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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #55113 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55113)
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: From The Log of The "Velsa"
-
-Author: Arnold Bennett
-
-Illustrator: E. A. Rickards
-             Arnold Bennett
-
-Release Date: July 15, 2017 [EBook #55113]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM THE LOG OF THE "VELSA" ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
-
-By Arnold Bennett
-
-Pictures By E. A. Rickards
-
-And A Frontispiece By The Author
-
-New York: The Century Co.
-
-1914
-
-
-[Illustration: 0001]
-
-[Illustration: 0008]
-
-[Illustration: 0009]
-
-
-
-
-FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
-
-
-
-
-PART I HOLLAND
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I--VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
-
-THE skipper, who, in addition to being a yachtsman, is a Dutchman,
-smiled with calm assurance as we approached the Dutch frontier in the
-August evening over the populous water of the canal which leads from
-Ghent to Terneuzen. He could not abide Belgium, possibly because it
-is rather like Holland in some ways. In his opinion the bureaucrats of
-Belgium did not understand yachts and the respect due to them, whereas
-the bureaucrats of Holland did. Holland was pictured for me as a
-paradise where a yacht with a seventy-foot mast never had to wait a
-single moment for a bridge to be swung open. When I inquired about
-custom-house formalities, I learned that a Dutch custom-house did not
-exist for a craft flying the sacred blue ensign of the British Naval
-Reserve. And it was so. Merely depositing a ticket and a tip into the
-long-handled butterfly-net dangled over our deck by the bridge-man as we
-passed, we sailed straight into Holland, and no word said! But we knew
-immediately that we were in another country--a country cleaner and
-neater and more garnished even than Belgium. The Terneuzen Canal,
-with its brickwork banks and its villages “finished” to the last tile,
-reminded me of the extravagant, oily perfection of the main tracks
-of those dandiacal railroads, the North Western in England and the
-Pennsylvania in America. The stiff sailing breeze was at length
-favorable. We set the mainsail unexceptionably; and at once, with the
-falling dusk, the wind fell, and the rain too. We had to depend again
-on our erratic motor, with all Holland gazing at us. Suddenly the whole
-canal was lit up on both sides by electricity. We responded with our
-lights. The exceedingly heavy rain drove me into the saloon to read
-Dostoyevsky.
-
-[Illustration: 0019]
-
-At eight P. M. I was dug up out of the depths of Dostoyevsky in order
-to see my first Dutch harbor. Rain poured through the black night. There
-was a plashing of invisible wavelets below, utter darkness above, and
-a few forlorn lights winking at vast distances. I was informed that we
-were moored in the yacht-basin of Terneuzen. I remained calm. Had we
-been moored in the yacht-basin of Kamchatka, the smell of dinner would
-still have been issuing from the forecastle-hatch, the open page of
-Dostoyevsky would still have invited me through the saloon skylight, and
-the amiable ray of the saloon lamp would still have glinted on the piano
-and on the binnacle with impartial affection. Herein lies an advantage
-of yachting over motoring. I redescended without a regret, without an
-apprehension. Already the cook was displacing Dostoyevsky in favor of a
-white table-cloth and cutlery.
-
-The next morning we were at large on the billow’s of the West Schelde,
-a majestic and enraged stream, of which Flushing is the guardian
-and Antwerp the mistress. The rain had in no wise lost heart. With
-a contrary wind and a choppy sea, the yacht had a chance to show her
-qualities and defects. She has both. Built to the order of a Dutch
-baron rather less than twenty years ago, she is flat-bottomed, with
-lee-boards, and follows closely the lines of certain very picturesque
-Dutch fishing-smacks. She has a length of just over fifty-five feet and
-a beam of just over fifteen feet. Her tonnage is fifty-one, except when
-dues have to be paid, on which serious occasions it mysteriously
-shrinks to twenty-one net. Yachtsmen are always thus modest. Her rig is,
-roughly, that of a cutter, with a deliciously curved gaff that is the
-secret envy of all real cutters.
-
-Her supreme advantage, from my point of view, is that she has well over
-six feet of head-room in the saloon and in the sleeping-cabins. And,
-next, that the owner’s bed is precisely similar to the celestial bed
-which he enjoyed on a certain unsurpassed American liner. Further, she
-carries a piano and an encyclopedia, two necessaries of life. I may say
-that I have never known another yacht that carried an encyclopedia in
-more than a score of volumes. Again, she is eternal. She has timbers
-that recall those of the _Constitution_. There are Dutch eel-boats on
-the Thames which look almost exactly like her at a distance, and which
-were launched before Victoria came to the throne. She has a cockpit
-in which Hardy might have kissed Nelson. She sails admirably with a
-moderate wind on the quarter. More important still, by far, she draws
-only three feet eight inches, and hence can often defy charts, and slide
-over sands where deep-draft boats would rightly fear to tread; she has
-even been known to sail through fields.
-
-Possibly for some folk her chief attribute would be that, once seen, she
-cannot be forgotten. She is a lovely object, and not less unusual than
-lovely. She is smart also, but nothing more dissimilar to the average
-smart, conventional English or American yacht can well be conceived. She
-is a magnet for the curious. When she goes under a railway bridge
-while a train is going over it, the engine-driver, of no matter what
-nationality, will invariably risk the lives of all his passengers in
-order to stare at her until she is out of sight. This I have noticed
-again and again. The finest compliment her appearance ever received was
-paid by a schoolboy, who, after staring at her for about a quarter of an
-hour as she lay at a wharf at Kingston-on-Thames, sidled timidly up to
-me as I leaned in my best maritime style over the quarter, and asked,
-“Please, sir, is this a training brig?” Romance gleamed in that boy’s
-eye.
-
-As for her defects, I see no reason why I should catalogue them at
-equal length. But I admit that, to pay for her headroom, she has no
-promenade-deck for the owner and his friends to “pace,” unless they are
-prepared to exercise themselves on the roof of the saloon. Also that,
-owing to her shallowness, she will ignobly blow off when put up to the
-wind. Indeed, the skipper himself, who has proved that she will live in
-any sea, describes her progress under certain conditions as “one mile
-ahead and two miles to leeward”; but he would be hurt if he were taken
-seriously. Her worst fault is due to her long, overhanging prow, which
-pounds into a head sea with a ruthlessness that would shake the funnels
-off a torpedo-boat. You must not press her. Leave her to do her best,
-and she will do it splendidly; but try to bully her, and she will bury
-her nose and defy you.
-
-That morning on the wide, broad Schelde, with driving rain, and an
-ever-freshening northwester worrying her bows, she was not pressed,
-and she did not sink; but her fierce gaiety was such as to keep us all
-alive. She threshed the sea. The weather multiplied, until the half-inch
-wire rope that is the nerve between the wheel and the rudder snapped,
-and we were at the mercy, etc. While the skipper, with marvelous
-resource and rapidity, was improvising a new gear, it was discovered
-amid general horror, that the piano had escaped from its captivity, and
-was lying across the saloon table. Such an incident counts in the life
-of an amateur musician. Still, under two hours later, I was playing the
-same piano again in the tranquillity of Flushing lock.
-
-[Illustration: 0026]
-
-It was at Middelburg that the leak proved its existence. Middelburg is
-an architecturally delightful town even in heavy, persevering rain and
-a northwest gale. It lies on the canal from Flushing to Veere, and its
-belfry had been a beacon to us nearly all the way down the Schelde from
-Temeuzen. Every English traveler stares at its renowned town-hall; and
-indeed the whole place, having been till recently the haunt of more or
-less honest English racing tipsters and book-makers, must be endeared to
-the British sporting character. We went forth into the rain and into the
-town, skirting canals covered with timber-rafts, suffering the lively
-brutishness of Dutch infants, and gazing at the bare-armed young women
-under their umbrellas. We also found a goodish restaurant.
-
-When we returned at nine P. M., the deck-hand, a fatalistic philosopher,
-was pumping. He made a sinister figure in the dark. And there was the
-sound of the rain on our umbrellas, and the sound of the pumped water
-pouring off our decks down into the unseen canal. I asked him why he
-was pumping at that hour. He answered that the ship leaked. It did. The
-forecastle floor was under an inch of water, and water was pushing up
-the carpet of the starboard sleeping-cabin, and all the clean linen in
-the linen-locker was drenched. In a miraculous and terrifying vision,
-which changed the whole aspect of yachting as a recreation, I saw the
-yacht at the bottom of the canal. I should not have had this vision
-had the skipper been aboard; but the skipper was ashore, unfolding the
-beauties of Holland to the cook. I knew the skipper would explain
-and cure the leak in an instant. A remarkable man, Dutch only by the
-accident of birth and parentage, active as a fox-terrier, indefatigable
-as a camel, adventurous as Columbus, and as prudent as J. Pierpont
-Morgan, he had never failed me. Half his life had been spent on that
-yacht, and the other half on the paternal barge. He had never lived
-regularly in a house. Consequently he was an expert of the very first
-order on the behavior of Dutch barges under all conceivable conditions.
-While the ship deliberately sank and sank, the pumping monotonously
-continued, and I waited in the saloon for him to come back. Dostoyevsky
-had no hold on me whatever. The skipper would not come back: he declined
-utterly to come back; he was lost in the mazy vastness of Middelburg.
-
-Then I heard his voice forward. He had arrived in silence. “I hear our
-little ship has got a leak, sir,” he said when I joined the group of
-professional mariners on the forward deck, in the thick rain that
-veiled even gas-lamps. I was disappointed. The skipper was depressed,
-sentimentally depressed, and he was quite at a loss. Was the leak caused
-by the buffetings of the Schelde, by the caprices of the piano, by the
-stress of working through crowded locks? He knew not. But he would swear
-that the leak was not in the bottom, because the bottom was double. The
-one thing to do was to go to Veere, and put the ship on a grid that he
-was aware of in the creek there, and find the leak. And, further, there
-were a lot of other matters needing immediate attention. The bob-stay
-was all to pieces, both pumps were defective, and the horn for rousing
-lethargic bridge-men would not have roused a rabbit. All which meant for
-him an expedition to Flushing, that bustling port!
-
-The ship was pumped dry. But the linen was not dry. I wanted to spread
-it out in the saloon; but the skipper would not permit such an outrage
-on the sanctity of the saloon, he would not even let the linen rest in
-the saloon lavatory (sometimes called the bath-room). It must be hidden
-like a shame in the forecastle. So the crew retired for the night to the
-sodden, small forecastle amid soaked linen, while I reposed in dry
-and comfortable spaciousness, but worried by those sociological
-considerations which are the mosquitos of a luxurious age--and which
-ought to be. None but a tyrant convinced of the divine rights of riches
-could be always at ease on board a small yacht; on board a large one,
-as in a house, the contrasts are less point-blank. And yet must small
-yachts he abolished? Absurd idea! Civilization is not so simple an
-affair as it seems to politicians perorating before immense audiences.
-
-Owing to the obstinacy of water in finding its own level, we went to bed
-more than once during that night, and I thought of selling the ship and
-giving to the poor. What a declension from the glory of the original
-embarkation!
-
-The next afternoon, through tempests and an eternal downpour, we reached
-Veere, at the other end of the canal. Veere is full of Scotch history
-and of beauty; it has a cathedral whose interior is used by children as
-a field, a gem of a town-hall, and various attractions less striking;
-but for us it existed simply as a place where there was a grid, to serve
-the purpose of a dry-dock. On the following morning we got the yacht
-onto the grid, and then began to wait for the tide to recede. During
-its interminable recession, we sat under a shed of the shipyard, partly
-sheltered from the constant rain, and labored to produce abominable
-watercolors of the yacht, with the quay and the cathedral and the
-town-hall as a background. And then some one paddling around the yacht
-in the dinghy perceived a trickle out of a seam. The leak! It was naught
-but the slight starting of a seam! No trace of other damage. In an hour
-it had been repaired with oakum and hammers, and covered with a plaster
-of copper. The steering-gear was repaired. The pumps were repaired.
-The bobstay was repaired. The water-color looked less abominable in the
-discreet, kindly light of the saloon. The state of human society seemed
-less volcanically dangerous. God was in His heaven. “I suppose you’d
-like to start early to-morrow morning, sir,” said the skipper, whose one
-desire in life is to go somewhere else. I said I should.
-
-I went ashore with the skipper to pay bills--four gulden for repairs and
-three gulden for the use of the grid. It would have been much more but
-for my sagacity in having a Dutch skipper. The charming village proved
-to be virtually in the possession of one of those formidable English
-families whose ladies paint in water-colors when no golf-course is near.
-They ran ecstatically about the quay with sheets of Whatman until the
-heavy rain melted them. The owner of the grid lived in a large house
-with a most picturesque façade. Inside it was all oilcloth, red
-mahogany, and crimson plush, quite marvelously hideous. The shipwright
-was an old, jolly man, with white whiskers spreading like a peacock’s
-tail. He gave us cigars to pass the time while he accomplished the
-calligraphy of a receipt. He was a man sarcastic about his women (of
-whom he had many), because they would not let him use the _voor-kammer_
-(front room) to write receipts in. I said women were often the same
-in England, and he gave a short laugh at England. Nevertheless, he
-was proud of his women, because out of six daughters five had found
-husbands, a feat of high skill in that island of Walcheren, where women
-far outnumber men.
-
-Outside, through the mullioned window, I saw a young matron standing
-nonchalant and unprotected in the heavy rain. She wore an elaborate
-local costume, with profuse gilt ornaments. The effect of these Dutch
-costumes is to suggest that the wearer carries only one bodice, thin and
-armless, but ten thousand skirts. Near the young matron was a girl
-of seven or eight, dressed in a fashion precisely similar, spectacle
-exquisite to regard, but unsatisfactory to think about. Some day all
-these women will put on long sleeves and deprive themselves of a few
-underskirts, and all the old, jolly men with spreading white beards will
-cry out that women are unsexed and that the end of the world is nigh. In
-another house I bought a fisherman’s knitted blue jersey of the finest
-quality, as being the sole garment capable of keeping me warm in a Dutch
-summer. I was told that the girl who knitted it received only half a
-gulden for her labor. Outrageous sweating, which ought never to have
-been countenanced. Still, I bought the jersey.
-
-At six-thirty next day we were under way--a new ship, as it seemed to
-me. Yachts may have leaks, but we were under way, and the heavenly
-smell of bacon was in the saloon; and there had been no poring over
-time-tables, no tipping of waiters, no rattling over cobbles in
-omnibuses, no waiting in arctic railway-stations, no pugnacity for
-corner seats, no checking of baggage. I was wakened by the vibration
-of the propeller; I clad myself in a toga, and issued forth to laugh
-good-by at sleeping Veere--no other formalities. And all along the quay,
-here and there, I observed an open window among the closed ones. Each
-open window denoted for me an English water-colorist sleeping, even as
-she or he had rushed about the quay, with an unconcealed conviction of
-spiritual, moral, and physical superiority. It appeared to me monstrous
-that these English should be so ill bred as to inflict their insular
-notions about fresh air on a historic Continental town. Every open
-window was an arrogant sneer at Dutch civilization, was it not? Surely
-they could have slept with their windows closed for a few weeks! Or, if
-not, they might have chosen Amsterdam instead of Veere, and practised
-their admirable Englishness on the “Victorian Tea-Room” in that city.
-
-[Illustration: 0035]
-
-We passed into the Veeregat and so into the broad Roompot Channel, and
-left Veere. It was raining heavily, but gleams near the horizon allowed
-me to hope that before the day was out I might do another water-color.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II--DUTCH LEISURE
-
-EVERY tourist knows that Holland is one of the historic cradles of
-political freedom, and also a chain of cities which are in effect
-museums of invaluable art. The voyager in a little ship may learn that
-in addition to all this Holland is the home of a vast number of plain
-persons who are under the necessity of keeping themselves alive seven
-days a week, and whose experiments in the adventure of living have
-an interest quite equal to the interest of ancient art. To judge that
-adventure in its final aspect, one should see Holland on a Sunday, and
-not the Holland of the cities, but of the little towns.
-
-We came one Sunday morning to a place called Zieriksee, on an island to
-the north of the East Schelde. Who has heard of Zieriksee? Nevertheless,
-Zieriksee exists, and seven thousand people prosecute the adventure
-therein without the aid of museums and tourists. At first, from the
-mouth of its private canal, it seems to be a huge, gray tower surrounded
-by tiniest doll’s-houses with vermilion roofs; and as you approach, the
-tower waxes, until the stones of it appear sufficient to build the
-whole borough; then it wanes, and is lost in the town, as all towers
-ultimately are. The cobbled quay and streets were empty as we moored.
-And in an instant a great crowd sprang up out of the earth,--men and
-boys and girls, but few women,--staring, glaring, giggling, gabbling,
-pushing. Their inquisitiveness had no shame, no urbanity. Their cackle
-deafened. They worried the _Velsa_ like starving wolves worrying a deer.
-The _Velsa_ was a godsend, unhoped for in the enormous and cruel tedium
-which they had created for themselves. To escape them we forced our way
-ashore, and trod the clean, deathlike, feet-torturing streets. One shop
-was open; we entered it, and were supplied with cigarettes by two polite
-and gracious very old women who knew no English. On emerging from this
-paganism, we met a long, slow-slouching, gloomy procession of sardonic
-human beings,--not a pretty woman among them, not a garment that was
-comely or unclean or unrespectable, not a smile,--the great, faithful
-congregation marching out of the great church. Here was the life of
-leisure in Holland as distinguished from the week-day life of industry.
-It was a tragic spectacle. When we returned to the yacht, the other
-congregation was still around it. And it was still there, just as noisy
-and boorish, when we left several hours later. And it would still have
-been there if we had remained till midnight. The phenomenon of that
-crowd, wistful in its touching desire for distraction, was a serious
-criticism of the leaders of men in Holland. As we slid away, we could
-see the crowd rapidly dissolving into the horror of its original ennui.
-I asked the cook, a cockney, what he thought of Zieriksee.
-
-His face lightened to a cheerful smile.
-
-“Rather a nice sort of place, sir. More like England.”
-
-[Illustration: 0040]
-
-The same afternoon we worked up the Schelde in a dead calm to Zijpe. The
-rain had pretermitted for the first time, and the sun was hot. Zijpe
-is a village, a haven, a dike, and a junction of train and steamer. The
-village lies about a mile inland. The haven was pretty full of barges
-laid up for Sunday. On the slopes of the haven, near the railway-station
-and the landing-stage, a multitude of at least a thousand people
-were strolling to and fro or sitting on the wet grass, all in their
-formidable Sabbath best. We joined them, in order, if possible, to learn
-the cause of the concourse; but the mystery remained for one hour and a
-half in the eventless expanse of the hot afternoon, when the train came
-in over the flat, green leagues of landscape. We then understood. The
-whole of Zijpe had turned out to see the afternoon train come in! It was
-a simple modest Dutch local train, making a deal of noise and dust,
-and bearing perhaps a score of passengers. But it marked the grand
-climacteric of leisured existence at Zijpe. We set off to the village,
-and discovered a village deserted, and a fair-ground, with all its
-booths and circuses swathed up in gray sheeting. Scarcely a soul! The
-spirit of romance had pricked them all to the railway-station to see the
-train come in!
-
-Making a large circuit, we reached again the river and the dike, and
-learned what a dike is in Holland. From the top of it we could look down
-the chimneys of houses on the landward side. The population was now
-on the dike, promenading in magnificent solemnity and self-control.
-Everybody gravely saluted us in passing. We gravely saluted everybody,
-and had not a moment to ourselves for miles.
-
-“Over there,” said the skipper afterward, pointing vaguely to the
-southeast over the Schelde, “they ’re Roman Catholics. There ’s a
-lot of Spaniards left in Holland.” By Spaniards he meant Dutchmen with
-some Spanish blood.
-
-“Then they enjoy their Sundays?” I suggested.
-
-“Yes,” he answered sarcastically, “they enjoy their Sundays. They put
-their playing-cards in their pockets before they go to church, and then
-they go straight from the church to the café, and play high, and as like
-as not knife each other before they ’ve done.” Clearly it takes all
-sorts to make a little world like Holland, and it is difficult to strike
-the mean between absolute nullity and homicidal knives. My regret is
-that the yacht never got as far as those Spaniards gaming and knifing in
-cafés.
-
-On Monday morning every skipper on every river and canal of Holland
-tries to prove that the stagnation of Sunday is only a clever illusion.
-The East Schelde hummed with express barges at five A. M. It was exactly
-like a Dutch picture by an old master. Even we, in no hurry, with a
-strong tide under us and a rising northwester behind us, accomplished
-fifteen sea-miles in ninety minutes. Craft were taking shelter from the
-threatened gale. In spite of mistakes by an English crew unaccustomed
-to a heavy mainsail in tortuous navigation and obstreperous weather,
-we reached Dordrecht railway bridge without public shame; and then the
-skipper decided that our engine could not be trusted to push us through
-the narrow aperture against wind and tide. Hence we bargained with a
-tug, and were presently attached thereto, waiting for the bridge to
-open.
-
-Considering that Holland is a country where yachts are understood, and
-where swing-bridges open at a glance, we had to wait some little time
-for that bridge; namely, three hours. The patriotism of the skipper was
-strained. During the whole period the tug rushed to and fro, frisking us
-wildly about like a kettle at the tail of a busy dog, and continuously
-collecting other kettles, so that our existence was one long shock and
-collision. But we saw a good deal of home life on the barges, from a
-minor barge which a girl will steer to the three-thousand-ton affair
-that surpasses mail steamers in capacity.
