its
scrupulous cleanliness. The common streets and footways, are kept in the
same order as the private garden-walks. They are paved with yellow bricks,
and as a fair was to open in the place that afternoon, the most public
parts of them were sanded for the occasion, but elsewhere, they appeared
as if just washed and mopped. I have never seen any collection of human
habitations so free from any thing offensive to the senses. Saardam, where
Peter the Great began his apprenticeship as a shipwright, is among the
sights of Holland, and we went the next day to look at it. This also is
situated on a dyke, and is an extremely neat little village, but has not
the same appearance of opulence in the dwellings. We were shown the
chamber in which the Emperor of Russia lodged, and the hole in the wall
where he slept, for in the old Dutch houses, as in the modern ones of the
farmers, the bed is a sort of high closet, or, more properly speaking, a
shelf within the wall, from which a door opens into the room. I should
have mentioned that, in going to Broek, I stopped to look at one of the
farm-houses of the country, and at Saardam I visited another. They were
dairy houses, in which the milk of large herds is made into butter. The
lower story of the dwelling, paved with bricks, is used in winter as a
stable for the cattle; in the summer, it is carefully cleansed and
painted, so that not a trace of its former use remains, and it then
becomes both the dairy and the abode of the family. The story above is as
neat as the hands of Dutch housewives can make it; the parlor, the
dining-room, the little boxes in the wall which hold the beds, are
resplendent with cleanliness.

In going from Amsterdam by railway to Utrecht, we perceived the canals by
which the plains were intersected became fewer and fewer, and finally we
began to see crops of grain and potatoes, a sign that we had emerged from
the marshes. We stopped to take a brief survey of Utrecht. A part of its
old cathedral has been converted into a beautiful Gothic church, the rest
having been levelled many years ago by a whirlwind. But what I found most
remarkable in the city was its public walks. The old walls by which
Utrecht was once inclosed having been thrown down, the rubbish has formed
hillocks and slopes which almost surround the entire city and border one
of its principal canals. On these hillocks and slopes, trees and shrubs
have been planted, and walks laid out through the green