otterdam, you perceive at once that you are in Holland.
The city has as many canals as streets, the canals are generally overhung
with rows of elms, and the streets kept scrupulously clean with the water
of the canals, which is salt. Every morning there is a vigorous splashing
and mopping performed before every door by plump servant girls, in white
caps and thick wooden shoes. Our hotel stood fronting a broad sheet of
water like the lagoons at Venice, where a solid and straight stone wharf
was shaded with a row of elms, and before our door lay several huge
vessels fastened to the wharf, which looked as if they were sent thither
to enjoy a vacation, for they were neither loading nor unloading, nor did
any person appear to be busy about them. Rotterdam was at that time in
the midst of a fair which filled the open squares and the wider streets of
the city with booths, and attracted crowds of people from the country.
There were damsels from North Holland, fair as snow, and some of them
pretty, in long-eared lace caps, with their plump arms bare; and there
were maidens from another province, the name of which I did not learn,
equally good-looking, with arms as bare, and faces in white muslin caps
drawn to a point on each cheek. Olycoeks were frying, and waffles baking
in temporary kitchens on each side of the streets.

The country about Rotterdam is little better than a marsh. The soil serves
only for pasture, and the fields are still covered with "yellow blossoms,"
as in the time of Goldsmith, and still tufted with willows. I saw houses
in the city standing in pools of dull blue water, reached by a bridge from
the street: I suppose, however, there might be gardens behind them. Many
of the houses decline very much from the perpendicular; they are, however,
apparently well-built and are spacious. We made no long stay in Rotterdam,
but after looking at its bronze statue of Erasmus, and its cathedral,
which is not remarkable in any other respect than that it is a Gothic
building of brick, stone being scarce in Holland, we took the stage-coach
for the Hague the next day.

Green meadows spotted with buttercups and dandelions, flat and low, lower
than the canals with which the country is intersected, and which bring in
between them, at high tide, the waters of the distant sea, stretched on
every side. They were striped with long lines of water which is constantly
pumped out by the windmills, and sent with the ebb tide through the c