have it done later in the day, as it waked him up, and he
could not go to sleep again. Then the Frisian answered, "Very sorry,
King, but we always do wash the decks at five, and it must be done";
which amused his majesty so much that he made no more objections.

If the people of Friesland have great individuality, so have their
meers. There was a canal through which we had to pass after Stavoren,
like a long, green-walled corridor leading into a huge room. The green
wall was made of tall reeds, and we had glimpses of level golden spaces,
and sails which seemed to be skimming through meadows. There was a
crying of gulls, a smell of salt and of peat, which once formed the
great forests swallowed up by the meer. Then, through a kind of
water-gateway, we slipped into our first Frisian meer, where the water
was like glass, the black sails of yellow sail-boats were purple in the
sunlight, and the windmills on the distant shore looked like restless,
gesticulating ghosts.

Our wash raised a golden, pearl-fringed wave, but the water was so clear
that now and then we fancied we could faintly see the old road under the
meer, which they say Frisian farmers use to this day, knowing just where
and how to guide their horses along it, through the water.

Because of this road, and others like it, Jonkheer Brederode had taken
on a pilot at Stavoren, a man able to keep us off all hidden perils. He
seemed to know every person on every heavily-laden peat-boat, or
brightly painted eel-boat, and Nell insisted that even the families of
wild ducks we met nodded to him as we went by.

We passed from the meer called Morra into the biggest in all Friesland,
Fluessen Meer; and it was all rather like the Norfolk Broads, where my
father once took me when I was a child. Always going from one meer into
another, there were charming canals, decorated with pretty little houses
in gardens of roses and hollyhocks, and emphasized, somehow, by strange
windmills exactly like large, wise gray owls, or, in the distance,
resembling monks bearing aloft tall crosses.

It was exquisite to glide on and on between two worlds; the world of
realities, the world of reflections. Villages were far separated one
from another, on canal and meer, though there were many farmhouses,
walled round by great trees to keep cool the store-lofts in their
steeply-sloping roofs. Gulls sat about like domestic fowls, and perched
on the backs of cows, that grazed in meadows fringed wi