-
-[Illustration: 0045]
-
-There are two homes on these monsters, one at the stem and the other
-at the stern; the latter is frequently magnificent in spaciousness
-and gilding. That the two families in the two distant homes are ever
-intimate is impossible, that they are even acquainted is improbable;
-but they seem to share a tireless dog, who runs incessantly along the
-leagues of planking which separate them.
-
-The bridge did at last open, and everything on the river, unmindful of
-everything else, rushed headlong at the opening, like a crowd of sinners
-dashing for a suddenly unbarred door into heaven. Our tug jerked us into
-the throng, a fearful squeeze, and we were through. We cast off, the
-gulden were collected in a tin, and within five minutes we were moored
-in the New Haven, under the lee of the Groote Kerk, with trees all
-around us, in whose high tops a full gale was now blowing.
-
-The next morning our decks were thickly carpeted with green leaves,
-a singular sight. The harbor-master came aboard to demand dues, and
-demanded them in excellent English.
-
-“Where did you learn English?” I asked, and he answered with strange
-pride:
-
-“Sir, I served seven years under the British flag.”
-
-Standing heedless in the cockpit, under driving rain, he recounted
-the casualties of the night. Fifteen miles higher up the river a
-fifteen-hundred-ton barge had sunk, and the master and crew, consisting,
-_inter alia_, of all his family, were drowned. I inquired how such an
-event could happen in a narrow river amid a numerous population, and
-learned that in rough weather these barges anchor when a tug can do no
-more with them, and the crew go to bed and sleep. The water gradually
-washes in and washes in, until the barge is suddenly and silently
-engulfed. Dutch phlegm! Corresponding to their Sabbatic phlegm, no
-doubt. Said the harbor-master:
-
-“Yes, there is a load-line, but they never takes no notice of it in
-Holland; they just loads them up till they won’t hold any more.”
-
-The fatalism of the working-classes everywhere is perhaps the most
-utterly astounding of all human phenomena.
-
-Thoughtful, I went off to examine the carved choir-stalls in the Groote
-Kerk. These choir-stalls are among the most lovely sights in Holland.
-Their free, fantastic beauty is ravishing and unforgetable; they make
-you laugh with pleasure as you behold them. I doubt not that they
-were executed by a rough-tongued man, in a dirty apron, with shocking
-finger-nails.
-
-[Illustration: 0052]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III--DUTCH WORK
-
-We passed through Rotterdam more than once, without seeing more of
-it than the amazing traffic of its river and its admirable zoological
-gardens full of chromatically inclined parrots; but we stopped at a
-minor town close by, on a canal off the Meuse, Schiedam. Instinct
-must have guided me, for the sociological interest of Schiedam was not
-inconsiderable. Schiedam is called by the Dutch “stinking Schiedam.”
- I made a circuit of the town canals in the dinghy and convinced myself
-that the epithet was just and not malicious. On the lengthy quays were a
-large number of very dignified gin distilleries, whose architecture was
-respectable and sometimes even very good, dating from perhaps early
-in the last century. Each had a baptismal name, such as “Liverpool,”
- inscribed in large letters across its façade. This rendering decent and
-this glorification of gin constituted an impressive phenomenon. But
-it was the provinciality and the uncouth melancholy of the apparently
-prosperous town that took my fancy. We walked through all its principal
-streets in the rain, and I thought I had never seen a provinciality so
-exquisitely painful and perfect. In this city of near thirty thousand
-people there was not visible one agreeably imposing shop, or one woman
-attired with intent to charm, or one yard of smooth pavement. I know not
-why I find an acrid pleasure in thus beholding mediocrity, the average,
-the everyday ordinary, as it is; but I do. No museum of Amsterdam, The
-Hague, or Haarlem touched me so nearly as the town of Schiedam, which,
-after all, I suppose I must have liked.
-
-Toward six o’clock we noticed an unquiet, yet stodgy, gathering in the
-square where is the electric-tram terminus, then a few uniforms. I asked
-a superior police officer what there was. He said in careful, tranquil
-English:
-
-“There is nothing. But there is a strike of glass-workers in the town.
-Some of them don’t want to work, and some of them do want to work. Those
-that have worked to-day are being taken home in automobiles. That is
-all.”
-
-I was glad it was all, for from his manner I had expected him to
-continue to the effect that the glass-workers had been led away by paid
-agitators and had no good reason to strike. The automobiles began to
-come along, at intervals, at a tremendous pace, each with a policeman by
-the chauffeur’s side. In one was a single artisan, middle-aged, with a
-cigar in the corner of his mouth, and a certain adventurous look in his
-eye. The crowd grimly regarded. The police tried to seem as if they were
-there by accident, but obviously they lacked histrionic training.
-In short, the scene was one of the common objects of the wayside
-of existence all over the civilized world. It presented no novelty
-whatever, and yet to witness it in Holland was piquant, and caused one
-to think afresh and perhaps more clearly.
-
-At night, when it had ceased to rain. I was escorting a friend to the
-station. Musicians were climbing up into the bandstand in the same
-square. It was Wednesday, the evening of the weekly municipal concert.
-The railway-station, far out, was superbly gloomy, and it was the only
-station in Holland where I failed to get a non-Dutch newspaper. The
-train, with the arrogance of an international express, slid in, slid
-out, and forgot Schiedam. I emerged from the station alone. A one-horse
-tram was waiting.
-
-The tram, empty, with a sinking, but everlasting, white horse under a
-yellow cloth, was without doubt the most provincial and melancholy thing
-that destiny has yet brought me in contact with. The simple spectacle
-of it, in the flickering gaslights and in the light of its own lamps,
-filled the heart, with an anguish inexplicable and beautiful. I got in.
-An age passed. Then an old workman got in, and saluted; I saluted. Save
-for the saluting, it was the Five Towns of the eighties over again,
-intensified, and the last tram out of Hanbridge before the theater-tram.
-
-An age passed. Then a mysterious figure drew the cloth off the horse,
-and the horse braced up all its four legs. We were starting when
-a tight-folded umbrella waved in the outer obscurity. An elderly,
-easy-circumstanced couple arrived upon us with deliberation; the
-umbrella was a good one.
-
-We did start. We rumbled and trundled in long curves of suburban
-desolation. Then a few miserable shops that ought to have been shut;
-then the square once more, now jammed in every part with a roaring,
-barbaric horde. In the distance, over a floor of heads, was an island of
-illumination, with the figures of puffing and blowing musicians in it;
-but no rumor of music could reach us through the din. The white horse
-trotted mildly into and right through the multitude, which jeered
-angrily, but fell back. An enormous multitude, Gothic, Visi-gothic,
-savage, uncivilized, chiefly consisting of young men and big boys--the
-weekly concert of humanizing music!
-
-[Illustration: 0057]
-
-I left the tram, and walked along the dark, empty canal-side to
-the yacht. The impression of stagnation, tedium, provincialism was
-overwhelming. Nevertheless, here, as in other towns, we were struck by
-the number of shop-windows with artist’s materials for sale. Such was
-Schiedam. If it is asked whether I went to Holland on a yachting cruise
-to see this sort of thing, the answer is that I just did.
-
-After a few weeks I began to perceive that Schiedam and similar places,
-though thrilling, were not the whole of Holland, and perhaps not the
-most representative of Holland. As the yacht worked northward, Holland
-seemed to grow more Dutch, until, in the chain of shallow lakes and
-channels that hold Friesland in a sort of permanent baptism, we came
-to what was for me the ideal or celestial Holland--everything done by
-water, even grass cut under water, and black-and-white cows milked
-in the midst of ponds, and windmills over the eternal flatness used
-exclusively to shift inconvenient water from one level to another. The
-road is water in Friesland, and all the world is on the road. If your
-approach to a town is made perilous by a succession of barges that
-will obstinately keep the middle of the channel, you know that it is
-market-day in that town, and the farmers are rolling home in agreeable
-inebriation.
-
-The motor broke down in Friesland, and we were immobolized in the midst
-of blue-green fields, red dogs, the cows aforesaid, green milk-floats,
-blue-bloused sportsmen, and cargoes of cannon-ball cheese. We decided to
-tow the yacht until we got to a favorable reach. Certain barges sailed
-past us right into the eye of the wind, against all physical laws,
-but the _Velsa_ possessed not this magic. We saw three men comfortably
-towing a string of three huge barges, and we would tow. Unfortunately
-the only person, the skipper, who knew how to tow had to remain on
-board. The cook, the deck-hand, and I towed like Greeks pulling against
-Greeks, and could scarcely move one little yacht. The cook, neurasthenic
-by temperament, grew sad, until he fell into three feet of inundation,
-which adventure struck him as profoundly humorous, so that he was
-contorted with laughter. This did not advance the yacht. Slowly we
-learned that towing is not mere brute striving, but an art.
-
-We at last came to terms with a tug, as our desire was to sleep at
-Sneek. Sneek is the veritable metropolis of those regions. After
-passing, at late dusk, the mysterious night-watchers of eel-nets, who
-are wakened in their elaborate green-and-yellow boats by a bell, like
-a Paris concierge, we gradually emerged into nocturnal Sneek through
-a quadruple lane of barges and tugs so long as to put Sneek among the
-seven great ports of the world. And even in Sneek at nightfall the
-impression of immense quantities of water and of greenness, yellowness,
-and redness was continued. It rained, as usual, in Sneek the next day,
-but no rain and no water could damp Sneek. It was the most active
-town any of us had ever seen. It must have been the original “hive of
-industry.” It was full, and full of everything. The market was full of
-cattle, pigs, and sheep, crowded in pens and in carts; calves, prone,
-with all four legs tied together, filled acres of pavement. The cafés
-were full of dealers and drovers, mostly rather jolly, being served by
-slatternly, pleasant women. The streets were full of good shops, and
-of boys and girls following us and touching us to see if we existed.
-(Dreadful little boors!) The barges were full of cauliflowers, cabbages,
-apples, potatoes, sabots, cheeses, and barrels. The canals were full of
-barges and steamers.
-
-And immediately one sat down to sketch a group of craft one learned that
-nothing was stationary. Everything moved that floated--everything on
-the surface of miles of canal! Everybody, without haste, but without
-stopping ever, was tirelessly engaged in shifting matter from one spot
-to another. At intervals a small steamer, twenty, thirty, fifty,
-eighty tons, would set off for a neighboring village with a few
-passengers,--including nice girls,--a few cattle, and high piles of
-miscellaneous packages; or would come in from a neighboring village. The
-kaleidoscope was everlasting; but it did not fatigue, because it never
-hurried. Only it made us ashamed of our idleness. Gently occupied old
-country-women, with head-dresses of lace-work and a gold casque, the
-whole ridiculously surmounted by a black bonnet for fashion’s sake--even
-these old women made us ashamed of our untransporting idleness.
-
-[Illustration: 0063]
-
-Having got our engine more or less repaired, we departed from Sneek, a
-spot that beyond most spots abounds in its own individuality. Sneek is
-memorable. Impossible to credit that it has fewer than thirteen thousand
-inhabitants!
-
-As, at breakfast, we dropped down the canal on the way to Leeuwarden,
-a new guest on board, whose foible is the search for the ideal, and who
-had been declaiming against the unattractiveness of the women of Munich,
-spoke thus:
-
-“Is this Dutch bread? I think I should like to become a Dutchman, and
-live at Sneek, and marry a Dutch girl. They have such nice blue eyes,
-and they ‘re so calm.”
-
-I remarked that I should have thought that his recent experiences in
-Munich would have frightened him right off the entire sex. He said:
-
-“Well, they ‘re all beautiful in Vienna, and that worries you just as
-much in another way. Sneek is the mean.”
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV--THE ZUYDER ZEE
-
-WE reached the Zuyder Zee, out of a canal, at Monnikendam, which is a
-respectably picturesque townlet and the port of embarkation for Marken,
-the alleged jewel of the Zuyder Zee, the precious isle where the customs
-and the costumes of a pure age are mingled with the prices of New
-York for the instruction of tourists. We saw Marken, but only from the
-mainland, a long, serrated silhouette on the verge. The skipper said
-that Marken was a side-show and a swindle, and a disgrace to his native
-country. So I decided to cut it out of the program, and be the owner
-of the only foreign yacht that had cruised in the Zuyder Zee without
-visiting Marken. My real reason was undoubtedly that the day’s program
-had been upset by undue lolling in the second-hand shops of Monnikendam.
-Thus we sailed due north for Hoorn, secretly fearing that at Marken
-there might be something lovely, unforgetable, that we had missed.
-
-The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, provided you don’t mind
-rain, and provided your craft does not draw more than about six feet.
-It has the appearance of a sea, but we could generally touch the bottom
-with our sounding-pole; after all, it is not a sea, but a submerged
-field. The skipper would tell inclement stories of the Zuyder Zee under
-ice, and how he had crossed it on foot between Enkhuizen and Stavoren,
-risking his life for fun; and how he had been obliged to recross it the
-next day, with more fatigue, as much risk, and far less fun, because
-there was no other way home. We ourselves knew it only as a ruffled
-and immense pond, with a bracing atmosphere and the silhouettes of
-diminished trees and houses sticking up out of its horizons here and
-there. When these low silhouettes happen to denote your destination,
-they have the strange faculty of receding from your prow just as fast as
-you sail toward them, a magic sea of an exquisite monotony; and when you
-arrive anywhere, you are so surprised at having overtaken the silhouette
-that your arrival is a dream, in the unreal image of a city.
-
-The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead.
-
-We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead cities, and never
-saw one. Hoorn is a delightful vision for the eye--beautiful domestic
-architecture, beautiful warehouses, beautiful towers, beautiful
-water-gate, beautiful aniline colors on the surface of dreadful canals.
-If it were as near to London and Paris as Bruges is, it would be
-inhabited exclusively by water-colorists. At Hoorn I went mad, and did
-eight sketches in one day, a record which approaches my highest break
-at billiards. Actually, it is inhabited by cheese-makers and dealers. No
-other town, not even Chicago, can possibly contain so many cheeses
-per head of the population as Hoorn. At Hoorn I saw three men in blue
-blouses throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the second story
-of a brown and yellow and green warehouse into a yellow cart. One man
-was in the second story, one in the first, and one in the cart. They
-were flinging cheeses from hand to hand when we arrived and when we
-left, and they never dropped a cheese or ceased to fling. They flung
-into the mysterious night, when the great forms of little cargo-steamers
-floated soundless over romance to moor at the dark quays, and the long,
-white English steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and its
-flulfy chambermaid, and its polished mahogany motor-launch, and its
-myriad lights and gleams, glided to a berth by the water-tower, and
-hung there like a cloud beyond the town, keeping me awake half the night
-while I proved to myself that I did not really envy its owner and that
-the Velsa was really a much better yacht.
-
-[Illustraion: 0070]
-
-The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the
-English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who
-spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was
-selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British
-army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the
-Dutch army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh,
-British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand
-the phrase “East Indian cigar.” He said there were no such cigars in
-his parents’ shop. When I said “Sumatra,” he understood, and fetched
-his mother. When I said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn,
-his mother put away all the samples already exhibited and fetched his
-father. The family had begun to comprehend that a serious customer had
-strayed into the shop. The father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity
-and deference went up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of
-cigars that were warm to the touch. “These are the best?”
-
-“These are the best.” I bought. They were threepence apiece.
-
-A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling
-sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the
-Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have
-atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have
-adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for
-the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like
-too many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of
-dogs--dogs that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order
-to prove that they are of the race that has always ended by expelling
-invaders with bloodshed.
-
-I was safer in the yacht’s dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though
-the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched,
-three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into
-the canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone
-on the quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as
-table-tops--cleaner.
-
-The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though
-Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived
-there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first
-glance, exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I
-remember it as the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner
-steering, and foul the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his
-owner, as if to say, “You see what owners do when they take charge.” I
-admitted it.
-
-We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy
-and recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having
-taken to his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail
-in a jiffy. The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become
-an omnibus conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus
-conductor will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young
-man, and himself painted in water-colors.
-
-[Illustration: 0076]
-
-I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town;
-but I know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely
-practical town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the
-cook. We were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised
-even by E. V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation.
-Kampen has architecture,--wonderful gates,--but it also has the crudest
-pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east
-wind was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner
-of Kampen was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen,
-which perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning
-was warm and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven
-weeks continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three
-hours we were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was
-steering.
-
-“Please keep the center of the channel,” the skipper enjoined me.
-
-I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are
-privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within
-half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on
-to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had
-seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is
-the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at
-high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs
-and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go
-to Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the
-town.
-
-Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end
-surcease, and all their long-colored _weins_ (vanes) streamed in the
-wind against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was
-the spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses
-that pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue
-ensign), and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay
-and held him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the
-spectacle of his aged father’s trading barge, unexpectedly making for
-the same port, with his mother, brother, and sister on deck--the crew!
-Arrived in port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the
-skipper boarded his old home with becoming placidity.
-
-The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful
-forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom
-nated by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a
-smack arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed
-to be always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect
-picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an
-establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass.
-The town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick
-water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an
-avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched
-off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a
-square. Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in
-Indian reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely
-imitated from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the
-church was a picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a
-sacristan out of a late novel by Huysmans.
-
-The churchyard was a mass of tall flowers.
-
-The women’s costumes here showed a difference, the gilt casque being
-more visibly divided into two halves. All bodices were black, all
-skirts blue. Some of the fishermen make majestic figures, tall, proud,
-commanding, fit adversaries of Alva; in a word, exemplifications of the
-grand manner. Their salutes were sometimes royal.
-
-The gaiety of the color; the distinction of the forms; the strange
-warmth; the completeness of the entity of the town, which seemed to
-have been constructed at one effort; the content of the inhabitants,
-especially the visible, unconscious gladness of the women at the return
-of their mariners; the urbanity of everybody--all these things helped
-to produce a comfortable and yet disconcerting sensation that the old,
-unreformed world was not quite ripe for utter destruction.
-
-All day until late in the evening smacks ceased not to creep up the
-canal. The aspect of the basin altered from minute to minute, with
-disastrous effect on water-colorists. In the dusk we ferreted In
-a gloomy and spellbound second-hand shop, amid dozens of rococo
-wall-clocks, and bought a few little things. As we finally boarded the
-yacht in the dark, we could see a group of sailors in a bosky arbor
-bending over a table on which was a lamp that harshly lighted their
-grave faces. They may have thought that they were calculating and
-apportioning the week’s profits; but in reality they were playing at
-masterpieces by Rembrandt.
-
-[Illustration: 0081]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V--SOME TOWNS
-
-HAARLEM is the capital of a province, and has the airs of a minor
-metropolis. When we moored in the Donkere Spaarne, all the architecture
-seemed to be saying to us, with innocent pride, that this was the city
-of the illustrious Frans Hals, and the only place where Frans Hals could
-be truly appreciated. Haarlem did not stare at strangers, as did other
-towns. The shops in the narrow, busy Saturday-night streets were small
-and slow, and it took us most of an evening, in and out of the heavy
-rain, to buy three shawls, two pairs of white stockings, and some
-cigarettes; but the shopmen and shop-women, despite their ignorance of
-English, American, and French, showed no openmouthed provinciality at
-our fantastic demands. The impression upon us of the mysterious entity
-of the town was favorable; we felt at home.
-
-The yacht was just opposite the habitation of a nice middle-class
-family, and on Sunday morning, through the heavy rain, I could see a boy
-of sixteen, a girl of fourteen, and a child of five or six, all dressing
-slowly together in a bedroom that overlooked us, while the father in
-shirt-sleeves constantly popped to and fro. They were calmly content
-to see and be seen. Presently father and son, still in shirt-sleeves,
-appeared on the stoop, each smoking a cigar, and the girl above, arrayed
-in Sunday white, moved about setting the bedroom in order. It was a
-pleasant average sight, enhanced by the good architecture of the house,
-and by a certain metropolitan self-unconsciousness.
-
-We went to church later, or rather into a church, and saw beautiful
-models of ships hung in the nave, and aged men entering, with their
-hats on and good cigars in their mouths. For the rest, they resembled
-superintendents of English Sunday-schools or sidesmen of small parishes.
-In another church we saw a Sunday-school in full session, a parson in
-a high pulpit exhorting, secretary and minor officials beneath him, and
-all the boys standing up with shut eyes and all the girls sitting down
-with shut eyes. We felt that we were perhaps in the most Protestant
-country in Europe.
-
-In the afternoon, when the rain-clouds lifted for a few moments and the
-museums were closed, we viewed the residential prosperity of Haarlem, of
-which the chief seat is the Nieuwe Gracht, a broad canal, forbidden to
-barges, flanked by broad quays beautifully paved in small red brick, and
-magnificent houses. A feature of the noble architecture here was that
-the light ornamentation round the front doors was carried up and round
-the central windows of the first and second stories. A grand street! One
-properly expected to see elegant women at the windows of these lovely
-houses,--some were almost palaces,--and one was disappointed. Women
-there were, for at nearly every splendid window, the family was seated,
-reading, talking, gazing, or drinking tea; but all the women were dowdy;
-the majority were middle-aged; none was beautiful or elegant. Nor was
-any of the visible furniture distinguished.
-
-The beauty of Haarlem seems to be limited to architecture, pavements,
-and the moral comeliness of being neat and clean. The esthetic
-sense apparently stops there. Charm must be regarded in Haarlem with
-suspicion, as a quality dangerous and unrespectable. As daylight failed,
-the groups within gathered closer and closer to the windows, to catch
-the last yellow drops of it, and their curiosity about the phenomena of
-the streets grew more frank. We were examined. In return we examined.
