We Passed Several
Of The Women Going To Market Or Returning, With Large Baskets On Their
Heads, Placed On The Crown Of A Broad-Brimmed Straw Bonnet, Tied At The
Sides Under The Chin, And Strapping Creatures They Were, Striding Along In
Their Striped Black And White Petticoats.
In the streets of Scheveling, I
saw the tallest woman I think I ever met with, a very giantess,
considerably more than six feet high, straddling about the street of the
little village, and scouring and scrubbing the pavement with great
energy.
Close at hand was the shore; a strong west wind was driving the
surges of the North Sea against it. A hundred fishing vessels rocking in
the surf, moored and lashed together with ropes, formed a line along the
beach; the men of Scheveling, in knit woollen caps, short blue jackets,
and short trowsers of prodigious width, were walking about on the shore,
but the wind was too high and the sea too wild for them to venture out.
Along this coast, the North Sea has heaped a high range of sand-hills,
which protect the low lands within from its own inundations; but to the
north and south the shore is guarded by embankments, raised by the hand of
man with great cost, and watched and kept in constant repair.
We left the Hague, and taking the railway, in a little more than two hours
were at Amsterdam, a great commercial city in decay, where nearly half of
the inhabitants live on the charity of the rest. The next morning was
Sunday, and taking advantage of an interval of fair weather, for it still
continued to rain every day, I went to the Oudekerk, or Old Church, as the
ancient Cathedral is called, which might have been an impressive building
in its original construction, but is now spoiled by cross-beams, paint,
galleries, partitions, pews, and every sort of architectural enormity. But
there is a noble organ, with a massive and lofty front of white marble
richly sculptured, occupying the west end of the chancel. I listened to a
sermon in Dutch, the delivery of which, owing partly to the disagreeable
voice of the speaker and partly no doubt to my ignorance of the language,
seemed to me a kind of barking. The men all wore their hats during the
service, but half the women were without bonnets. When the sermon and
prayer were over, the rich tones of the organ broke forth and flooded the
place with melody.
Every body visits Broek, near Amsterdam, the pride of Dutch villages, and
to Broek I went accordingly. It stands like the rest, among dykes and
canals, but consists altogether of the habitations of persons in
comfortable circumstances, and is remarkable, as you know, for 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 turf, until it
has become one of the most varied and charming pleasure-grounds I ever
saw - swelling into little eminences, sinking into little valleys,
descending in some places smoothly to the water, and in others impending
over it. We fell in with a music-master, of whom we asked a question or
two. He happened to know a little German, by the help of which he pieced
out his Dutch so as to make it tolerably intelligible to me.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 54 of 105
Words from 54159 to 55158
of 107287
