams of pewter which would have
delighted Rembrandt.

Next day it was to his house, in the strange, teeming Jewish quarter
that we went first of all; but Nell and Phyllis were heartsick to find
the rooms, once rich in treasures, piled untidily with "curiosities" of
no great beauty or value.

Then, by way of a change after the Old Town, and the harbor with its
queer houses, like drunken men trying to prop each other up, I chose the
Heerengracht, all the city has of the richest and most exclusive. But
the tall mansions, with their air of reserve and their selfishly hidden
gardens, struck the eye