-And a discussion arose as to whether inspection from within justified
-inquisitiveness from the street. The decision was that it did not; that
-a person inside a house had the right to quiz without being quizzed. But
-this merely academic verdict was not allowed to influence our immediate
-deportment. In many houses of the lesser streets tables were already
-laid for supper, and one noticed heavy silver napkin-rings and other
-silver. In one house the shadowy figures of a family were already
-grouped round a repast, and beyond them, through another white-curtained
-window at the back of the spacious room, could be discerned a dim
-courtyard full of green and yellow foliage. This agreeable picture,
-typifying all the domestic tranquillity and dignity of prosperous
-Holland, was the last thing we saw before the dark and the rain fell,
-and the gas-lamps flickered in.
-
-[Illustration: 0087]
-
-We entered The Hague through canals pitted by heavy rain, the banks of
-which showed many suburban residences, undistinguished, but set in the
-midst of good gardens. And because it was the holiday week,--the week
-containing the queen’s birthday,--and we desired quietude, we obtained
-permission to lie at the private quay of the gasworks. The creators
-of The Hague gas-works have made only one mistake: they ought to have
-accomplished their act much earlier, so that Balzac might have described
-it; for example, in “The Alkahest,” which has the best imaginative
-descriptions of Dutch life yet written. The Hague gas-works are like
-a toy, gigantic; but a toy. Impossible to believe that in this vast,
-clean, scrubbed, swept expanse, where every bit of coal is scrupulously
-in place, real gas is made. To believe, you must go into the city and
-see the gas actually burning. Even the immense traveling-cranes, when
-at work or otherwise, have the air of life-size playthings. Our quay
-was bordered with flower-beds. The workmen, however, seemed quite real
-workmen, realistically dirty, who were not playing at work, nor rising
-at five-thirty a.m. out of mere joyous ecstasy.
-
-Nor did the bargemen who day and night ceaselessly and silently
-propelled their barges past us into the city by means of poles and
-sweat, seem to be toying with existence. The procession of these barges
-never stopped. On the queen’s birthday, when our ship was dressed, and
-the whole town was flagged, it went on, just as the decorated trams and
-tram-drivers went on. Some of the barges penetrated right through
-the populous districts, and emerged into the oligarchic quarter of
-ministries, bureaus, official residences, palaces, parks, art dealers,
-and shops of expensive lingerie--the quarter, as in every capital, where
-the precious traditions of correctness, patriotism, red-tape, order,
-luxury, and the moral grandeur of devising rules for the nice conduct of
-others are carefully conserved and nourished. This quarter was very well
-done, and the bargemen, with their perspiring industry, might have had
-the good taste to keep out of it.
-
-The business center of The Hague, lying between the palaces and the
-gas-works, is cramped, crowded, and unimpressive. The cafés do not
-glitter, and everybody knows that the illumination of cafés in a capital
-is a sure index of a nation’s true greatness. Many small cafés, veiled
-in costly curtains at window and door, showed stray dazzling shafts of
-bright light, but whether the true greatness of Holland was hidden
-in these seductive arcana I never knew. Even in the holiday week the
-principal cafés were emptying soon after ten o’clock. On the other hand,
-the large stores were still open at that hour, and the shop-girls, whose
-pale faces made an admirable contrast to their black robes, were still
-serving ladies therein. At intervals, in the afternoons, one saw a chic
-woman, moving with a consciousness of her own elegance; but she was
-very exceptional. The rest might have run over for the day from Haarlem,
-Delft, Utrecht, or Leyden. In the really excellent and well-frequented
-music-halls there was no elegance either. I have never anywhere seen
-better music-hall entertainments than in Holland. In certain major
-capitals of Europe and elsewhere the public is apt to prove its own
-essential naïveté by allowing itself to be swindled nightly in gorgeous
-music-halls. The Dutch are more astute, if less elegant.
-
-The dying engine of the yacht lost consciousness, for about the
-twentieth time during this trip, as we were nearing Amsterdam; but a
-high wind, carrying with it tremendous showers of rain, kindly blew us,
-under bare poles, up the last half-mile of the North Sea Canal into the
-private haven of the Royal Dutch Yacht-Club, where we were most amicably
-received, as, indeed, in all the yacht-club basins of Holland. Baths,
-telephones, and smoking-rooms were at our disposal without any charge,
-in addition to the security of the haven, and it was possible to get
-taxicabs from the somewhat distant city. We demanded a chauffeur who
-could speak English. They sent us a taxi with two chauffeurs neither of
-whom could speak any language whatsoever known to philologists. But
-by the use of maps and a modification of the pictorial writing of the
-ancient Aztecs, we contrived to be driven almost where we wanted. At
-the end of the excursion I had made, in my quality of observer, two
-generalizations: first, that Amsterdam taxis had two drivers for
-safety; and, second, that taxi-travel in Amsterdam was very exciting and
-dangerous. But our drivers were so amiable, soft-tongued, and energetic
-that I tipped them both. I then, somehow, learned the truth: one of the
-men was driving a taxi for the first time, and the other was teaching
-him.
-
-[Illustration: 0094]
-
-After driving and walking about Amsterdam for several days, I decided
-that it would be completely civilized when it was repaved, and not
-before. It is the paradise of stomachs and the hell of feet. Happily,
-owing to its canals and its pavements, it has rather fewer of the rash
-cyclists who menace life in other Dutch cities. In Holland, outside
-Amsterdam, everybody uses a cycle. If you are ran down, as you are, it
-is just as likely to be by an aged and toothless female peasant as by
-an office boy. Also there are fewer homicidal dogs in Amsterdam than
-elsewhere, and there is the same general absence of public monuments
-which makes other Dutch cities so agreeably strange to the English and
-American traveler. You can scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue
-of a nonentity in Holland, because there are scarcely any statues.
-
-Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland.
-Its architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively
-immanent in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of
-it in the mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless,
-the inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer.
-Amsterdam has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever
-passed through the head of a stock-broker. It is excessively ugly and
-graceless, but I admire it for being a caprice, and especially for being
-a stock-broker’s caprice. No English stock-broker would have a caprice.
-Amsterdam has small and dear restaurants of the first order, where a few
-people with more money than appetite can do themselves very well indeed
-in hushed privacy. It also has prodigious cafés. Krasnopolshy’s--a town,
-not a café--is said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It
-isn’t; but it is large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a
-million people.
-
-[Illustration: 0099]
-
-In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the
-quality which above all others a great city ought to possess. It
-pullulates. Vast masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and
-boil over into its public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the
-rain, is thronged with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of
-its shops. The Kalver-Straat will compete handsomely with Bond Street.
-Go along the length of it, and you will come out of it thoughtful. Make
-your way thence to the Rembrandt-Plein, where pleasure concentrates, and
-you will have to conclude that the whole of Amsterdam is there, and all
-its habitations empty. The mirrored, scintillating cafés, huge and
-lofty and golden, are crowded with tables and drinkers and waiters, and
-dominated by rhapsodic orchestras of women in white who do what they
-can against the hum of ten thousand conversations, the hoarse calls of
-waiters, and the clatter of crockery. It is a pandemonium with a certain
-stolidity. The excellent music-halls and circuses are equally crowded,
-and curiously, so are the suburban resorts on the rim of the city. Among
-the larger places, perhaps, the Café Américain, on the Leidsche-Plein,
-was the least feverish, and this was not to be counted in its favor,
-because the visitor to a city which pullulates is, and should he,
-happiest in pullulating. The crowd, the din, the elbowing, the glitter
-for me, in a town like Amsterdam! In a town like Gouda, which none
-should fail to visit for the incomparable stained-glass in its church, I
-am content to be as placid and solitary as anybody, and I will follow
-a dancing bear and a Gipsy girl up and down the streets thereof with
-as much simplicity as anybody. But Amsterdam is the great, vulgar,
-inspiring world.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI--MUSEUMS
-
-I DID not go yachting in Holland in order to visit museums;
-nevertheless, I saw a few. When it is possible to step off a yacht clean
-into a museum, and heavy rain is falling, the temptation to remain on
-board is not sufficiently powerful to keep you out of the museum. At
-Dordrecht there is a municipal museum manned by four officials.
-They received us with hope, with enthusiasm, with the most touching
-gratitude. Their interest in us was pathetic. They were all dying of
-ennui in those large rooms, where the infection hung in clouds almost
-visible, and we were a specific stimulant. They seized on us as the
-morphinomaniac seizes on an unexpected find of the drug.
-
-[Illustration: 0106]
-
-Just as Haarlem is the city of Frans Hals, so Dordrecht is the city of
-Ary Scheffer. Posterity in the end is a good judge of painters, if not
-of heroes, but posterity makes mistakes sometimes, and Ary Scheffer
-is one of its more glaring mistakes. (Josef Israels seems likely to
-be another.) And posterity is very slow in acknowledging an error. The
-Dordrecht museum is waiting for such an acknowledgment. When that
-comes, the museum will be burned down, or turned into a brewery, and
-the officials will be delivered from their dreadful daily martyrdom of
-feigning ecstatic admiration for Ary Scheffer. Only at Dordrecht is it
-possible to comprehend the full baseness, the exquisite unimportance,
-of Scheffer’s talent. The best thing of his in a museum full of him is
-a free, brilliant copy of a head by Rembrandt done at the age of eleven.
-It was, I imagine, his last tolerable work. His worst pictures, solemnly
-hung here, would be justifiably laughed at in a girls’ schoolroom. But
-his sentimentality, conventionality, and ugliness arouse less laughter
-than nausea. By chance a few fine pictures have come into the Dordrecht
-museum, as into most museums. Jakob Maris and Bosboom are refreshing,
-but even their strong influence cannot disinfect the place nor keep
-the officials alive. We left the museum in the nick of time, and saw no
-other visitors.
-
-Now, the tea-shop into which we next went was far more interesting and
-esthetically valuable than the museum. The skipper, who knew every shop,
-buoy, bridge, and shoal in Holland, had indicated this shop to me as a
-high-class shop for costly teas. It was. I wanted the best tea, and
-here I got it. The establishment might have survived from the age
-when Dordrecht was the wealthiest city in Holland. Probably it had so
-survived. It was full of beautiful utensils in practical daily use.
-It had an architectural air, and was aware of its own dignity. The
-head-salesman managed to convey to me that the best tea--that was,
-tea that a connoisseur would call _tea_--cost two and a half florins a
-pound. I conveyed to him that I would take two pounds of the same. The
-head-salesman then displayed to me the tea in its japanned receptacle.
-He next stood upright and expectant, whereupon an acolyte, in a lovely
-white apron, silently appeared from the Jan-Steen shadows at the back of
-the shop, and with solemn gestures held a tun-dish over a paper bag for
-his superior to pour tea into. Having performed his share in the rite,
-he disappeared. The parcel was slowly made up, every part of the process
-being evidently a matter of secular tradition. I tendered a forty-gulden
-note. Whereon the merchant himself arrived in majesty at the counter
-from his office, and offered the change with punctilio. He would have
-been perfect, but for a hole in the elbow of his black alpaca coat. I
-regretted this hole. We left the shop stimulated, and were glad to admit
-that Dordrecht had atoned to us for its museum. Ary Scheffer might have
-made an excellent tea-dealer.
-
-The museum at Dordrecht only showed in excess an aspect of displayed art
-which is in some degree common to all museums. For there is no museum
-which is not a place of desolation. Indeed, I remember to have seen only
-one collection of pictures, public or private, in which every item was
-a cause of joy--that of Mr. Widener, near Philadelphia. Perhaps the
-most wonderful thing in the tourist’s Holland is the fact that the small
-museum at Haarlem, with its prodigious renown, does not disappoint. You
-enter it with disturbing preliminaries, each visitor having to ring a
-bell, and the _locus_ is antipathetic; but one’s pulse is immediately
-quickened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces of Hals. And
-Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influential here, and even the mediocre
-paintings have often an interest of perversity, as to which naturally
-the guide-books say naught.
-
-The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up
-with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant,
-who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired
-the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum
-of the kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by
-Rembrandt, of which he managed to exaggerate the value.
-
-Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces
-than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one’s first sight of Rembrandt’s
-“Lesson in Anatomy” therein would constitute a dramatic event in any
-yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy
-one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday
-of the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared
-coarsely around, and understood nothing--nothing. True, they gazed in a
-hypnotized semicircle at “The Lesson in Anatomy,” and I can hear amiable
-persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant
-and the simple. I don’t believe it. I believe that if “The Lesson
-in Anatomy” had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of
-Carolus-Duran, the ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized
-just the same. And I have known the ignorant and the simple to be
-overwhelmed with emotion by spurious trickery of the most absurd and
-offensive kind.
-
-An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic
-experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic
-sense the majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be
-artistically civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can
-make any appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy
-of art, by which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in
-the midst of a vast, dangerous population--a few adventurous whites
-among indigenous hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may
-have splendid qualities, but they have not that one quality which
-more than any other vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the
-manifestations of art which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not
-very agreeable either. A string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth,
-came into the Mauritshuis out of the rain, and mildly and politely
-scorned it. Their attitude was unmistakable. They were not intimidated.
-Well, I like that. I preferred that, for example, to the cant of ten
-thousand tourists.
-
-Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag
-was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste,
-as illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact
-that many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two
-superb works--a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau--could not make up for
-the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full
-of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having
-time to spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is
-famous, and is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea,
-but it does not rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a
-sky full of kites. Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left
-Scheveningen, my secret melancholy was profoundly established within me,
-and in that there is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it
-becomes uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.
-
-[Illustration: 0112]
-
-The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town
-of fine architecture, is that they should both--the Ryks and the
-municipal--be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the
-age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs,
-and the result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities.
-Michelangelo often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects
-and artists more skilled than he in pleasing city councils and
-building-committees muddled away opportunities which he would have
-glorified; but he did obtain part of a job now and then, subject to it
-being “improved” by some duffer like Bernini, who of course contrived to
-leave a large fortune, whereas if Michelangelo had lived to-day he might
-never have got any job at all.
-
-Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the
-Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, “The Night-Watch”
- of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on
-the part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you:
-“Hats off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.”
- The truth is that “The Night-Watch” is neither very lovable nor very
-beautiful. It is an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering
-centuries in the eye, and it does so. But how long it will continue to
-do so is a nice question.
-
-Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of
-room, despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me
-with youth. It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful
-mistakes, but at any rate it is being made under the guidance of
-somebody who is not afraid of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced
-with such a collection, one realizes the shortcomings of London museums
-and the horror of that steely English official conservatism, at once
-timid and ruthless, which will never permit itself to discover a foreign
-artist until the rest of the world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks
-there are Van Goghs and Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best,
-but they are there. Also there are some of the most superb water-colors
-of the age, and good things by a dozen classic moderns who are still
-totally unrepresented in London. I looked at a celestial picture of
-women--the kind of thing that Guys would have done if he could--painted
-perhaps fifty years ago, and as modern as the latest Sargent
-water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T. C.? T. C.? Who on earth could
-T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas Couture, of course! A great
-artist! He will appear in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about
-the middle of the twenty-first century.
-
-Then there was Daumier’s “Christ and His Disciples,” a picture that I
-would have stolen had it been possible and quite safe to do so. It might
-seen incredible that any artist of the nineteenth century should take
-the subject from the great artists of the past, and treat it so as to
-make you think that it had never been treated before. But Daumier did
-this. It is true that he was a very great artist indeed. Who that has
-seen it and understood its tender sarcasm can forget that group of
-the exalted, mystical Christ talking to semi-incredulous, unperceptive
-disciples in the gloomy and vague evening landscape? I went back to the
-yacht and its ignoble and decrepit engine, full of the conviction that
-art still lives. And I thought of Wilson Steer’s “The Music-Room” in
-the Tate Gallery, London, which magnificent picture is a proof that in
-London also art still lives.
-
-[Illustration: 0117]
-
-
-
-
-PART II--THE BALTIC
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII--THE YACHT I LOST
-
-OUR adventures toward the Baltic began almost disastrously, because I
-put into the planning of them too much wisdom and calculation. We had a
-month of time at our disposal. Now, a fifty-ton yacht in foreign parts
-thinks nothing of a month. It is capable of using up a month in mere
-preliminaries. Hence, with admirable forethought, I determined to send
-the yacht on in advance. The _Velsa_ was to cross from her home port,
-Brightlingsea, to the Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many islands,
-to creep along the coasts of Hanover, Holstein, Schleswig, and Denmark,
-past the mouths of the Elbe, Weser, and Eider, to the port of Esbjerg,
-where we were to join her by a fast steamer from Harwich. She was then
-to mount still farther the Danish coast, as far as Liim Fjord and, by
-a route combining fjords and canals, cross the top of the Jutland
-peninsula, and enter the desired Baltic by Randers Fjord. The banal
-way would have been through the Kiel Canal. Yachts never take the Liim
-Fjord; but to me this was a fine reason for taking the Liim Fjord.
-Moreover, English yachts have a habit of getting into trouble with
-the German Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English yachtsmen are apt to
-languish in German prisons on charges of espionage. I was uncertain
-about the comforts provided for spies in German prisons, and I did not
-wish to acquire certitude.
-
-So the yacht was despatched. The skipper gave himself the large
-allowance of a fortnight for the journey to Esbjerg. He had a beautiful
-new 30-horse-power engine, new sails, a new mast. Nothing could stop him
-except an east wind. It is notorious that in the North Sea the east wind
-never blows for more than three days together, and that in July it never
-blows at all. Still, in this July it did start to blow a few days before
-the yacht’s intended departure. And it continued to blow hard. In a
-week the skipper had only reached Harwich, a bare twenty miles from
-Brightlingsea. Then the yacht vanished into the North Sea. The wind
-held in the east. After another week I learned by cable that my ship
-had reached the Helder, in North Holland. By a wondrous coincidence, my
-Dutch skipper’s wife and family are established at the Helder. The east
-wind still held. The skipper spent money daily in saddening me by
-cable. Then he left the Helder, and the day came for us to board the
-mail-steamer at Harwich for Esbjerg.
-
-[Illustration: 0123]
-
-She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her
-very first trip. She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced
-Danes, who had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom
-they chattered in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and
-incomprehensible. Also she was full of original Danish food, and
-especially of marvelous and mysterious sandwiches, which, with small
-quantities of champagne, we ate at intervals in a veranda cafe passably
-imitated from Atlantic liners. Despite the east wind, which still held,
-that steamer reached Esbjerg in the twinkling of an eye.
-
-When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. It was in
-the dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an
-unknown foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it
-as great ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant.
-There was a vast fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid
-imperceptibly past the mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the
-multitudinous masts for the mast of the _Velsa_. Her long Dutch streamer
-was ever unmistakable. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What
-the mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have
-done in more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the
-distance was simply nothing.
-
-I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes,
-though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on
-the quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound
-to be on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great
-ship, because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have
-accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. The _Velsa_ was
-definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of
-the Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled
-us out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of
-purgatory. He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he
-consented to be our friend, no serious harm could happen to our
-universe. And the hotel was excellent, the food was excellent, the
-cigars were excellent. And the three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting
-demurely about the long corridor at their nightly tasks, fair, clad
-in prints, foreign, separated romantically from us by the palisades of
-language--the three modest chambermaids were all young and beautiful,
-with astounding complexions.
-
-The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than
-east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless,
-I more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the
-extreme end of the jetty--about a mile each way each time--in the hope
-of descrying the _Velsa’s_ long, red streamer in the offing. It was
-Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly
-modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though
-extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of
-the same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger,
-especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful
-or even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong,
-gusty breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.
-
-We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we
-not gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the
-standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other
-place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday
-summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a
-degree really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at
-all they wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been
-a southern zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but
-we retained them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound
-compensations. There were two types of beautiful women, one with
-straight lips, and the other with the upper lip like the traditional
-bow. The latter, of course, was the more generously formed, acquiescent
-and yet pouting, more blonde than the blonde. Both types had the effect
-of making the foreigner feel that to be a foreigner and a stranger in
-Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all the daily frequentations and intimacies
-of the social organism, was a mistake.
-
-[Illustration: 0130]
-
-In the afternoon we hired an automobile, ostensibly to inspect the
-peninsula, but in fact partly to see whether similar women prevailed
-throughout the peninsula, and partly to give the yacht a chance of
-creeping in during our absence. In our hearts we knew that so long as
-we stood looking for it it would never arrive. In a few moments, as
-it seemed, we had crossed the peninsula to Veile, a sympathetic
-watering-place on its own fjord, and were gazing at the desired Baltic,
-whereon our yacht ought to have been floating, but was not. It seemed a
-heavenly sea, as blue as the Mediterranean.
-
-We had driven fast along rather bad and dusty roads, and had passed
-about ten thousand one-story farmsteads, brick-built, splendidly
-thatched, and each bearing its date on the walls in large iron figures.
-These farmsteads, all much alike, showed that some great change,
-probably for the better, must have transformed Danish agriculture about
-thirty or forty years ago. But though farmers were driving abroad in
-two-horse vehicles, and though certain old men strolled to and fro,
-smoking magnificent pipes at least a foot and a half long, the weight
-of which had to be supported with the hand, there was little evidence of
-opulence or even of ease.
