n half as
nice when it was alive." And down something went in her note-book.

We drove by a park, a noble church, and the loveliest cemetery I ever
saw, not at all sad. I could not think of the dead there, but only of
children playing and lovers strolling under the trees.

As soon as we were outside Edam we began to pass windmills quite
different from any we had seen before. They were just like stout Dutch
ladies, smartly dressed in green, with coats and bonnets of gray thatch
and greenish veils over their faces, half hiding the big eyes which
gazed alway toward the dyke that imprisons the Zuider Zee.

We had been off the dyke and skimming along an ordinary Dutch road for a
while; but presently we swerved toward the right and were again on a
dyke sloping toward the sea. Sailing along its level top we could see
far off the embowered roofs and spires of a town which Mr. van Buren
said was the once powerful city of Hoorn.

"Isn't there a Cape somewhere named after it?" asked Lady MacNairne
gaily; and Mr. van Buren (answering that William Schouten, the sailor
who discovered the Cape, named it after his native town) looked
surprised at her ignorance.

She doesn't seem to know much about history, but she will know a great
deal about Holland before we finish this trip if she goes on as she is
going now.

In ten minutes we were in the suburbs; in five more we were in the Dead
City itself; but it had the air of having been resurrected and being
delighted to find itself alive again. We passed row upon row of
wonderful carts, shaped like the cars of classical goddesses, though no
self-respecting goddess would have her car painted green outside and
blue or scarlet within.

"By Jove, now I know why Brederode was so keen on our getting off early
and not waiting at Volendam till to-morrow for the wind to die!"
exclaimed Mr. van Buren. "What a fellow he is to think of everything!
This is the one and only time to find Hoorn at its best--market-day. And
now you will see some nice things."

He had the chauffeur slow down the car in a fascinating street, with
quaint houses leaning back or sidewise, and bearing themselves as they
pleased.

"Which way for the cheese market?" Mr. van Buren asked an old man with a
wreath of white fur under his chin.

He asked in Dutch, but so many Dutch words sound like caricatures of
English ones that I begin to understand now. Besides, I have bought a
grammar and study it in the evenings. This p