aught sight of
him. Word went round that there was a strange monster, a cross between a
monkey and a goblin, sitting in an automobile, and all the people of
Hoorn poured into the street to see the show, just as they had poured to
the harbor more than three hundred years ago when the "zeeslag" was
going on.

We came out to find the car almost lost to sight in the crush; but Mr.
van Buren, who is like a great, handsome Viking, pushed the people
aside, and said things to them in Dutch which made some laugh and others
grumble.

To escape, we drove out of the town into toy-like suburbs, with little
streets, and tiny houses on dykes, each one with its drawbridge across
the stream running on either side a dyke-road. And now we seemed to be
in the heart of toyland. It was like a place built by Santa Claus, to
come to at Christmas time, and choose presents to fill his pack.

Aalsmeer and Broek-in-Waterland, which we had thought toy-like, were
grown-up villages for grown-up people compared to this toy-world.

On we went, penetrating further into the doll-country, instead of
running out of it. The brown, yellow, green, and red carts, ornamented
with festoons of flowers in carved wood, which were returning from
market, were the only grown-up things we saw--except the trees, and they
seemed abnormally tall by way of contrast.

Mile after mile, the road to Enkhuisen led on between two lines of
dolls' houses and gardens. Some must have been meant for very large
dolls, but that made no difference in the toy effect, as the great
farmhouses, apportioned off half for toy animals, half for
farmer-dolls, were just as fantastic in design and decoration as the
tiny ones.

Backgrounds of meadows, canals, and windmills, I suppose there must have
been, as every picture has to have its background; but backgrounds are
seldom obtrusive in Holland, as Mr. Starr says; and here the two lines
of toy dwellings were so astonishing that we noted nothing else.

For the whole ten miles of the drive we were playing dolls. The long,
straight string of houses was knotted now and then into the semblance of
a village, but never was the string broken between Hoorn and Enkhuisen,
and though we saw so many, each new doll-house made us laugh as if it
were the first.

I tried not to laugh at the beginning, lest it might hurt Mr. van
Buren's feelings; but he didn't mind, and pointed out the funniest front
doors, crusted with colored flowers, like the icing o