-
-The passage of the automobile caused real alarm among male cyclists and
-other wayfarers, who, in the most absurd, girlish manner, would even
-leap across ditches to escape the risks of it. The women, curiously,
-showed much more valor. The dogs were of a reckless audacity. From every
-farmyard, at the sound of our coming, a fierce dog would rush out to
-attack us, with no conception of our speed. Impossible to avoid these
-torpedoes! We killed one instantaneously, and ran over another, which
-somersaulted, and, aghast, then balanced itself on three legs. Scores
-of dogs were saved by scores of miracles. Occasionally we came across a
-wise dog that must have had previous altercations with automobiles, and
-learned the lesson. By dusk we had thoroughly familiarized ourselves
-with the flat Danish landscape, whose bare earth is of a rich gray
-purple; and as we approached Esbjerg again, after a tour of 120 miles,
-we felt that we knew Jutland by heart, and that the yacht could not fail
-to be waiting for us in some cranny of the port, ready to take us to
-other shores. But the yacht had not come.
-
-Then the head waiter grew to be our uncle, our father, our consoler. It
-is true that he told us stories of ships that had set forth and never
-been heard of again; but his moral influence was invaluable. He soothed
-us, fed us, diverted us, interpreted us, and despatched cables for us.
-We called him “Ober,” a name unsuitable to his diminutive form, his few
-years, and his chubby face. Yet he was a true Ober. He expressed himself
-in four languages, and could accomplish everything. In response to all
-our requests, he would murmur in his exquisitely soft voice, “Oh, yes!
-oh, yes!” He devised our daily excursions. He sent us to Ribe, the one
-ancient town that we saw on the peninsula, in the cathedral of which was
-a young girl who had stepped out of a picture by Memling, and who sold
-post-cards with the gestures of a virgin saint and the astuteness of a
-dealer. He sent us to the island of Fano, where the northeaster blows
-straight from Greenland across a ten-mile bathing-beach peopled by
-fragile women who saunter in muslin in front of vast hotels beneath a
-canopy of flags that stand out horizontally in the terrible breeze. He
-provided us with water-bottles and with plates (for palettes ), so that
-we could descend to the multicolored port, and there, half sheltered
-from the wind by a pile of fish-boxes and from the showers by an
-umbrella, produce wet water-colors of fishing-smacks continually in
-motion.
-
-Day followed day. We had lived at Esbjerg all our lives. The yacht was
-lost at sea. The yacht had never existed. The wife of the skipper, or,
-rather, his widow, had twice cabled that she had no news. But the Ober
-continued to bear our misfortunes with the most astounding gallantry.
-And then there came a cable from the skipper, dated from the island
-of Wangeroog.... Wan-geroog! Wangeroog! What a name for an impossible
-island! What a name for an island at which to be weatherbound! We knew
-it not. Baedeker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of it. We
-found it at last on a map more than a hundred miles to the south. And
-I had been walking down to the jetty thrice a day to gaze forth for the
-_Velsa’s wein!_
-
-[Illustration: 0136]
-
-The skipper in his cable asked us to meet him at Friedrichstadt, on the
-Eider, in Holstein, Germany. The trains were very slow and awkward. The
-Ober said:
-
-“Why do you not take an automobile? Much quicker.”
-
-“Yes; but the German customs?”
-
-“Everything shall be arranged,” said the Ober.
-
-I said:
-
-“I don’t see myself among the German bureaucracy in a hired car.”
-
-The Ober said calmly:
-
-“I will go with you.”
-
-“All the way?”
-
-“I will go with you all the way. I will arrange everything. I speak
-German very well. Nothing will go wrong.”
-
-Such a head waiter deserved encouragement. I encouraged him. He put
-on his best clothes, and came, smoking cigars He took us faultlessly
-through the German customs at the frontier. He superintended our first
-meal at a small German hotel. I asked him to join us at table. He bowed
-and accepted. When the meal was over, he rose and bowed again. It was a
-good meal. He took us through three tire-bursts amid the horrid wastes
-of Schleswig-Holstein. He escorted us into Friedrichstadt, and secured
-rooms for us at the hotel. Then he said he must return. No! no! We could
-not let him abandon us in the harsh monotony of that excessively tedious
-provincial town. But he murmured that he must depart. The yacht might
-not arrive for days yet. I shuddered.
-
-“At any rate,” I said, “before you leave, inquire where the haven is,
-and take me to it, so that I may know how to find it.”
-
-He complied. It was a small haven; a steamer and several ships were in
-it. Behind one ship I saw a mast and a red pennant somewhat in the style
-of the _Velsa_.
-
-“There,” I said, “my yacht has a mast rather like that.”
-
-I looked again. Utterly impossible that the _Velsa_ could have arrived
-so quickly; but it was the _Velsa_. Joy! Almost tears of joy! I led the
-Ober on board. He said solemnly:
-
-“It is very beautiful.”
-
-So it was.
-
-But our things were at the hotel. We had our rooms engaged at the hotel.
-
-The Ober said:
-
-“I will arrange everything.”
-
-In a quarter of an hour our baggage was on board, and there was no hotel
-hill. And then the Ober really did depart, with sorrow. Never shall
-I look on his like again. The next day we voyaged up the Eider, a
-featureless stream whose life has been destroyed by the Kiel Canal, to
-its junction with the Kiel Canal, eighty-six dull, placid kilometers.
-But no matter the dullness; we were afloat and in motion.
-
-We spent about seventy-two hours in the German Empire, and emerged from
-it, at Kiel, by the canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had
-several times groaned in the formidable clutch of the Fatherland’s
-bureaucracy. She had been stopped by telephone at Friedrichstadt for
-having passed the custom-house at the mouth of the Eider, the said
-custom-house not being distinguished, as it ought to have been, by the
-regulation flag. Again we were stopped by telephone at Rendsburg, on the
-canal, for having dared to ascend the Eider without a pilot. Here the
-skipper absolutely declined to pay the pilot-fees, and our papers were
-confiscated, and we were informed that the panjandrum of the harbor
-would call on us. However, he did not call on us; he returned our
-papers, and let us go, thus supporting the skipper’s hotly held theory
-that by the law of nations yachts on rivers are free.
-
-We were obliged to take a pilot for the canal. He was a nice,
-companionable man, unhealthy, and gently sardonic. He told us that the
-canal would be remunerative if war-ships paid dues. “Only they don’t,”
- he added. Confronted with the proposition that the canal was very ugly
-indeed, he repudiated it. He went up and down the canal forever and
-ever, and saw nothing but the ships on it and the navigation signals. He
-said that he had been piloting for twelve years, and had not yet had the
-same ship twice. And there were 150 pilots on the canal!
-
-We put him ashore and into the arms of his wife at Kiel, in heavy
-rain and the customary northeaster, and we pushed forward into the
-comparative freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort, which
-looked attractive on the chart. But Friedrichsort was too naval for us;
-it made us feel like spies. We crossed hastily to Moltenort, a little
-pleasure town. Even here we had not walked a mile on land before we
-were involved in forts and menacing sign-boards. We retreated. The
-whole fjord was covered with battle-ships, destroyers, submarines,
-Hydro-aëroplanes curved in the atmosphere, or skimmed the froth off
-the waves. The air was noisy with the whizzing of varied screws. It was
-enormous, terrific, intimidating, especially when at dusk
-search-lights began to dart among the lights of the innumerable
-fjord passenger-steamers. We knew that we were deeply involved in
-the tremendous German system. Still, our blue ensign flew proudly,
-unchallenged.
-
-[Illustration: 0141]
-
-The population of Moltenort was not seductive, though a few young men
-here and there seemed efficient, smart, and decent. The women and girls
-left us utterly unmoved. The major part of the visitors were content
-to sit vacantly on the promenade at a spot where a powerful drain,
-discharging into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the sense.
-These quiet, tired, submissive persons struck us as being the raw
-slavish material of the magnificent imperial system, and entirely
-unconnected with the wondrous brains that organized it and kept it
-going. The next morning we departed very early, but huge targets were
-being towed out in advance of us, and we effected our final escape into
-the free Baltic only by braving a fleet of battleships that fired into
-the checkered sky. Sometimes their shells glinted high up in the sun,
-and seemed to be curving along the top edge of an imaginary rainbow.
-We slowly left them astern, with, as I say, a certain relief. Little,
-unmilitary Denmark lay ahead.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VIII--BALTIC COMMUNITIES
-
-AT Vordingborg, a small town at the extreme south of Sjaelland, the
-largest and easternmost of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to
-be really for the first time in pure and simple Denmark (Esbjerg had
-a certain international quality). We had sailed through the Langelands
-Belt, skirting the monotonous agricultural coasts of all sorts of
-islands, great and small, until one evening we reached this city, which
-looked imposing on the map. When we had followed the skipper ashore on
-his marketing expedition, and trodden all the stony streets of little
-Vordingborg, we seemed to know what essential Denmark, dozing in the
-midst of the Baltic, truly was.
-
-Except a huge and antique fort, there was no visible historical basis
-to this town. The main thoroughfare showed none of the dignity of
-tradition. It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and comfortable bourgeoises
-were placidly shopping therein--the same little bourgeoises that one
-sees all over the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacconists;
-a bookseller who also sold wall-papers; a sausage-shop, with a girl
-actuating an efficient sausage-slicing machine, and in the window an
-electric fan whirring close to a gigantic sausage. In the market, on a
-vague open space, a few carts, with their shafts on the ground; a few
-stalls; a few women; a butcher whipping off a hungry dog; three cheeses
-on a stand; baskets of fruit and vegetables on the Danish ground; our
-skipper chattering by signs and monosyllables in the middle. That was
-Vordingborg.
-
-[Illustration: 0146]
-
-In the churchyard there were only two graves. The church had no more
-architectural interest than a modern church in a London suburb, though
-it was older. We went within. The numbers of the hymns at the last
-service were still forlornly stuck up on the indicator. The altar and
-screen were ingenuously decorated in the style of a high-class booth
-at a fair. Three women in huge disfiguring aprons were cleaning the
-interior. Their cloaks and a white umbrella lay on the stone floor.
-They never even glanced at us. We left the church, and then skirting
-market-gardens and climbing over the ramparts of the fort, we descended
-to the mournful little railway station, and as we watched a little train
-amble plaintively in and out of that terminus, we thought of the numbers
-of the hymns sung at the last service in the church, and the immense
-devastating ennui of provincial existence in remote places enveloped us
-like a dank fog. We set sail, and quitted Vordingborg forever, lest we
-might harden our hearts and be unjust to Vordingborg, which, after all,
-at bottom, must be very like a million other townlets on earth.
-
-Compared with some of the ports we made, Vordingborg was a metropolis
-and a center of art. When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and the
-Stege Strand and the intricacies of the Rogestrommen, we found shelter
-in a village harbor of the name of Faxo. Faxo had nothing--nothing but
-a thousand trucks of marl, a girl looking out of a window, and a locked
-railway station. We walked inland into a forest, and encountered the
-railway track in the middle of the forest, and we walked back to Faxo,
-and it was the same Faxo, except that a splendid brig previously at
-anchor in the outer roads was slipping away in the twilight, and leaving
-us alone in Faxo.
-
-At Spotsbjerg, on the north of the island of Sjælland, a small, untidy
-fishing village with a harbor as big as a swimming-bath, there was not
-even a visible church; we looked vainly for any church. But there was
-a telephone, and on the quay there was a young and pretty girl leaning
-motionless on her father’s, or her grandfather’s, tarpaulin shoulder.
-Full of the thought that she would one day be old and plain, we fled
-from Spotsbjerg, and traveled an incredible distance during the whole
-of a bright Sunday, in order to refresh our mundane instincts at the
-capital of the Jutland peninsula, Aarhus.
-
-[Illustration: 0151]
-
-And on approaching Aarhus, we ran into a regatta, and the _Velsa_ had
-less of the air of an aristocrat among the industrial classes than in
-such ports as Spotsbjerg and Faxo. Further, a reporter came to obtain
-a “story” about the strange Dutch yacht with the English ensign. It was
-almost equal to being anchored off the Battery, New York.
-
-At Aarhus the pulse of the world was beating rather loud. In the windows
-of the booksellers’ shops were photographs of the director of the
-municipal theater surrounded by his troupe of stars. And he exactly
-resembled his important brethren in the West End of London. I myself
-was among the authors performed in the municipal theater, and I had a
-strange, comic sensation of being world-renowned. Crowds surged in the
-streets of Aarhus and in its cafés and tram-cars, and at least one of
-its taxicabs was driven by a woman. It had a really admirable hotel, the
-Royal, with first-class cooking, and a concert every night in its winter
-garden, where the ruling classes met for inexpensive amusement, and
-succeeded in amusing themselves with a dignity, a simplicity, and a
-politeness that could not possibly be achieved in any provincial town in
-England, were it five times the size of Aarhus. And why?
-
-Withal, Aarhus, I have to confess, was not much of a place for elegance.
-Its women failed, and the appearance of the women is the true test of a
-civilization. So far in our Danish experience the women of Esbjerg
-stood unrivaled. The ladies of Aarhus, even the leading ladies gathered
-together in the Royal Hotel, lacked style and beauty. Many of them had
-had the sense to retain the national short sleeve against the ruling of
-fashion, but they did not arrive at any effect of individuality. They
-were neither one thing nor the other. Their faces showed kindness,
-efficiency, constancy, perhaps all the virtues; but they could not
-capture the stranger’s interest.
-
-There was more style at Helsingôr (Elsinore), a town much smaller than
-Aarhus, but probably enlivened by naval and military influences, by its
-close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry communication therewith, and
-by its connection with Hamlet and Shakspere. The night ferries keep the
-town unduly awake, but they energize it. Till a late hour the station
-and the quay are busy with dim figures of chattering youth in pale
-costumes, and the departure of the glittering train-laden ferry to a
-foreign country two miles off is a romantic spectacle. The churches of
-Helsingôr have an architectural interest, and its fruit shops display
-exotic fruits at high prices. Officers flit to and fro on bicycles.
-Generals get out of a closed cab at the railway station, and they bear
-a furled standard, and vanish importantly with it into the arcana of the
-station. The newspapers of many countries are for sale at the kiosk. The
-harbor-master is a great man, and a suave.
-
-The pride of Helsingor is the Kronborg Castle, within sight of the town
-and most grandiosely overlooking sea and land. Feudal castles are often
-well placed, but one seldom sees a renaissance building of such heroic
-proportions in such a dramatically conceived situation. The castle is of
-course used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enormous precincts,
-we saw through a window a private sitting on a chair on a table, in
-fatigue uniform, playing mildly a flageolet, and by his side on the
-table another private in fatigue uniform, with a boot in one hand,
-doing nothing whatever. And from these two figures, from the whitewashed
-bareness of the chamber, and from the flageolet, was exhaled all the
-monstrous melancholy of barrack-life, the same throughout the world.
-Part of the castle is set aside as a museum, wherein, under the
-direction of a guide, one is permitted to see a collection of pictures
-the surpassing ugliness of which nearly renders them interesting. The
-guide points through a window in the wall ten feet thick to a little
-plot of turf. “Where Hamlet walked.” No historical authority is offered
-to the visitor for this statement. The guide then leads one through a
-series of large rooms, empty save for an occasional arm-chair, to the
-true heart of the Kronborg, where he displayed to us a seated statue
-of Mr. Hall Caine, tinted an extreme unpleasant bluish-white. An
-inscription told that it had been presented to Kronborg by a committee
-of Englishmen a few years earlier to mark some anniversary. The guide
-said it was a statue of Shakspere. I could not believe him.
-
-[Illustration: 0157]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IX--A day’s SAIL
-
-ALTHOUGH there is a lively pleasure in discovering even the dullest and
-smallest towns and villages, the finest experience offered by the Baltic
-is the savor of the Baltic itself in a long day’s sail. I mean a day of
-fourteen hours at least, from six in the morning till eight at night,
-through varied seascapes and landscapes and varied weather. As soon as
-the yacht leaves harbor in the bracing chill of sunrise she becomes a
-distinct entity, independent, self-reliant. The half-dozen men on her,
-cut off from the world, are closely knitted into a new companionship,
-the sense of which is expressed not in words, but by the subtleties
-of tone and mien; and if only one amoung them falls short of absolute
-loyalty and good-will toward the rest, the republic is a failure, and
-the air of ocean poisoned. The dictum of an older and far more practised
-yachtsman than myself used always to be, “I ’ll have no man aboard my
-ship who can’t smile all the time.” It is a good saying. And it could
-be applied to my yacht in the Baltic. We had days at sea in the Baltic
-which were ideal and thrilling from one end to the other.
-
-[Illustration: 0161]
-
-To make a final study of the chart in the cabin while waiting for
-breakfast is a thrilling act. You choose a name on the chart, and
-decide: “We will go to that name.” It is a name. It is not yet a town
-or a village. It is just what you imagine it to be until you first sight
-it, when it instantly falsifies every fancy. The course is settled. The
-ship is on that course. The landmarks will suffice for an hour or two,
-but the sea-marks must be deciphered on the chart, which is an English
-chart, and hence inferior in fullness and clearness to either French
-or Dutch charts. Strange, this, for a nation preëminently maritime! To
-compensate, the English “Sailing Directions”--for example, the “Pilot’s
-Guide to the Baltic”--are so admirably written that it is a pleasure
-to read them. Lucid, succinct, elegant, they might serve as models to a
-novelist. And they are anonymous.
-
-To pick up the first buoy is thrilling. We are all equally ignorant of
-these waters; the skipper himself has not previously sailed them, and
-we are all, save the cook, engulfed below amid swaying saucepans, on the
-lookout for that buoy. It ought to be visible at a certain hour, but it
-is not. The skipper points with his hand and says the buoy must be about
-there, but it is not. He looks through my glasses, and I look through
-his; no result. Then the deck-hand, without glasses, cries grinning
-that he has located her. After a quarter of an hour I can see the thing
-myself. That a buoy? It is naught but a pole with a slightly swollen
-head. Absurd to call it a buoy! Nevertheless, we are relieved, and in
-a superior manner we reconcile ourselves to the Baltic idiosyncrasy
-of employing broom-handles for buoys. The reason for this dangerous
-idiosyncrasy neither the skipper nor anybody else could divine.
-Presently we have the broom close abeam, a bobbing stick all alone in
-the immense wilderness of water. There it is on the chart, and there it
-is in the water, a romantic miracle. We assuage its solitude for a few
-minutes, and then abandon it to loneliness.
-
-We resume the study of the chart; for although we are quite sure of our
-course, the skipper can never be sure enough. My attention is drawn to
-a foot-note that explains the ice-signals of the Baltic. And the skipper
-sets to telling tales of terror about the ice, in the Zuyder Zee and
-other seas. He tells how the ice forms under the ship surreptitiously,
-coming up from the bottom like treacle. You say, “It’s freezing
-to-night,” and the next morning the ship can’t move; and you may die of
-starvation, for though the ice will hold the ship, it won’t hold you.
-The skipper knew men who could remember ice in the Zuyder Zee in June.
-He himself had once oscillated for a whole week between two ports on the
-Zuyder Zee, visible to each other, pushed hither and thither by the ice,
-and unable to get anywhere at all. But ice was less terrible than
-it used to he, owing to the increased strength and efficiency of
-ice-breakers. And climate was less rigorous. Thus the skipper would
-reassure us for a moment, only to intimidate us afresh. For it seems
-that the ice has a way of climbing; it will climb up over everything,
-and inclose a ship. Indeed, he was most impressive on the subject of
-ice. He said that the twin horrors of the sea were ice and fog. But
-of fog he told no tales, being occupied with the forward valve of the
-engine. We perceived that yachtsmen who go out when it happens to suit
-them, between May and September only, can never achieve intimacy with
-the entire individuality of the sea.
-
-The weather has now cleared for a while. The sun is hot, the saloon
-skylight warm to the touch. You throw off a jersey. The tumbling water
-is a scale of deep blues, splendid against the brass of the bollard and
-the reddishness of the spars. The engine is running without a “knock”;
-the sails are nicely filled; the patent log is twirling aft. A small
-rainbow shines steadily in the foam thrown up from the bows, and a great
-rainbow stretches across all heaven, with its own ghost parallel to it.
-Among the large, soft clouds rags of dark cloud are uneasily floating.
-On the flat shores of near islands the same cereals ripen as ripen at
-home. And this is thrilling. Distant islands are miraged. Even a distant
-battleship seems to be lifted clean out of the water by the so-called
-mirage.
-
-And then a trading-schooner, small, but much larger than us,
-relentlessly overhauls us. She laughs at the efforts of our engine to
-aid our sails, and forges ahead, all slanting, with her dinghy slung up
-tight aft, over her rudder. And then it is the still small voice of the
-stomach that speaks. Hunger and repletion follow each other very swiftly
-on such days. The after-breakfast cigar is scarcely finished before
-a genuine curiosity as to the menu of lunch comes to birth within. We
-glance into the saloon. Yes, the white cloth is laid, but we cannot eat
-cloth. The cook and the chronometer are conspiring together against us.
-
-In the afternoon the weather is thick and squally. And we are creeping
-between sad and forlorn veiled islands that seem to exude all the
-melancholy of the seas. There is plenty of water, but only in a
-deceiving horizontal sense. The channel is almost as narrow and
-as tortuous as a Devonshire lane. English charts are criminally
-preposterous, and so are Danish brooms. Hardly can one distinguish
-between a starboard and a port broom. Is the life of a yacht to depend
-on such negligent devices? The skipper is worried. And the spectacle
-of a ship aground in mid-sea does not tranquilize. Sometimes the hail
-wipes out for a few seconds the whole prospect. The eyes of everybody
-are strained with looking for distant brooms.
-
-[Illustration: 0168]
-
-Then we are free of the archipelago, and also the sky clears. The sun,
-turning orange, is behind us, and the wind in our teeth. Ahead is a
-schooner, beating. And she is the schooner of the morning. Our engine
-now has the better of her. As we overtake her, she runs away on one
-tack, and comes back on the next. She bears down on our stern, huge,
-black, glittering. A man and a boy are all her crew. This man and this
-boy are entitled to be called mariners, as distinguished from yachtsmen.
-We can see their faces plainly as they gaze down at us from their high
-deck. And you may see just the same faces on the liners that carry
-emigrants from Denmark to the West, and the same limbs sprawling on
-the decks of the Esbjerg steamers, as the same hands scrawl Danish
-characters on picture postal cards to the inhabitants of these very
-islands.
-
-The sea is now purple, and the schooner a little black blot on the red
-panorama of the sunset; and ahead, amid faint yellow and green fields,
-is a white speck, together with sundry red specks and blue specks. The
-name on the chart! And then the haven is descried, and a ring of masts
-with fluttering rags. And then the lighthouse and the roofs detach
-themselves, and the actual mouth of the haven appears. Twilight falls;
-the engine is moderated; the deck-hand stands by with a pole.
-Very slowly we slide in, and the multitudinous bright tints of the
-fishing-smacks are startlingly gay even in the dusk. The skipper glances
-rapidly about him, and yells out in Dutch to a fisherman, who replies
-in Danish. The skipper shakes his head, at a loss, and gives an order
-to the deck-hand. The deck-hand claws with a pole at a yellow smack.
-We have ceased to be independent. The name on the chart is a name no
-longer. It is a living burg, a poor little place, good enough to sleep
-in, and no more. But another stage on the journey to that magic capital
-Copenhagen.
-
-
-
-
-PART III COPENHAGEN
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER X--THE DANISH CAPITAL
-
-ACROSS the great expanse of Kjoge Bay, Copenhagen first became visible
-as a group of factory chimneys under a firmament of smoke. We approached
-it rapidly upon smooth water, and ran into the narrowing bottle-neck of
-Kallebo, with the main island of Sjælland to the west and the appendant
-island of Amager to the east. Copenhagen stands on both, straddling over
-a wide connecting bridge which carries double lines of electric trams
-and all the traffic of a metropolis. When a yacht, even a small one,
-wishes to enter the harbor, this bridge is cut in two and lifted into
-the air, and the traffic impatiently champs its bit while waiting for
-the yacht.
-
-[Illustration: 0174]
-
-Apparently they understand yachts at Copenhagen, as they do in Holland.
-At the outer harrier of the harbor we were not even requested to stop.
-A cheerful and beneficent functionary cried out for our name, our
-captain’s name, our tonnage, and our immediate origin, and, his
-curiosity being sated, waved us onward. The great bridge bisected itself
-for us with singular promptitude. Nevertheless, the gold-buttoned man
-in charge thereof from his high perch signaled to us that our burgee was
-too small. We therefore, having nothing else handy to placate him,
-ran up a blue ensign to the masthead; but it looked so excessively odd
-there, so acutely contrary to the English etiquette of yachts, that we
-at once hauled it down again. No further complaint was made.
-
-We were now in the haven, and over the funnels of many ships we could
-see the city. It was all copper domes and roofs; and we saw that it was
-a proud city, and a city where exposed copper turns to a beautiful green
-instead of to black, as in London. Splendid copper domes are the chief
-symptom of Copenhagen. After all the monotonous, tiny provincialism
-of the peninsula and of the islands, it was sensational to find a vast
-capital at the far end of the farthest island. We thought we were coming
-to the end of the world, and we came to a complete and dazzling city
-that surpassed, for example, Brussels in its imposingness. We turned
-westward out of the main channel into the heart of the town, and in a
-moment were tied up to a smack, and the red-and-green bourse was
-leaning over us; the rattle and ringing and stamping of horses, lorries,
-tram-cars, and taxi-cabs deafened us on three sides; and a bridge
-trembling with traffic barred our way.
-
-Towers and spires rose beyond the bridge; crowds stood to gaze at us;
-steamers and warehouses filled the prospect to the north; and under our
-bows the petrol-engined gondolas of Copenhagen, each holding a dozen
-passengers or so, continually shot. We were in the midst of a terrific
-din, but we cared not. We had arrived, and we had arrived in a grand
-town; we knew that at the first glance.
-
-[Illustration: 0179]
-
-In something less than half an hour one of us had gone forth and
-returned with grave tidings: “This is a most exciting city. I’ve already
-seen lots of beautiful women, some with lovely tow-colored hair.” The
-charm of distant Esbjerg was at last renewed. I went forth myself, into
-a very clean, fresh-looking city, with simple and lively inhabitants. In
-a trice I had gazed at the Thorvaldsen Museum (which I had no intention
-of entering, Thorvaldsen being for me on about the same artistic plane
-as the inexcusable Ary Scheffer of Dordrecht), the Christianborg Palace,
-which had an austere and kingly air, the very modern and admirable
-town hall, the old railway station, which has been transformed into
-the largest kinema in the world, the floating fish shops and fish
-restaurants (made out of old smacks and schooners), the narrow,
-thronged shopping streets, the celebrated Tivoli establishment, and the
-yacht-like steamers that from a quay, which might almost be called the
-gate to Sweden, in the very middle of the town, are constantly setting
-sail for Scandinavia. From Copenhagen you go to Sweden as thoughtlessly
-as in New York you go from Forty-second to Sixty-ninth Street, or
-in London from the Bank to Chelsea, and with less discipline. If the
-steamer has cast off, and the captain sees you hurrying up the street,
-he stops his engines and waits for you, and you are dragged on board by
-a sailer; whereupon the liner departs, unless the captain happens to see
-somebody else hurrying up the street.
-
-An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen was enough to convince my
-feet that it was not a city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped
-back to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a carriage. He knew no
-more of the city than I did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak
-a single word of Danish; but I felt sure that he would return with an
-equipage. What I desired was an equipage with a driver who could speak
-either English, French, or Dutch. He did return with an equipage, and it
-was overpowering. Rather like a second-hand state carriage, it was
-drawn by two large gray horses, perhaps out of a circus, and driven by
-a liveried being who was alleged to speak French. I shuddered at the
-probable cost of this prodigious conveyance, but pretended I did not
-care. The ligure named was just seven dollars a day. We monopolized the
-carriage during our sojourn, and the days were long; but the coachman
-never complained. Possibly because he had no language in which to
-complain. We learned in a moment that his ability to speak French
-was entirely mythical. Then some one said that a misunderstanding had
-occurred at the livery-stables, and that German was the foreign language
-he spoke, But he did not speak German either, nor anything else. He was
-just another of those strange creatures met in the course of travel who
-are born, who mature, and who die without speaking or comprehending any
-language whatever.
-
-From the height of his spacious and sedate vehicle we gazed down upon
-the rushing population of Copenhagen--beautiful women, with lovely
-tow-colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The driver only made
-one mistake, but it was a bad one. We wanted tea, and we asked him to
-go to a teagarden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went. He took us up
-an interminable boulevard, with a special strip for cyclists. Thousands
-upon thousands of cyclists, all fair, passed and repassed us. He went on
-and on. One of the horses fell lame, but it made no difference. We could
-not stop him. And repetitions of the word for tea in French and German
-had no effect save to make him smile. We constantly descried what seemed
-in the distance to be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens. We
-saw an incomprehensible colony of doll’s houses--well-kept suburban huts
-exteriorly resembling houses--in a doll’s garden. We could not conceive
-the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not a tea-garden. Presently
-the carriage was stopped by a man demanding money. He wore no uniform,
-but conveyed to us that he was an official of the town of Hillerup, and
-that strange carriages had to pay forty-eight ore in order to traverse
-Hillerup.
-
-It seemed a lot of money; but as it only amounted to sixpence, we paid.
-The man may have been a highwayman. We looked at the map for Hillerup,
-and found it miles away from Copenhagen.
-
-We were now in serious need of tea, and helpless. The driver drove
-on. He conducted us through half a dozen seaside resorts on the quite
-unjustly celebrated “Danish Riviera”; he came actually to the end of
-the tram-line, and then he curved inland into a forest (more to pay). We
-were now angry and still helpless. The forest had no end, and the roads
-in it no direction. Desperate, we signaled to him to turn back. He would
-not. He informed us on his lingers that he would be arriving in twenty
-minutes or so. When he did arrive, we solved the mystery. He had
-confused the word for tea with the word for deer, and had brought us
-to a well-known country resort called the Deer Park. A few miserable
-tourists were in fact drinking cold, bad tea on a windy terrace
-overlooking a distant horizon, far beyond which lay Copenhagen. We
-swallowed the tea, the driver swallowed beer, and we started hack. We
-had no overcoats, and the Baltic evening was cold. Trams overtook us
-flying at a tremendous pace into Copenhagen, and we were behind a lame
-horse. In the dusk we reached once more the desirable city, whose women
-never seemed more fair to us than they did then. This adventure taught
-us that the yachtsman must be prepared for any adventure, even the
-wildest.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XI--CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS
-
-THE most interesting thing, to the complete stranger, in a large
-foreign city that does not live on its own past is not the museums, but
-the restaurants and cafés, even in the dead season. We were told that
-August was the dead season in Copenhagen, and that all the world was at
-the seaside resorts. We had, however, visited a number of Danish seaside
-resorts, and they were without exception far more dead than Copenhagen.
-In particular Marienlyst, reputed to be the haunt of fashion and
-elegance, proved to be a very sad, deserted strand. Copenhagen was not
-dead.
-
-We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restaurant, signalized to us by
-authority as the finest in Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold
-place, full of waiters who had learned English in America, of
-hors-d’ouvre, and of music. The hand was much better than the food, but
-it has to be said that we arrived at half-past seven, when Danish dinner
-is over and Danish supper not begun. Still, many middle-class people
-were unceremoniously and expensively eating--in the main hors-d’ouvre.
-The metropolitanism of Copenhagen was at once apparent in this great
-restaurant. The people had little style, but they had the assurance and
-the incuriousness of metropolitans, and they were accustomed to throwing
-money about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the idiosyncrasies
-of waiters, and to being in the swim. Wivels might show itself on
-Fifth Avenue or in the Strand without blushing. And its food had the
-wholesale, crude quality of the food offered in these renowned streets
-to persons in the swim.
-
-Next we went to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, which was just the restaurant
-of the standardized international hotel. Once within its walls, and
-you might as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harrogate, Rome, Algiers,
-Brussels, as at Copenhagen. The same menu, the same cooking, the
-same waiters, the same furniture, the same toothpicks, and the same
-detestable, self-restrained English travelers, with their excruciating
-Englishness. The café on the ground floor of this hotel, overlooking a
-large and busy circular _place_, with the opera and other necessaries of
-metropolitan life close by, was more amusing than the restaurant. It was
-a genuine resort in the afternoon. The existence of Copenhagen rolled to
-and fro in front of its canopied terrace, and one might sit next to an
-English yachting party of astounding correctness and complacency (from
-one of those conceited three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white,
-and jeweled in many holes, like a watch), or to a couple of Danish
-commercials, or to a dandy and his love. Here we one night singled out
-for observation a very characteristic Danish young man and young woman
-with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive voices, and the soothing
-gestures of the North. It was an agreeable sight; but when we had
-carried our observation somewhat further, we discovered that they were
-an English pair on their honeymoon.
-
-[Illustration: 0186]
-
-In a day or two, feeling more expert in things Danish, we wanted a truly
-Danish restaurant, unspoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the
-Wiener Café, appanage of the Hotel King of Denmark. A long, narrow room,
-anciently and curiously furnished, with mid-Victorian engravings on the
-somber walls. The waiters had the austerity of priests presiding at
-a rite. Their silent countenances said impassively: “This is the most
-select resort in our great and historic country. It has been frequented
-by the flower of Danish aristocracy, art, and letters for a thousand
-years. It has not changed. It never will. No upstart cosmopolitanism can
-enter here. Submit yourselves. Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the
-niceties of our ceremonial, for we have consented to receive you.”
-
-In brief, it was rather like an English bank, or a historic hotel in an
-English cathedral town, though its food was better, I admit. The menu
-was in strict Danish. We understood naught of it, but it had the air
-of a saga. At the close of the repast, the waiter told us that, for the
-_prix fixe_, we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said, “Will
-you let me have a look at the cake, and then I ‘ll decide.” He replied
-that he could not; that the cake could not be produced unless it was
-definitively ordered. The strange thing was that he persisted in this
-attitude. Cake never had been shown on approval at the Wiener Café
-of the Hotel King of Denmark, and it never would he. I bowed the head
-before an august tradition, and ordered cheese. The Wiener Café ought
-to open a branch in London; it was the most English affair I have ever
-encountered out of England.
-
-Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely English. That very night we
-chose the restaurant of the Hotel--------for dinner. The room was darkly
-gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly shown to an empty
-table, and a menu was dung at us. The head waiter and three inefficient
-under waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for fifteen
-minutes; they had their habitués to serve. At the end of fifteen minutes
-we softly and apologetically rose and departed, without causing any
-apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat boy, whom we basely
-omitted to tip.
-
-[Illustration: 0191]
-
-We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets, searching hungrily for a
-restaurant that seemed receptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck
-guided us into the Café de l’Industrie, near the Tivoli. The managers
-of this industrious café had that peculiar air, both independent and
-amicable, which sits so well on the directors of an organism that
-is firmly established in the good-will of the flourishing mass. No
-selectness, no tradition, no formality, no fashion, no preposterous
-manners about the Café de l’Industrie, but an aspect of solid, rather
-vulgar, all-embracing, all-forgiving prosperity. It was not cheap,
-neither was it dear. It was gaudy, but not too gaudy. The waiters were
-men of the world, experienced in human nature, occupied, hasty, both
-curt and expansive, not servile, not autocratic. Their faces said: “Look
-here, I know the difficulties of running a popular restaurant, and you
-know them, too. This is not heaven, especially on a Sunday night; but we
-do our best, and you get value for your money.”
-
-The customers were samples of all Copenhagen. They had money to spend,
-but not too much. There were limits to their recklessness in the pursuit
-of joy. They were fairly noisy, quite without affectation, fundamentally
-decent, the average Danish. Elegance was rarer than beauty, and
-spirituality than common sense, in that restaurant. We ate moderately in
-the din and clash of hors d’ouvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music,
-and thanked our destiny that we had had the superlative courage to leave
-the Hotel --------, with its extreme correctitude.
-
-Finally, among our excursions ‘n restaurants, must be mentioned a crazy
-hour in the restaurant of the Hotel --------, supreme example of what
-the enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accomplish when it sets
-about to imitate the German _art nouveau_. The -------- is a grand hotel
-in which everything, with the most marvelous and terrifying ingenuity,
-has been designed in defiance of artistic tradition. A fork at the
--------- resembles no other fork on earth, and obviously the designer’s
-first and last thought was to be unique. It did not matter to him what
-kind of fork he produced so long as it was different from any previous
-fork in human history. The same with the table-cloth, the flower-vase,
-the mustard-pot, the chair, the carpet, the dado, the frieze, the
-tessellated pavement, the stair-rail, the wash-basin, the bedstead, the
-quilt, the very door-knobs. The proprietors of the place had ordered a
-new hotel in the extreme sense, and their order had been fulfilled. It
-was a prodigious undertaking, and must certainly have been costly. It
-was impressive proof of real initiative. It intimidated the beholder,
-who had the illusion of being on another planet. Its ultimate effect was
-to outrival all other collections of ugliness. I doubt whether in Berlin
-itself such ingenious and complete ugliness could be equaled in the
-same cubic space. My idea is that the creators of the Hotel -------- may
-lawfully boast of standing alone on a pinnacle.
-
-It was an inspiration on the part of the creators, when the hotel
-was finished to the last salt-spoon, to order a number of large and
-particularly bad copies of old masters, in inexpensive gilt frames, and
-to hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls. The resulting effect of
-grotesquery is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the -------- justly ranks as
-one of the leading European hotels. It is a mercy that the architect
-and the other designers were forbidden to meddle with the cooking, which
-sins not by any originality.
-
-The summary and summit of the restaurants and cafes of Copenhagen is the
-Tivoli. New York has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can only
-say with regret that the Tivoli is what Earl’s Court ought to be, and is
-not. The Tivoli comprises, within the compass of a garden in the midst
-of the city, restaurants, cafés, theater, concert-hall, outdoor
-theater, bands, pantomime, vaudeville, dancing-halls, and very numerous
-side-shows on both land and water. The strangest combinations of
-pleasure are possible at the Tivoli. You can, for instance, as we
-did, eat a French dinner while watching a performance of monkeys on a
-tightrope. The opportunities for weirdness in felicity are endless. We
-happened to arrive at Copenhagen just in time for the fêtes celebrating
-the seventieth anniversary of the Tivoli, which is as ancient as it is
-modern. On the great night the Tivoli reveled until morning. It must
-be the pride of the populace of Copenhagen, and one of the city’s
-dominating institutions. It cannot be ignored. It probably uses more
-electric light than any other ten institutions put together. And however
-keenly you may resent its commonplace attraction, that attraction will
-one day magnetize you to enter its gates--at the usual fee.
-
-I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand people at once in the
-Tivoli, not a bad total for one resort in a town of only half a million
-inhabitants. And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to the
-foreign observer, not merely for the pervading beauty and grace cf the
-women, which was remarkable, but also for the evident fact that as a
-race the Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety, dignity, and
-simplicity. Their demeanor was a lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to
-discover how to enjoy themselves freely without being either ridiculous
-or vulgar or brutish. The twenty thousand represented in chief the
-unassuming middle-class of Copenhagen.
-
-[Illustration: 0197]
-
-There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, “nuts,” rascals,
-obelisks, and mere artisans among the lot, but the solid bulk was
-the middle-class, getting value for its money in an agreeable and
-unexceptionable manner. The memory of those thousands wandering lightly
-clad in the cold Northern night, under domes and festoons and pillars
-of electric light, amid the altercations of conflicting orchestras, or
-dancing in vast, stuffy inclosures, or drinking and laughing and eating
-hors-d’ouvre under rustling trees, or submitting gracefully to
-Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose glazed aisles were two
-restaurants, or floating on icy lakes, or just beatifically sitting
-on al-fresco seats in couples--this memory remains important in the
-yachtsman’s experiences of the Baltic.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XII--ARISTOCRACY AND ART
-
-THE harbor-master would not allow us to remain for more than three
-days in our original berth, which served us very well as a sort of grand
-stand for viewing the life of Copenhagen. His theory was that we were
-in the way of honest laboring folk, and that we ought to be up in the
-“sound,” on the northeastern edge of the city, where the yachts lie. We
-contested his theory, but we went, because it is unwise to quarrel with
-a bureaucracy of whose language you are ignorant.
-
-The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was opposite a coaling station,
-and also opposite a shipbuilding yard, and from the west came a strong
-odor out of a manufactory of something unpleasant. We could have
-tolerated the dust, the noise, and the smell, but what we could not
-tolerate was the heavy rolling, for the north wind was blowing and the
-anchorage exposed to it. Indeed, the Royal Danish Yacht Club might
-have chosen more comfortable quarters for itself. We therefore
-unostentatiously weighed anchor again, and reëntered the town, and hid
-ourselves among many businesslike tugs in a little creek called the New
-Haven, whose extremity was conveniently close to the Café d’Angleterre.
-We hoped that the prowling harbor-master would not catch sight of us,
-and he did not.
-
-[Illustration: 0204]
-
-The aristocratic and governing quarter of the town lay about us,
-including the Bregade, a street full of antiquaries, marble churches,
-and baroque houses, and the Amalienborg Palace, which is really four
-separate similar palaces (in an octagonal _place_) thrown into one. Here
-all the prospects and vistas were dignified, magnificent, and proudly
-exclusive. The eighteenth century had nobly survived, when the populace
-was honestly regarded as a horde created by divine providence in order
-that the ruling classes might practise upon it the art of ruling. There
-was no Tivoli when those beautiful pavements were made, and as you stand
-on those pavements and gaze around at the royal grandiosity, speckless
-and complete, you can almost imagine that even the French Revolution has
-not yet occurred. The tiny, colored sentry at the vast, gray gates is
-still living in the eighteenth century. The architecture is not very
-distinguished, but it has style. It shames the -------- Hotel. The
-Frederiks Church, whose copper dome overtops the other copper domes, is
-a fair example of the quarter. Without being in the least a masterpiece,
-it imposes by its sincerity and its sense of its own importance. And the
-interior is kept as scrupulously as a boudoir. The impeccability of the
-marble flooring is wondrous, and each of the crimson cushions in the
-polished pews is like a lady’s pillow. Nothing rude can invade this
-marmoreal fane.
-
-The Rosenborg Palace, not far off, is open to the public, so that all
-may judge what was the life of sovereigns in a small country, and what
-probably still is. The royal villas outside Florence are very ugly, but
-there is a light grace about their furnishing which lifts them far above
-the heavy, stuffy, tasteless mediocrity of such homes as the Rosenborg.
-Badly planned, dark, unhygienic, crammed with the miscellaneous ugliness
-of generations of royal buying, the Rosenborg is rather a sad sight to
-people of taste; and the few very lovely tilings that have slipped in
-here and there by inadvertence only intensify its mournfulness. The
-phantoms of stupid courtiers seem to pervade, strictly according to
-etiquette, its gloomy salons. And yet occasionally, in the disposition
-of an arm-chair or a screen, one realizes that it must, after all, have
-been a home, inhabited by human beings worthy of sympathy. It is the
-most bourgeois home I ever entered. In a glass case, with certain
-uniforms, were hung the modern overcoat (a little frayed) and the hat
-of a late monarch. They touched the heart of the sardonic visitor, their
-exposure was so naive.
-
-Even more depressing than this mausoleum of nineteenth-century maimers
-was the museum of art. As a colossal negation of art, this institution
-ranks with the museum of Lausanne. It is an enormous and ugly building,
-full of enormous ugliness in painting and sculpture. It contained a fine
-Rembrandt--“Christ at Emmaus”--and one good modern picture, a plowing
-scene by Wilhelmson. We carefully searched the immense rooms for another
-good modern picture, and found it not. Even the specimens of Gauguin,
-Van Gogh, and Bonnard were mediocre.
-
-The sculpture was simply indescribable. The eye roamed like a bird
-over the waters of the deluge, and saw absolutely nothing upon which
-to alight with safety. Utter desolation reigned. The directors of this
-museum had never, save in the case of Wilhelmson, been guilty of an
-inadvertence. Their instinct against beauty in any form was unerring.
-Imagine the stony desert of rooms and corridors and giant staircases
-on a wet Sunday morning, echoing to the footsteps of the simple holiday
-crowd engaged patriotically in the admiration of Danish art; imagine
-ingenuous, mackintoshed figures against the vast flanks of stiff and
-terrific marble Venuses and other gods; imagine the whispering in front
-of anecdotes in paint; imagine the Inferno of an artist--and you have
-the art museum, the abode and lurking-place of everlasting tedium.
-
-Quite different is the Glyptothek, a museum whose existence is due
-to private enterprise and munificence. It is housed in an ugly and
-ill-planned building, but the contents are beautiful, very well
-arranged, and admirably exposed. The Glyptothek has an entrancing
-small picture by Tiepolo, of Antony and Cleopatra meeting, which I was
-informed must be a study for a larger picture in Venice It alone should
-raise the museum to a shrine of pilgrimage, and it is not even mentioned
-in Baedeker! But the Glyptothek triumphs chiefly by its sculpture. Apart
-from its classical side, it has a superb collection of Meuniers, which
-impressed, without greatly pleasing, me; a roomful of Rodin busts which
-are so honest and lifelike and jolly that when you look at them you want
-to laugh--you must laugh from joy. And the Carpeaux busts of beautiful
-women--what a profound and tranquil satisfaction n gazing at them!
-
-[Illustration: 0209]
-
-Some of the rooms at the Glyptothek are magical in their effect on
-the sensibility. They would make you forget wife and children, yachts,
-income tax, and even the Monroe Doctrine. Living Danish women were
-apposite enough to wander about the sculpture rooms for our delectation,
-making delicious contrasts against the background of marble groups.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIII--THE RETURN
-
-WE left Copenhagen with regrets, for the entity of the town was very
-romantic and attractive. Even the humble New Haven, where we sheltered
-from the eye of the harbor-master, had its charm for us. It was the real
-sailors’ quarter, thoroughly ungentlemanly and downright. The shops on
-each side of the creek were below the level of the street and even of
-the water, and every one of them was either a café, with mysterious
-music heating behind glazed doors, or an emporium of some sort for
-sailors. Revelries began in the afternoon. You might see a nice neat
-Danish wife guiding an obstreperously intoxicated Danish sailor down the
-steps leading to a cigar shop. Not a pleasant situation for a nice wife!
-But, then, you reflected that he was a sailor, and that he had doubtless
-been sober and agreeable a short while before, and would soon be sober
-and agreeable again; and that perhaps there were great compensations
-in his character. At night Bacchus and Pan were the true gods of that
-quarter, and the worship of them was loud and yet harmonious.
-
-We prepared reluctantly to depart; the engine also. The engine would not
-depart, and it was a new engine. Two hours were spent in wheedling and
-conciliating its magneto. After that the boat traveled faster than it
-had ever traveled. We passed out of Copenhagen into the sound, leaving
-a noble array of yachts behind, and so up the sound. Soon Copenhagen
-was naught but a bouquet of copper domes, and its beautiful women became
-legendary with us, and our memory heightened their beauty. And then the
-engine developed a “knock.” Now, in a small internal-combustion engine
-a “knock” may be due to bad petrol or to a misplacement of the magneto
-or to a hundred other schisms in the secret economy of the affair.
-We slowed to half-speed and sought eagerly the origin of the “knock,”
- which, however, remained inexplicable. We were engloomed; we were in
-despair.
-
-We had just decided to stop the engine when it stopped of itself, with a
-fearful crash of broken metal One side of the casing was shattered. The
-skipper’s smile was tragical. The manliness of all of us trembled under
-the severity of the ordeal which fate had administered. To open out
-the engine-box and glance at the wreck in the depths thereof was
-heart-rending. We could not closely examine the chaos of steel and brass
-because it was too hot, but we knew that the irremediable had occurred
-in the bowels of the _Velsa_. We made sail, and crawled back to the
-sound, and mournfully anchored with our unseen woe among the other
-yachts.
-
-The engine was duly inspected bit by bit; and it appeared that only the
-bearing of the forward piston was broken, certainly owing to careless
-mounting of the engine in the shops. It was an enormous catastrophe, but
-perhaps not irremediable.
-
-Indeed, within a short time the skipper was calculating that he could
-get a new bearing made in Copenhagen in twenty-four hours. Anyhow,
-we had to reconcile ourselves to a second visit to Copenhagen. And
-Copenhagen, a few hours earlier so sweet a name in our ears, was now
-hateful to us, a kind of purgatory to which we were condemned for the
-sins of others.
-
-[Illustration: 0216]
-
-The making and fitting of the new bearing occupied just seventy hours.
-During this interminable period we enjoyed the scenery of the sound and
-grew acquainted with its diverse phenomena. The weather, if wet, was
-calm, and the surface of the water smooth; but every steamer that passed
-would set up a roll that flung hooks, if not crockery, about the saloon.
-And the procession of steamers in both directions was constant from
-five a. m. to midnight. They came from and went to every part of
-the archipelago and of Sweden and of northern Germany. We gradually
-understood that at Copenhagen railways are a trifle, and the sea a
-matter of the highest importance. Nearly all traffic is seaborne.
-
-We discovered, too, that the immediate shore of the sound, and of the
-yacht-basin scooped out of it, was a sort of toy seaside resort for
-the city. Part of the building in which the Royal Danish Yacht Club
-is housed was used as a public restaurant, with a fine terrace that
-commanded the yacht-club landing-stage and all the traffic of the sound.
-Moreover, it was a good restaurant, except that the waiters seemed to be
-always eating some titbit on the sly.
-
-Here we sat and watched the business and pleasure of the sound. The
-czar’s yacht came to anchor, huge and old-fashioned and ungraceful, with
-a blue-and-white standard large enough to make a suit of sails for a
-schooner--the biggest yacht afloat, I think, but not a pleasing object,
-though better than the antique ship of the Danish king. The unwieldy
-ceremoniousness of Russian courts seemed to surround this pompous
-vessel, and the solitary tragedy of imperial existence was made manifest
-in her. Ah, the savage and hollow futility of saluting guns! The two
-English royal yachts, both of which we saw in the neighborhood, were in
-every way strikingly superior to the Russian.
-
-Impossible to tire of the spectacle offered by that restaurant terrace.
-At night the steamers would slip down out of Copenhagen one after the
-other to the ends of the Baltic, and each was a moving parterre of
-electricity on the darkness. And then we would walk along the nocturnal
-shore and find it peopled with couples and larger groups, whose bicycles
-were often stacked in groups, too. And the little yachts in the little
-yacht-basin were each an illuminated household! A woman would emerge
-from a cabin and ask a question of a man on the dark bank, and he would
-flash a lantern-light in her face like a missile, and “Oh!” she would
-cry. And farther on the great hulk which is the home of the Copenhagen
-Amateur Sailing Club would be lit with festoons of lamps, and from
-within it would come the sounds of song and the laughter of two sexes.
-And then we would yell, “_Velsa_, ahoy!” and keep on yelling until all
-the lightly clad couples were drawn out of the chilly night like moths
-by the strange English signaling. And at last the _Velsa_ would wake
-up, and the dinghy would detach itself from her side, and we would go
-aboard. But not until two o’clock or so would the hilarity and music of
-the Amateur Sailing Club cease, and merge into a frantic whistling for
-taxicabs from the stand beyond the restaurant.
-
-Then a few hours’ slumber, broken by nightmares of the impossibility of
-ever quitting Copenhagen, and we would get up and gaze at the sadness
-of the dismantled engine, and over the water at the yachts dozing
-and rocking in the dawn. And on a near yacht, out of the maw of a
-forecastle-hatch left open for air, a half-dressed sailor would appear,
-and yawn, and stretch his arms, and then begin to use a bucket on the
-yacht’s deck.
-
-[Illustration: 0221]
-
-The day was born. A green tug would hurry northward, splashing; and the
-first of the morning steamers would arrive from some mystical distant
-island, a vessel, like most of the rest, of about six hundred tons, red
-and black funnels, the captain looking down at us from the bridge; a
-nice handful of passengers, including a few young women in bright
-hats; everything damp and fresh, and everybody expectant and braced
-for Copenhagen. A cheerful, ordinary sight! And then our skipper would
-emerge, and the cook with my morning apple on a white plate. And the
-skipper would say, “We ought to be able to make a start to-day, sir.”
- And on the third day we did make a start, the engine having been
-miraculously recreated; and we left Copenhagen, hating it no more.
-
-
-
-
-PART IV--ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COAST
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIV--FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
-
-WE waited for the weather a day and a night at Folkestone, which,
-though one of the gateways of England, is a poor and primitive place to
-lie in. Most of the time we were on the mud, and to get up into England
-we had to climb a craggy precipice called the quay-wall. Nevertheless,
-the harbor (so styled) is picturesque, and in the less respectable
-part of the town, between the big hotels and band-stands and the
-mail-steamers; there are agreeable second-hand book shops, in one of
-which I bought an early edition of Gray’s poems bound in ancient vellum.
-
-The newspapers were very pessimistic about the weather, and smacks
-occasionally crept in for shelter, with wild reports of what was going
-on in the channel. At four o’clock in the morning, however, we started,
-adventurous, for the far coasts of Brittany, via Boulogne. The channel
-was a gray and desolate sight, weary and uneasy after the gale. And I
-also was weary and uneasy, for it is impossible for a civilized person
-of regular habits to arise at four a. m. without both physical and
-psychical suffering, and the pleasure derived from the experience,
-though real, is perverse. The last gleams of the Gris-Nez and the Varne
-lights were visible across the heaving waste, feebly illuminating the
-intense melancholy of the dawn. There was nothing to do except steer
-and keep your eyes open, because a favorable and moderate southwest wind
-rendered the engine unnecessary. The ship, and the dinghy after her,
-pitched and rolled over the heavy swell. The skipper said naught. I said
-naught. The lights expired. The dark gray of the sea turned to steel.
-The breeze was icy. Vitality was at its lowest. Brittany seemed
-exceedingly remote, even unattainable. Great, vital questions presented
-themselves to the enfeebled mind, cutting at the very root of all
-conduct and all ambitions. What was the use of yachting? What was the
-use of anything? Why struggle? Why exist? The universe was too vast, and
-the soul homeless therein.
-
-And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft, bearing a brass tray,
-and on the tray an electro-teapot, sugar-basin, and milk-jug, and a
-white cup and saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernalia! Exquisite and
-potent draft, far surpassing champagne drunk amid the bright glances
-of beauty! Only the finest China tea is employed aboard the _Velsa_.
-I drank, and was healed; and I gave also to the shipper. Earth was
-transformed. We began to talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling
-over, spurted. It was a grand life. We descried the French coast. The
-hours flew. Before breakfast-time we were becalmed, in sunshine, between
-the piers at Boulogne, and had to go in on the engine. At 8:15 we ran
-her on the mud, on a rising tide, next to a pilot-boat, the _Jean et
-Marie_, inhabited by three jolly French sailors. We carried a warp to
-the Quai Chanzy, and another to a buoy, and considered ourselves fairly
-in France.
-
-[Illustration: 0228]
-
-The officials of the French republic on the quay had been driven by
-the spectacle of our peculiar Dutch lines and rig to adopt strange,
-emotional attitudes; and as soon as we were afloat, the French republic
-came aboard in a dinghy manned by two acolytes. The skipper usually
-receives the representatives of foreign powers, but as the skipper
-speaks no French, and as this was the first time I had entered France
-in this style, I thought I would be my own ambassador. I received the
-French republic in my saloon; we were ravishingly polite to each other;
-we murmured sweet compliments to each other. He gave me a clean bill of
-health, and went off with four francs and one half-penny. There is no
-nation like the French. A French milliner will make a hat out of a
-piece of felt and nothing; and a French official will make a diplomatic
-episode out of nothing at all, putting into five minutes of futility all
-the Gallic civilization of centuries.
-
-Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as its area is narrowly
-limited, and its entrance difficult, the amount of signaling that goes
-on is extraordinary. A single ship will fill the entrance; hence a flag
-flies to warn the surrounding seas when the entrance is occupied or
-about to be occupied. The state of the tide is also indicated, and the
-expert can read from hieroglyphics slung in the air the exact depth of
-water at a particular moment between the piers. In addition, of course,
-there is the weather signaling. We had scarcely been in port a couple
-of hours before the weather signaling shocked us; nay, we took it as
-an affront to ourselves. The south cone went up. We had come in at the
-tail-end of one south gale, and now another was predicted! How could
-small people like us hope to work our way down to Brittany in the teeth
-of the gale! And I had an appointment in the harbor of Carantec, a tiny
-village near Morlaix, in a week’s time! The thing was monstrous. But the
-south cone was hoisted, and it remained hoisted. And the cone is
-never displayed except for a real gale,--not a yachtsman’s gale, but a
-sailor’s gale, which is serious.
-
-A tender went forth to meet a Dutch American liner in the roads. We
-followed her along the jetty. At the end of the jetty the gale was
-already blowing; and rain-squalls were all round the horizon. Soon we
-were in the midst of a squall ourselves. The rain hid everything for a
-minute. It cleared. The vast stretch of sands glistened wet, with the
-variegated bathing-tents, from which even then beautiful creatures were
-bathing in a shallow surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex
-roofs of Boulogne, and to the north a road climbing up to the cliff-top,
-and the illimitable dunes that are a feature of this part of the
-country. Above all floated thunder-clouds, white in steely blue. The
-skipper did not like those thunder-clouds; he said they were the most
-dangerous of all clouds, “because anything might come out of them.” He
-spoke as if they already contained in their bosoms every conceivable
-sort of weather, which they would let loose according to their caprice.
-
-The rain resumed heavily. The wind compelled us to hold tight to the
-rail of the pier. A poster announced that in the casino behind the
-rain, Suppé’s “Boccaccio” was to be performed that night, and Massenet’s
-“Thaïs” the next night. And opera seemed a very artificial and
-unnecessary form of activity as we stood out there in the reality of
-the storm. The Atlantic liner had now bid good-by to the tender, and was
-hugely moving. She found sea-room, and then turned with the solemnity of
-her bigness, and headed straight into the gale, pitching like a toy. The
-rain soon veiled her, and she was gone. I could not picture the _Velsa_
-in such a situation, at any rate with the owner on board. We went back,
-rather pensive, to the Quai Chanzy.
-
-[Illustration: 0234]
-
-The men in the pilot-boat alongside the _Velsa_ were not in the least
-reassuring as to the chances of the _Velsa_ ever getting to Brittany;
-but they were uplifted because the weather was too rough for them to go
-out. When the cone is on view, the pilot-service is accomplished by a
-powerful steam-vessel. Our friends, in their apparently happy idleness,
-sculled forth in a dinghy about fifty yards from where we lay, and
-almost immediately rejoined us with three eels that they had caught.
-I bought the three eels for two shillings, and the cook cooked them
-perfectly, and I ate one of them with ecstasy a few hours later; but
-eels are excessively antipathetic to the digestive organs, and may
-jaundice the true bright color of the world for days.
-
-The transaction of the eels, strengthened our intimacy with the pilot’s
-crew, who imparted to us many secrets; as, for example, that they were
-the selfsame men who act as porters at the quay for the transfer of
-luggage when the cross-channel steamers arrive and depart. On one day
-they are the pilot’s crew, and on the next they are porters to carry
-your handbags through the customs. This was a blow to me, because on
-the innumerable occasions when I had employed those porters I had always
-regarded them as unfortunate beings who could earn money only during
-about an hour each day, victims of the unjust social system, etc., and
-who were therefore specially deserving of compassion and tips. I now
-divined that their activities were multiple, and no doubt dovetailed
-together like a Chinese puzzle, and all reasonably remunerative. The
-which was very French and admirable. Herein was a valuable lesson to me,
-and a clear saving in future of that precious commodity, compassion.
-
-In a day or two the horrid fact emerged that we were imprisoned in
-Boulogne. The south cone did not budge. Neither could we. The tide
-ebbed; the tide flowed; we sank softly into the mud; we floated again.
-A sailor cut our warp because it was in his way, and therefore incurred
-our anger and the comminations of the harbor-master. But we were
-not released. An aeroplane meeting was announced, and postponed. We
-witnessed the preparations for the ceremonial opening of a grand new
-dock. We went to the casino and listened to Russian music, which in
-other circumstances would have enchanted us.
-
-But none of these high matters could hold our attention. Even when the
-cook criticized our water-colors with faint praise, and stated calmly
-that he, too, was a water-colorist, and brought proofs of his genius cut
-of the forecastle, even then we were not truly interested. We thirsted
-to depart, and could not. Our sole solace was to walk round and round
-the basini in the rain-squalls, and observe their tremendous vitality,
-which, indeed, never ceased, day or night save at low water, when most
-craft were aground.
-
-At such periods of tranquillity the trucks of the fishing-smacks were
-nearly level with the quay, and we noticed that every masthead was
-elaborately finished with gilded sculpture--a cross, a star, or a small
-figure of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or an angel. The names, too, of these
-smacks were significant: _Resurrection, Jesus-Marie_, and so on. The
-ornamentation of the deck-houses and companions of these vessels showed
-a great deal of fantasy and brilliant color, though little taste. And
-the general effect was not only gay, but agreeable, demonstrating, as it
-did, that the boats were beloved. English fishing-boats are beloved by
-their owners, but English affection does not disclose itself in the same
-way, if it discloses itself at all. On the third afternoon we assisted
-at the departure of an important boat for the herring fisheries. It had
-a crew of seventeen men, all dressed in brown, young and old, and
-an enormous quantity of gear. It bore the air of a noble cooperative
-enterprise, and went off on the tide, disdainfully passing the
-still-hoisted cone.
-
-Perhaps it was this event that gave us to think. If a herring-boat could
-face the gale, why not we? Our ship was very seaworthy, and the coast
-was dotted with sheltering ports. Only it was impossible to go south,
-since we could not have made headway. Then why not boldly cancel the
-rendezvous in Brittany, and run northward before the gale? The skipper
-saluted the idea with enthusiasm. He spoke of Ostend. He said that if
-the wind held we could easily run to Ostend in a day. He did not care
-for Ostend, but it would be a change. I, however, did care for Ostend.
-And so it was decided that, unless the wind went right round in the
-night, we would clear out of Boulogne at the earliest tidal hour the
-next morning. The joy of expectancy filled the ship, and I went into
-the town to buy some of the beautiful meat-pies that are offered in its
-shops.
-
-[Illustration: 0239]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XV--TO BELGIUM
-
-AT 6 a. M. we, too, were passing disdainfully the still-hoisted cone.
-Rain descended in sheets, in blankets, and in curtains, and when we
-did not happen to be in the rain, we could see rain-squalls of the most
-theatrical appearance in every quarter of the horizon. The gale had
-somewhat moderated, but not the sea; the wind, behind us, was against
-the tide, and considerably quarreling therewith. Now we were inclosed in
-walls of water, and now we were balanced on the summit of a mountain of
-water, and had a momentary view of many leagues of tempest. I
-personally had never been out in such weather in anything smaller than a
-mail-steamer.
-
-Here I must deal with a distressing subject, which it would be
-pleasanter to ignore, but which my training in realism will not allow
-me to ignore. A certain shameful crime is often committed on yachts,
-merchantmen, and even men-of-war. It is notorious that Nelson committed
-this crime again and again, and that other admirals have copied his
-iniquity. Sailors, and particularly amateur sailors, would sooner be
-accused of any wickedness rather than this. Charge them with cheating at
-cards, ruining innocent women, defrauding the Government, and they will
-not blench; but charge them with this offense, and they will blush, they
-will recriminate, and they will lie disgracefully against all evidence;
-they cannot sit still under the mere suspicion of it.
-
-As we slipped out of the harbor that morning the secret preoccupation
-of the owner and his friend was that circumstances might tempt them to
-perpetrate the sin of sins. Well, I am able to say that they withstood
-the awful temptation; but only just! If out of bravado they had
-attempted to eat their meals in the saloon, the crime would assuredly
-have been committed, but they had the sense to order the meals to be
-served in the cockpit, in the rain, in the blast, in the cold. No matter
-the conditions! They were saved from turpitude, and they ate heartily
-thrice during the day. And possibly nobody was more astonished than
-themselves at their success in virtue. I have known a yachtsman, an
-expert, a member of an exceedingly crack club, suddenly shift his course
-shoreward in circumstances not devoid of danger.
-
-“What are you about?” was the affrighted question. He replied:
-
-“I’m going to beach her. If I don’t, I shall be sick, and I won’t be
-sick aboard this yacht.”
-
-Such is the astounding influence of convention, which has transformed
-into a crime a misfortune over which the victim has no control whatever.
-We did not beach the _Velsa_, nor were our appetites impaired. We were
-lucky, and merely lucky; and yet we felt as proud as though we had,
-by our own skill and fortitude, done something to be proud of. This is
-human nature.
-
-As we rounded Cape Gris-Nez, amid one of the most majestic natural
-scenes I have ever witnessed, not a gale, but about half of a gale, was
-blowing. The wind continued to moderate. Off Calais the tide was slack,
-and between Calais and Dunkirk we had it under our feet, and were able
-to dispense with the engine and still do six and a half knots an hour.
-Thenceforward the weather grew calm with extraordinary rapidity, while
-the barometer continuously fell. At four o’clock the wind had entirely
-expired, and we restarted the engine, and crawled past Westend and
-Nieuport, resorts very ugly in themselves, but seemingly beautiful from
-the sea. By the time we sighted the whiteness of the kursaal at Ostend
-the water was as flat as an Inland lake.
-
-[Illustration: 0246]
-
-The sea took on the most delicate purple tints, and the pallor of the
-architecture of Belgian hotels became ethereal. While we were yet a mile
-and a half from the harbor-mouth, flies with stings wandered out from
-the city to meet us.
-
-We passed between the pierheads at Ostend at 6:10 p. m., and the skipper
-was free to speak again. When he had done manouvering in the basin, he
-leaned over the engine-hatch and said to me:
-
-“I ‘ve had a bit o’ luck this week.”
-
-“With the engine?” I suggested, for the engine had been behaving itself
-lately.
-
-“No, sir. My wife presented me with a little boy last Tuesday. I had the
-letter last night. I’ve been expecting it.” But he had said nothing to
-me before. He blushed, adding, “I should like you to do me a very great
-favor, sir--give me two days off soon, so that I can go to the baptism.”
- Strange, somehow, that a man should have to ask a favor to be present
-at the baptism of his own son! The skipper now has two sons. Both, I was
-immediately given to understand, are destined for the sea. He has six
-brothers-in-law, and they all follow the sea. On a voyage he will never
-willingly leave the wheel, even if he is not steering. He will rush down
-to the forecastle for his dinner, swallow it in two minutes and a half,
-and rush back. I said to him once:
-
-“I believe you must be fond of this wheel.”
-
-“I am, sir,” he said, and grinned.
-
-We lay nearly opposite the railway station, and our rudder was within
-a foot of the street. Next to us lay the _Velsa’s_ sister (occasion for
-the historic remark that “the world is very small”), a yacht well known
-to the skipper, of exactly the same lines as the _Velsa_, nearly the
-same size, and built within four miles of her in the same year! The
-next morning, which was a Sunday, the sisters were equally drenched in
-tremendous downpours of rain, but made no complaint to each other. I
-had the awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to keep the saloon
-skylights open.
-
-The rain had no effect on the traditional noisiness of Ostend. Like
-sundry other cities, Ostend has two individualities, two souls. All
-that fronts the sea and claims kinship with the kursaal is grandiose,
-cosmopolitan, insincere, taciturn, blatant, and sterile. It calls
-itself the finest sea-promenade in Europe, and it may he, but it is
-as factitious as a meringue. All that faces the docks and canals is
-Belgian, more than Belgian--Flemish, picturesque, irregular, strident,
-simple, unaffected, and swarming with children. Narrow streets are
-full of little cafés that are full of little men and fat women. All the
-little streets are cobbled, and everything in them produces the maximum
-quantity of sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and all the dogs
-drawing little carts hark loudly. Add to this the din of the tram-cars
-and the whistling of railway engines.
-
-On this Sunday morning there was a band festival of some kind, upon
-which the pitiless rain had no effect whatever. Band after band swung
-past our rudder, blaring its uttermost. We had some marketing to do, as
-the cook declared that he could market neither in French nor Flemish,
-and we waited impatiently under umbrellas for the procession of bands
-to finish. It would not finish, and we therefore had to join it. All the
-way up the Rue de la Chapelle we could not hear ourselves speak in the
-brazen uproar; and all the brass instruments and all the dark uniforms
-of the puffy instrumentalists were glittering and melting in the rain.
-Occasionally at the end of the street, over the sea, lightning feebly
-flickered against a dark cloud. At last I could turn off into a
-butcher’s shop, where under the eyes of a score of shopping matrons I
-purchased a lovely piece of beef for the nominal price of three francs
-seventy-five centimes, and bore it off with pride into the rain.
-
-When we got back to the yacht with well-baptized beef and vegetal
-des and tarts, we met the deck-hand, who was going alone into the
-interesting and romantic city. Asked what he was about, he replied:
-
-“I’m going to buy a curio, sir; that’s all.” He knew the city. He had
-been to Ostend before in a cargo-steamer, and he considered it neither
-interesting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal toward the
-country. “There’s a pretty walk over there,” he said; “but there’s
-nothing here,” pointing to the town. I had been coming to Ostend for
-twenty years, and enjoying it like a child, but the deck-hand, with one
-soft-voiced sentence, took it off the map.
-
-In the afternoon, winding about among the soaked cosmopolitanism of
-the promenade, I was ready to agree with him. Nothing will destroy
-fashionable affectations more surely than a wet Sunday, and the
-promenade seemed to rank first in the forlorn tragedies of the world.
-I returned yet again to the yacht, and was met by the skipper with a
-disturbed face.
-
-“We can’t get any fresh water, sir. Horse is n’t allowed to work on
-Sundays. _Everything’s changed in Belgium._” The skipper was too Dutch
-to be fond of Flanders. His mightiest passion was rising in him--the
-passion to go somewhere else.
-
-“All right,” I said; “we ‘ll manage with mineral water, and then we ‘ll
-move on to Bruges.” In rain it is, after all, better to be moving than
-to be standing still.
-
-But to leave Ostend was not easy, because the railway bridge would not
-swing for us, nor would it yield, for over an hour, to the song of our
-siren. Further, the bridge-man deeply insulted the skipper. He said that
-he was not supposed to swing for _canal-boats_.
-
-“Canal-boat!” the skipper cried. “By what canal do you think I brought
-this ship across the North Sea?” He was coldly sarcastic, and his
-sarcasm forced the bridge open. We passed through, set our sails, and
-were presently heeling over and washing a wave of water up the banks of
-the canal. I steered, and, as we overtook an enormous barge, I shaved
-it as close as I could for the fun of the thing. Whereupon the skipper
-became excited, and said that for a yacht to touch a barge was fatal,
-because the barges were no stronger than cigar-boxes, having sides
-only an inch thick, and would crumble at a touch; and the whole
-barge-population of Belgium and Holland, but especially Belgium, was in
-a conspiracy to extract damages out of yachts on the slightest pretext.
-It seemed to me that the skipper’s alarm was exaggerated. I understood
-it a few days later, when he related to me that he had once quite
-innocently assisted at the cracking of a cigar-box, for which his
-employer had had to pay five thousand francs.
-
-[Illustration: 0251]
-
-The barge which I had failed to sink had two insignificant square-sails
-set, like pocket-handkerchiefs, but was depending for most of its motion
-on a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-rope in good
-order.
-
-Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and simultaneously the
-weather improved and brightened. It was a strange summer, was that
-summer! The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleasantly through
-the water, and we had to start the engine, which is much less amusing
-than the sails. And the towers of Bruges would not appear on the horizon
-of the monotonous tree-lined canal, upon whose banks every little
-village resembles every other little village. We had to invent something
-to pass the time, and we were unwise enough to measure the speed of
-the engine on this smooth water in this unusual calm. A speed trial
-is nearly always an error of tact, for the reason that it shatters
-beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful illusion that under favorable
-conditions the engine would drive the yacht at the rate of twelve
-kilometers an hour. The canal-bank had small posts at every hundred
-meters and large posts at every thousand. The first test gave seven and
-a half kilometers an hour. It was unthinkable. The distances must be
-wrong. My excellent watch must have become capricious. The next test
-gave eight kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to the engine,
-and we rose to nine, only to fall again to eight. Allowing even that the
-dinghy took a kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of the test
-was very humiliating. We crawled. We scarcely moved.
-
-Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would go ashore and walk
-along the bank against the yacht until we could see Bruges. I swore it,
-and I kept the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred meters;
-and by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted the memorable belfry of Bruges
-in the distance, I had decided that the engine was perhaps a better
-engine than I had fancied. I returned on board, and had to seek my berth
-in a collapse. Nevertheless the _Velsa_ had been a most pleasing object
-as seen from the bank.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVI--BRUGES
-
-WE moored at the Quai Spinola, with one of the most picturesque
-views in Bruges in front of us, an irresistible temptation to the
-watercolorist, even in wet weather. I had originally visited Bruges
-about twenty years earlier. It was the first historical and consistently
-beautiful city I had ever seen, and even now it did not appear to have
-sunk much in my esteem. It is incomparably superior to Ghent, which is a
-far more important place, but in which I have never been fortunate.
-
-[Illustration: 0258]
-
-Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a different and a
-finer attribute. I have had terrible, devastating adventures in the
-restaurants of Ghent, and the one first-class monument there is
-the medieval castle of the counts of Flanders, an endless field for
-sociological speculation, but transcendency ugly and depressing. Ghent
-is a modern town in an old suit of clothes, and its inhabitants are more
-formidably Belgian than those of any other large city of Flanders.
-I speak not of the smaller industrial places, where Belgianism is
-ferocious and terrible.
-
-At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished, we went straight to
-Notre Dame, where there was just enough light left for us to gaze upon
-Michelangelo’s “Virgin and Child,” a major work. Then to the streets
-and lesser canals. I found changes in the Bruges of my youth.
-Kinematographs, amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be
-expected, for no show-city in Europe has been able to keep them out. Do
-they not enliven and illumine the ground floors of some of the grandest
-renaissance palaces in Florence? But there were changes more startling
-than the advent kinematographs.
-
-Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced the ordinary burners in the
-street-lamps of the town! In another fifty years the corporation of
-Bruges will be using electricity.
-
-Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats were running on the canals,
-and at the improvised landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges “The
-Venice of the North.” I admit that my feelings were hurt--not by the
-motor-boats, but by the signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the
-North, than Venice is the Bruges of the South.
-
-We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to descend upon us and
-penetrate us, as the motorboats ceased to run and the kinematographs
-grew more brilliant in the deepening night. We had to dine, and all the
-restaurants of the town were open to us. Impossible to keep away from
-the Grande Place and the belfry, still incessantly chattering about the
-time of day. Impossible not to look with an excusable sentimentality at
-the Hôtel du Panier d’Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with
-the fattest landlord in the world, and thousands of mosquitos ready
-among its bed-hangings to assist the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep.
-The Panier d’Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-loving
-tourist who could carry all his luggage and was firmly resolved not to
-spend more than seven francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d’Or
-one was sure to encounter other travelers who took both art and life
-seriously.
-
-No, we would not dine at the Panier d’Or, because we would not disturb
-our memories. We glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior,
-and we slipped into the café restaurant next door, and were served by
-a postulant boy waiter who had everything to learn about food and human
-nature, but who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost saturated with
-the exquisite melancholy of the Grande Place, we were too enchanted to
-move. We drank coffee and other things, and lingered until all the white
-cloths were removed from the tables; and the long, high room became
-a café simply. A few middle-aged male habitués wandered in
-separately,--four in all,--and each sat apart and smoked and drank beer.
-The mournfulness was sweet and overwhelming. It was like chloroform.
-The reflection that each of these sad, aging men had a home and an
-_intimité_ somewhere in the spacious, transformed, shabby interiors of
-Bruges, that each was a living soul with aspirations and regrets, this
-reflection was excruciating in its blend of forlornness and comedy.
-
-A few more habitués entered, and then a Frenchman and a young
-Frenchwomen appeared on a dais at the back of the café and opened a
-piano. They were in correct drawing-room costume, with none of the
-eccentricities of the _cafe-chantant_, and they produced no effect
-whatever on the faces or in the gestures of the habitués, They
-performed. He sang; she sang; he played; she played. Just the common
-songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls, vulgar, but more inane than
-vulgar, The young woman was agreeable, with the large, red mouth which
-is the index of a comfortable, generous, and good-natured disposition
-They sang and played a long time. Nobody budged; nobody smiled.
-Certainly we did not; in a contest of phlegm Englishmen can, it is
-acknowledged, hold their own. Most of the habitués doggedly read
-newspapers, but at intervals there was a momentary dull applause. The
-economic basis of the entertainment was not apparent to us. The prices
-of food and drink were very moderate, and no collection was made by or
-on behalf of the artists.
-
-At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed,
-because we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed.
-Yes, incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in
-Bruges. And in the café adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls
-in white were performing gaily to a similar audience of habitués. We
-glimpsed them through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph
-a bell was ringing loudly and continuously to invite habitués, and no
-habitués were responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of
-the belfry flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of
-these and of the habitués gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps,
-after all, Bruges had not changed.
-
-[Illustration: 0263]
-
-We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the
-Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of
-large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited
-by the historical past and also no doubt by habitués. And after much
-wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was
-supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street,
-beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold
-it and peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of
-tourists.
-
-As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the
-belfry suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the
-clockwork chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells,
-a bravura piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing,
-as different from that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a
-barrel-organ. All the magic of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine
-force. Bruges was no more a hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers
-and amateur painters and poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their
-attendant chaplains. It was the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed
-before I had ever even seen the place--just that.
-
-[Illustration: 0267]
-
-Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded
-up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again,
-reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed
-under the shadows of rococo churches, the façades and interiors of which
-are alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according
-to the instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the
-maze upon a long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was
-set in a frame of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by
-high towers, and by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the
-lake floated the _Velsa_, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be
-real, and yet real. It was the most magical thing.
-
-We could scarcely believe that there was our yacht right in the midst
-of the town. This was the same vessel that only a little earlier had
-rounded Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage whatever. Proof
-enough of the advantage of the barge-build, with a light draft, and
-heavy lee-boards for use with a beam wind when close-hauled. Some
-yachtsmen, and expert yachtsmen, too, are strongly against the barge.
-But no ordinary yacht of the _Velsas_ size could have scraped into that
-lake by the Quai Spinola and provided us with that unique sensation. The
-_Velsa_ might have been designed specially for the background of Bruges.
-She fitted it with exquisite perfection.
-
-And the shaft of light slanting up from her forecastle hatch rendered
-her more domestic than the very houses around, which were without
-exception dark and blind, and might have been abandoned. We went
-gingerly aboard across the narrow, yielding gangway, and before turning
-in gazed again at the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit that a
-little way off the kinematograph was tintinnabulating for custom, and a
-Parisian couple singing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked girls
-coarsely dancing.
-
-
-
-
-PART V--EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVII EAST ANGLIA
-
-AFTER the exoticism of foreign parts, this chapter is very English.
-But no island could be more surpassingly strange, romantic, and baffling
-than this island. I had a doubt about the propriety of using the phrase
-“East Anglia” in the title. I asked, therefore, three educated people
-whether the northern part of Essex could be termed East Anglia,
-according to current usage. One said he did n’t know. The next said
-that East Anglia began only north of the Stour. The third said that East
-Anglia extended southward as far as anybody considered that it ought to
-extend southward. He was a true Englishman. I agreed with him. England
-was not made, but born. It has grown up to a certain extent, and its
-pleasure is to be full of anomalies, like a human being. It has to be
-seen to be believed.
-
-Thus, my income tax is assessed in one town, twelve miles distant. After
-assessment, particulars of it are forwarded to another town in another
-county, and the formal demand for payment is made from there; but the
-actual payment has to be made in a third town, about twenty miles from
-either of the other two. What renders England wondrous is not such
-phenomena, but the fact that Englishmen see nothing singular in such
-phenomena.
-
-East Anglia, including North Essex, is as English as any part of
-England, and more English than most. Angles took possession of it very
-early in history, and many of their descendants, full of the original
-Anglian ideas, still powerfully exist in the counties. And probably no
-place is more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal yachting center
-on the east coast, and the home port of the _Velsa_. Theoretically
-and officially, Harwich is the home port of the _Velsa_, but not in
-practice: we are in England, and it would never do for the theory to
-accord with the fact. Brightlingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea,
-except at railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea. There is some
-excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.
-
-Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town, has found 193
-different spellings of the name.
-
-Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was “a member of the Cinque
-Ports.” Not _one_ of the Cinque Ports, of which characteristically there
-were seven, but a member. A “member” was subordinate, and Brightlingsea
-was subordinate to Sandwich, Heaven knows why. But it shared in the
-responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to provide fifty-seven ships
-for the king’s service every year. In return it shared in the privilege
-of carrying a canopy over the king at the coronation, and in a few
-useful exemptions. After it had been a member of the Cinque for many
-decades and perhaps even centuries, it began to doubt whether, after
-all, it was a member, and demanded a charter in proof. This was in 1442.
-The charter was granted, and it leads off with these words: “To all the
-faithful in Christ, to whom these present letters shall come, the Mayors
-and Bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting.” By
-this time ships had already grown rather large. They carried four masts,
-of which the aftermost went by the magnificent title of the “bonaventure
-mizen”; in addition they had a mast with a square sail at the extremity
-of the bow-sprit. They also carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of
-navigation.
-
-Later, smuggling was an important industry at Brightlingsea, and to
-suppress it laws were passed making it illegal to construct fast rowing-
-or sailing-boats. In the same English, and human, way, it was suggested
-at the beginning of the twentieth century that since fast motor-cars
-kicked up dust on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable of
-traveling fast should be made illegal. There are no four-masted ships
-now at Brightlingsea; no bowsprit carries a mast; no ship puts to sea
-with an astrolabe; the “bonaventure mizen” is no more; smuggling is
-unfashionable; fast craft are encouraged.
-
-Nevertheless, on a summer’s morning I have left the _Velsa_ in the
-dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyih Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten
-minutes have been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a border
-of pale grass at the top, and the gray English sky overhead, and the
-whole visible world was exactly as it must have been when the original
-Angles first rowed up that creek. At low water the entire Christian era
-is reduced to nothing, in many a creek of the Colne, the Black water,
-and the Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been done; the
-pristine reigns as perfectly as in the African jungle. And the charm of
-the scene is indescribable. But to appreciate it one must know what
-to look for. I was telling an Essex friend of mine about the dreadful
-flatness of Schleswig-Holstein. He protested. “But aren’t you educated
-up to flats?” he asked. I said I was. He persisted. “But are you
-educated up to mud, the lovely colors on a mud-flat?” He was a true
-connoisseur of Essex. The man who is incapable of being ravished by
-a thin, shallow tidal stream running between two wide, shimmering mud
-banks that curve through a strictly horizontal marsh, without a tree,
-without a shrub, without a bird, save an eccentric sea-gull, ought not
-to go yachting in Essex estuaries.
-
-[Illustration: 0278]
-
-Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oyster-fishing, and it
-catches more sprats than any other port in the island, namely, about
-fifteen hundred tons of them per annum. But its most spectacular
-industry has to do with yachting, It began to be a yachting resort
-only yesterday; that is to say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It
-has, however, steadily progressed, until now, despite every natural
-disadvantage and every negligence, it can count a hundred and twenty
-yachts and some eight hundred men employed therewith. A yacht cannot
-get into Brightlingsea at all from the high sea without feeling her
-way among sand-banks,--in old days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the
-inhabitants made a profitable specialty of salving wrecks,--and when a
-yacht has successfully come down Brightlingsea Reach, which is really
-the estuary of the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of
-Brightlingsea Creek, her difficulties will multiply.
-
-In the first place, she will always discover that the mouth of the creek
-is obstructed by barges at anchor. She may easily run aground at the
-mouth, and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably will, mistake
-the channel, and pile herself up on a bank known as the Cinders, or the
-Cindery. Farther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot there
-is no sufficiency of water except at about a yard and a half from
-the shore, which has the appearance of being flat. Escaping all these
-perils, she will almost certainly run into something, or something
-will run into her, or she may entangle herself in the oyster preserves.
-Yachts, barges, smacks, and floating objects without a name are anchored
-anywhere and anyhow. There is no order, and no rule, except that a smack
-always deems a yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops her anchor
-somewhere, and asks for the harbormaster. No harbor-master exists or
-ever has existed or ever will. Historical tradition--sacred! All craft
-do as they like, and the craft with the thinnest sides must look to its
-sides.
-
-Also, the creek has no charm whatever of landscape or seascape. You can
-see nothing from it except the little red streets of Brightlingsea
-and the yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some secret which is
-uncomprehended beyond England, it prospers as a center of yachting.
-Yachts go to it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but from
-choice. Yachts seem to like it. Of course it is a wonderful place,
-because any place where a hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be
-a wonderful place. The interest of its creek is inexhaustible, once you
-can reconcile yourself to its primitive Anglianism, which, after all,
-really harmonizes rather well with the mud-flats of the county.
-
-An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the weather eastward is
-dangerously formidable, you can turn your back on the North Sea and go
-for an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the Colne is always
-exciting because you never know when you may be able to return. Even the
-_Velsa_, which can float on puddles, has gone aground in the middle
-of the fair and wide Colne. A few miles up are the twin villages
-of Wivenhoe and Rowhedge, facing each other across the river, both
-inordinately picturesque, and both given up to the industry of yachting.
-At Wivenhoe large yachts and even ships are built, and in winter there
-is always a choice selection of world-famous yachts on the mud, costly
-and huge gewgaws, with their brass stripped off them, painfully forlorn,
-stranded in a purgatory between the paradise of last summer and the
-paradise of the summer to come.
-
-If you are adventurous, you keep on winding along the curved reaches,
-and as soon as the last yacht is out of sight, you are thrown hack once
-more into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing but a thin, shallow
-stream, two wide mud hanks, and a border of grass at the top of them.
-This is your world, which you share with a sea-gull or a crow for
-several miles; and then suddenly you arrive at a concourse of great
-barges against a quay, and you wonder by w hat magic they got there, and
-above the quay rise the towers and steeples of a city that was already
-ancient when William the Conqueror came to England in the interests of
-civilization to take up the white man’s burden,--Colchester, where more
-oysters are eaten on a certain night of the year at a single feast than
-at any other feast on earth. Such is the boast.
-
-But such contrasts as the foregoing do not compare in violence with the
-contrasts offered by the River Stour, a few miles farther north on
-the map of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its mouth, where, in
-confluence with the River Orwell (which truly _is_ in East Anglia) it
-forms a goodish small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town, is a
-fairly important naval port, and also “a gate of the empire,” where
-steamers go forth for Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. We
-came into Harwich Harbor on the tide one magnificent Sunday afternoon,
-with the sea a bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and the
-entrance to the Stour was guarded by two huge battle-ships, the _Blake_
-and the _Blenheim_, each apparently larger than the whole of the town of
-Harwich. Up the Stour, in addition to all the Continental steamers, was
-moored a fleet of forty or fifty men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in
-a quadruple line. It was necessary for the _Velsa_ to review this fleet
-of astoundingly ugly and smart black monsters, and she did so, to the
-high satisfaction of the fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of
-Sunday afternoon was thirsting for a distraction, even the mildest.
-On every sinister ship--the _Basilisk_, the _Harpy_, etc., apposite
-names!--the young bluejackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were
-trying bravely to amuse themselves. The sound of the jews’-harp and of
-the concertina was heard, and melancholy songs of love. Little circles
-of men squatted here and there on the machinery-encumbered decks playing
-at some game. A few students were reading; some athletes were sparring;
-many others skylarking. None was too busy to stare at our strange lines.
-Launches and longboats were flitting about full of young men, going
-on leave to the ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or sadly returning
-therefrom. Every sound and noise was clearly distinguishable in the
-stillness of the hot afternoon. And the impression given by the fleet
-as a whole was that of a vast masculine town, for not a woman could be
-descried anywhere. It was striking and mournful. When we had got to the
-end of the fleet I had a wild idea:
-
-“Let us go up the Stour.”
-
-At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and
-pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever
-had been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a
-ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded.
-Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had
-quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were
-back in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills,
-that was all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small
-headlands, and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated
-that a channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys
-nobody could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no
-buoys, and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide,
-deceptive waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put
-about, we dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant
-fleet, in another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of
-the forgotten town of Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached
-mysteriously out of one of those bights, and it was maimed by two men
-with the air of conspirators.
-
-“D’ ye want a pilot?”
-
-We hardened ourselves.
-
-“No.”
-
-They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.
-
-“Why in thunder is n’t this river buoyed?” I demanded of the skipper.
-
-The skipper answered that the intention obviously was to avoid taking
-the bread out of the mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No
-catastrophe. The town of Mistley approached us. Then we had to pause
-again, reversing the propeller. We were in a network of shallows. Far
-to port could be seen a small red buoy; it was almost on the bank.
-Impossible that it could indicate the true channel. We went straight
-ahead and chanced it. The next instant we were hard on the mud in
-midstream, and the propeller was making a terrific pother astern. We
-could only wait for the tide to float us off. The rowboat appeared
-again.
-
-‘D’ ye want a pilot?”
-
-“No.”
-
-And it disappeared.
-
-When we floated, the skipper said to me in a peculiar challenging tone:
-
-“Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?”
-
-“We ‘ll go on,” I said. I could say no less.
-
-[Illustration: 0288]
-
-We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure enough, the true channel
-was there, right under the south bank. And we came safely to the town of
-Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even a torpedo-boat and
-seldom indeed a yacht, certainly never a _Velsa_. And yet the smoke of
-the harbor of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique quay.
-The town of Mistley rose from its secular slumber to enjoy a unique
-sensation that afternoon.
-
-“Shall we go on to Manningtree, sir?” said the skipper, adding with a
-grin, “There’s only about half an hour left of the flood, and if we get
-aground again----”
-
-It was another challenge.
-
-“Yes,” I said.
-
-Manningtree is a town even more recondite than Mistley, and it marks the
-very end of the navigable waters of the Stour. It lay hidden round the
-next corner. We thought we could detect the channel, curving out again
-now into midstream. We followed the lure, opened out Manningtree the
-desired--and went on the mud with a most perceptible bump. Out, quick,
-with the dinghy! Cover her stern-sheets with a protecting cloth, and
-lower an anchor therein and about fifty fathoms of chain, and row away!
-We manned the windlass, and dragged the _Velsa_ off the mud.
-
-“Shall we go on, sir?”
-
-“No,” I said, not a hero. “We ‘ll give up Manningtree this trip.”
- Obstinacy in adventure might have meant twelve hours in the mud. The
-crew breathed relief. We returned, with great care, to civilization.
-We knew now why the Stour is a desolate stream. Thus to this day I have
-never reached Manningtree except in an automobile.
-
-And there are still stranger waters than the Stour; for example, Hamford
-Water, where explosives are manufactured on lonely marshes, where
-immemorial wharves decay, and wild ducks and owls intermingle, and
-public-houses with no public linger on from century to century, and
-where the saltings are greener than anywhere else on the coast, and the
-east wind more east, and the mud more vivid. And the _Velsa_ has been
-there, too.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVIII--IN SUFFOLK
-
-THE Orwell is reputed to have the finest estuary in East Anglia. It
-is a broad stream, and immediately Shotley Barracks and the engines
-of destruction have been left behind, it begins to be humane and
-reassuring. Thanks to the surprising modernity of the town of Ipswich,
-which has discovered that there are interests more important than those
-of local pilots, it is thoroughly well buoyed, so that the stranger and
-the amateur cannot fail to keep in the channel. It insinuates itself
-into Suffolk in soft and civilized curves, and displays no wildness
-of any kind and, except at one point, very little mud. When you are
-navigating the Orwell, you know positively that you are in England.
-On each side of you modest but gracefully wooded hills slope down with
-caution to the bank, and you have glimpses of magnificent mansions set
-in the midst of vast, undulating parks, crisscrossed with perfectly
-graveled paths that gleam in the sunshine. Everything here is private
-and sacred, and at the gates of the park lodge-keepers guard not only
-the paradisiacal acres, but the original ideas that brought the estate
-into existence.
-
-Feudalism, benevolent and obstinate, flourishes with calm confidence in
-itself; and even on your yacht’s deck you can feel it, and you are awed.
-For feudalism has been, and still is, a marvelous cohesive force. And
-it is a solemn thought that within a mile of you may be a hushed
-drawingroom at whose doors the notion of democracy has been knocking
-quite in vain for a hundred years. Presently you will hear the sweet and
-solemn chimes of a tower-clock, sound which seems to spread peace and
-somnolence over half a county. And as you listen, you cannot but be
-convinced that the feudal world is august and beautiful, and that it
-cannot be improved, and that to overthrow it would be a vandalism. That
-is the estuary of the Orwell and its influence. Your pleasure in it will
-be unalloyed unless you are so ill-advised as to pull off in the dinghy,
-and try to land in one of the lovely demesnes.
-
-About half-way up the estuary, just after passing several big
-three-masters moored in midstream and unloading into lighters, you come
-to Pinmill, renowned among yachtsmen and among painters. Its haven is
-formed out of the angle of a bend in the river, and the narrowness of
-the channel at this point brings all the traffic spectacularly close to
-the yachts at anchor. Here are all manner of yachts, and you are fairly
-certain to see a friend, and pay or receive a visit of state. And also
-very probably, if you are on board the Velsa some painter on another
-yacht will feel bound to put your strange craft into a sketch. And the
-skipper, who has little partiality for these river scenes, will take the
-opportunity to go somewhere else on a bicycle. You, too, must go
-ashore, because Pinmill is an exhibition-village, entirely picturesque,
-paintable, and English. It is liable to send the foreigner into
-raptures, and Americans have been known to assert that they could exist
-there in happiness forever and ever.
-
-I believe that some person or persons in authority offer prizes to the
-peasantry for the prettiest cottage gardens in Pinmill. It is well; but
-I should like to see in every picturesque and paint-able English village
-a placard stating the number of happy peasants who sleep more than three
-in a room, and the number of adult able-bodied males who earn less than
-threepence an hour. All aspects of the admirable feudal system ought to
-be made equally apparent. The chimes of the castle-clock speak loud,
-and need no advertisement; cottage gardens also insist on the traveler’s
-attention, but certain other phenomena are apt to escape it.
-
-[Illustration: 0297]
-
-The charm of Pinmill is such that you usually decide to remain there
-over night. In one respect this is a mistake, for the company of yachts
-is such that your early morning Swedish exercises on deck attract an
-audience, which produces self-consciousness in the exerciser.
-
-Ipswich closes the estuary of the Orwell, and Ipswich is a genuine town
-that combines industrialism with the historic sense. No American
-can afford not to visit it, because its chief hotel has a notorious
-connection with Mr. Pickwick, and was reproduced entire a lifelike-size at
-a world’s fair in the United States. Aware of this important fact,
-the second-hand furniture and curio-dealers of the town have adopted
-suitable measures. When they have finished collecting, Americans should
-go to the docks--as interesting as anything in Ipswich--and see the
-old custom-house, with its arch, and the gloriously romantic French
-and Scandinavian three-masters that usually lie for long weeks in the
-principal basin. Times change. Less than eighty years ago the docks of
-Ipswich were larger than those of London. And there are men alive and
-fighting in Ipswich to-day who are determined that as a port Ipswich
-shall resume something of her ancient position in the world.
-
-Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary, northward, is the
-estuary of the River Deben. One evening, feeling the need of a little
-ocean air after the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down there
-from to the North Sea, and finding ourselves off Woodbridgehaven, which
-is at the mouth of the Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined
-to risk the entrance. According to all printed advice, the entrance
-ought not to be risked without local aid. There is a bank at the mouth,
-with a patch that dries at low water, and within there is another bank.
-The shoals shift pretty frequently, and, worst of all, the tide runs
-at the rate of six knots and more. Still, the weather was calm, and the
-flood only two hours old. We followed the sailing directions, and got in
-without trouble just as night fell. The rip of the tide was very marked,
-and the coast-guard who boarded us with a coast-guard’s usual curiosity
-looked at us as though we were either heroes or rash fools, probably the
-latter.
-
-We dropped anchor for the night, and the next morning explored the
-estuary, with the tide rising. We soon decided that the perils of this
-famous river had been exaggerated. There were plenty of beacons,--which,
-by the way, are continually being shifted as the shoals shift,--and
-moreover the channel defined itself quite simply, for the reason
-that the rest of the winding river-bed was dry. We arrived proudly at
-Woodbridge, drawing all the maritime part of the town to look at us, and
-we ourselves looked at Woodbridge in a fitting manner, for it is sacred
-to the memory not of Omar Khayyam, but to much the same person, Edward
-Fitzgerald, who well knew the idiosyncrasies of the Deben. Then it was
-necessary for us to return, as only for about two hours at each tide is
-there sufficient water for a yacht to lie at Woodbridge.
-
-The exit from the Deben was a different affair from the incoming.
-Instead of a clearly defined channel, we saw before us a wide sea. The
-beacons or perches were still poking up their heads, of course, but they
-were of no use, since they had nothing to indicate whether they were
-starboard or port beacons. It is such details that harmonize well with
-the Old-World air of English estuaries--with the swans, for instance,
-those eighteenth-century birds that abound on the Deben. We had to
-take our choice of port or starboard. Heaven guided us. We reached the
-entrance. The tide was at half-ebb and running like a race; the weather
-was unreliable. It was folly to proceed. We proceeded. We had got in
-alone; we would get out alone. We shot past the coast-guard, who bawled
-after us. We put the two beacons in a line astern, obedient to the
-sailing directions; but we could not keep them in a line. The tide
-swirled us away, making naught of the engine. We gave a tremendous
-bump. Yes, we were assuredly on the bank for at least ten hours, if not
-forever; if it came on to blow, we might well be wrecked. But no. The
-ancient _Velsa_ seemed to rebound elastically off the traitorous sand,
-and we were afloat again, In two minutes more we were safe. What the
-coastguard said is not known to this day. We felt secretly ashamed of
-our foolishness, but we were sustained by the satisfaction of having
-deprived more local pilots of their fees.
-
-Still, we were a sobered crew, and at the next river-mouth
-northward--Orford Haven--we yielded to a base common sense, and signaled
-for a pilot. The river Ore is more dangerous to enter, and far more
-peculiar even than the Deben. The desolate spot, where it runs into the
-sea is well called Shinglestreet, for it is a wilderness of shingles.
-The tide runs very fast indeed; the bar shifts after every gale, and not
-more than four feet of water is guaranteed on it. Last and worst, the
-bottom is hard. It was probably the hardness of the bottom that finally
-induced us to stoop to a pilot. To run aground on sand is bad, but to
-run aground on anything of a rocky nature may be fatal. Our signal was
-simply ignored. Not the slightest symptom anywhere of a pilot. We
-were creeping in, and we continued to creep in. The skipper sent the
-deck-hand forward with the pole. He called out seven feet, eight feet,
-seven feet; but these were Dutch feet, of eleven inches each, because
-the pole is a Dutch pole. The water was ominous, full of curling crests
-and unpleasant hollows, as the wind fought the current. The deckhand
-called out seven, six, five and a half. We could almost feel the ship
-bump... and then we were over the bar. Needless to say that a pilot
-immediately hove in sight. We waved him off, though he was an old man
-with a grievance.
-
-We approached the narrows. We had conquered the worst difficulties by
-the sole help of the skipper’s instinct for a channel, for the beacons
-were incomprehensible to us; and we imagined that we could get through
-the narrows into the river proper. But we were mistaken. We had a fair
-wind, and we set all sails, and the engine was working well; but there
-was more than a six-knot tide rushing out through those narrows, and
-we could not get through. We hung in them for about half an hour. Then,
-imitating the example of a fisherman who had followed us, we just ran
-her nose into the shingle, with the sails still set, and jumped ashore
-with a rope. The opportunity to paint a water-color of the _Velsa_
-under full sail was not to be lost. Also we bought fish and we borrowed
-knowledge from the fisherman. He informed us that we had not entered by
-the channel at all; that we were never anywhere near it. He said that
-the channel had four feet at that hour. Thus we learned that local
-wisdom is not always omniscience.
-
-After a delay of two hours, we went up the Ore on the slack. The Ore is
-a very dull river, but it has the pleasing singularity of refusing to
-quit the ocean. For mile after mile it runs exactly parallel with the
-North Sea, separated from it only by a narrow strip of shingle. Under
-another name it all but rejoins the ocean at Aldeburgh where at length
-it curves inland. On its banks is Orford, a town more dead than any
-dead city of the Zuyder Zee, and quite as picturesque and as full of
-character. The deadness of Orford may be estimated from the fact that
-it can support a kinematograph only three nights a week. It has electric
-light, but no railway, and the chief attractions are the lofty castle,
-a fine church, an antique quay, and a large supply of splendid lobsters.
-It knows not the tourist, and has the air of a natural self-preserving
-museum.
-
-[Illustration: 0308]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIX--THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
-
-TIME was when I agreed with the popular, and the guide-book, verdict
-that the Orwell is the finest estuary in these parts; but now that I
-know it better, I unhesitatingly give the palm to the Blackwater. It is
-a nobler stream, a true arm of the sea; its moods are more various, its
-banks wilder, and its atmospheric effects much grander. The defect of
-it is that it does not gracefully curve. The season for cruising on the
-Blackwater is September, when the village regattas take place, and the
-sunrises over leagues of marsh are made wonderful by strange mists.
-
-Last September the _Velsa_ came early into Mersea Quarters for Mersea
-Regatta. The Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek that is
-sheltered between the mainland and Mersea Island--which is an island only
-during certain hours of the day. Crowds of small yachts have their home
-in the Quarters, and the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley
-of craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through five-tonners to
-fishing-smacks, trading-barges converted into barge-yachts, real
-barge-yachts like ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred tons
-or so, fully “dressed,” and carrying ladies in bright-colored jerseys,
-to preside over all. The principal events occur in the estuary, but
-the intimate and amusing events, together with all the river gossip and
-scandal, are reserved for the seclusion of the Quarters, where a long
-lane of boats watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for the tide
-to cover the illimitable mud, and listen to the excessively primitive
-band which has stationed itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.
-
-We managed to get on the mud, but we did that on purpose, to save the
-trouble of anchoring. Many yachts and even smacks do it not on purpose,
-and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A genuine yachtsman paid us a
-visit--one of those men who live solely for yachting, who sail their
-own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to dress like a sailor
-before the mast or like a longshore loafer--and told us a tale of an
-amateur who had bought a yacht that had Inhabited Mersea Quarters all
-her life. When the amateur returned from his first cruise in her,
-he lost his nerve at the entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a
-fisherman at anchor in a dinghy, “Which is the channel?” The fisherman,
-seeing a yacht whose lines had been familiar to him for twenty years,
-imagined that he was being made fun of. He drawled out, “_You_ know.” In
-response to appeals more and more excited he continued to drawl out,
-“_You_ know.” At length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon he
-drawlingly advised: “Let the old wench alone. Let her alone. _She_ ’ll
-find her way in all right.” Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal
-stories, because the time has to be passed somehow while the water
-rises. There was a tale of a smuggler on the mud-flats, pursued in the
-dead of night by a coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler turned
-round to face the coast-guardsman. “Look here,” said he to the
-coast-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not come any
-further. _You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the newspapers
-nowadays_.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of
-this dark st-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not
-come any further. _You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the
-newspapers nowadays_.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the
-truth of this dark saying, accepted the advice, and went home.
-
-The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin to go off, and presently
-the regatta is in full activity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with
-white, and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter within the
-lane of boats in the Quarters is terrific. In these affairs, at a given
-moment in the afternoon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy
-events are finished, and before the yachts and smacks competing in
-the long races have come back. During this pause we escaped out of the
-Quarters, and proceeded up the river, past Brad-well Creek, where Thames
-barges lie, and past Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide
-was still slack. We could not reach Maldon, which is the Mecca of the
-Blackwater, and we anchored a few miles below that municipal survival,
-in the wildest part of the river, and watched the sun disappear over
-vast, flat expanses of water as smooth as oil, with low banks whose
-distances were enormously enhanced by the customary optical delusions of
-English weather. Close to us was Osea Island, where an establishment for
-the reformation of drunkards adds to the weird scene an artistic touch
-of the sinister. From the private jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in
-process of being reformed gazed at us steadily in the deepening gloom.
-Then an attendant came down the jetty and lighted its solitary red eye,
-which joined its stare to that of the inebriates.
-
-[Illustration: 0313]
-
-Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the
-pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it,
-is superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not
-have been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway
-service has left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of
-yachtsmen who are content to see a town decay if only the spectacle
-affords esthetic pleasure.
-
-There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the
-Chelmsford Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and
-lock-house steeped in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond
-the lock was a basin in which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian
-schooners discharging timber and all the romance of the North. The
-prospect was so alluring that we decided to voyage on the canal, at any
-rate as far as the next lock, and we asked the lock-keeper how far off
-the next lock was. He said curtly:
-
-“Ye can’t go up to the next lock.”
-
-“Why not?”
-
-“Because there’s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was
-any more.”
-
-We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a
-county town, having a depth of only two feet.
-
-He sharply defended his canal.
-
-“Well,” he ended caustically, “it’s been going on now for a hundred or
-a hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day
-or two.”
-
-We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we
-apologized..
-
-Later--it was a Sunday of glorious weather--we rowed in the dinghy
-through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of Maldon
-was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were flitting
-about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open
-sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being
-Sunday and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place
-was naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but
-there was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to
-be bored, the ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its
-church-topped hill.
-
-Amid the waterways of the town were spacious timber-yards; and
-eighteenth-century wharves with wharfinger’s residence all complete, as
-in the antique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces; plenty
-of barges; and one steamer. We thought of Sneek, the restless and
-indefatigable. I have not yet visited in the _Velsa_ any Continental
-port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian
-estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was
-at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie
-in wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind.
-Assuredly a Thames barge--said to be the largest craft in the world
-sailed by a man and a boy--in full course on the Blackwater is a
-noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of
-enterprise in transport.
-
-The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly down the river in company
-with a fleet of fishing-smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The
-distances seemed enormous. The faintest southeast breeze stirred the
-atmosphere, but not the mirror of the water. All the tints of the pearl
-were mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect anywhere that was
-not flawlessly beautiful, enchanted with expectation of the day. The
-unmeasured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they must have steamed two
-thousand years ago, and herons stood sentry on them as they must have
-stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure glittering white, a
-sea-gull! The whole picture was ideal.
-
-At seven o’clock we had reached Goldhanger Creek, beset with curving
-water-weeds. And the creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the
-mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth. A boat sailed in, scarcely
-moving, scarcely rippling the water, and it was in charge of two old
-white-haired fishermen. They greeted me.
-
-“Is this creek long?” I asked. A pause. They both gazed at the creek
-with the beautiful name, into which they were sailing, as though they
-had never seen it before.
-
-“Aye, it’s long.”
-
-“How long is it? Is it a mile?”
-
-“Aye, it’s a mile.”
-
-“Is there anything up there?” Another pause. The boat was drawing away
-from me.
-
-“Aye, there’s oysters up there.” The boat and the men withdrew
-imperceptibly into the silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below,
-at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress for another village
-regatta; and an ineffable melancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme
-beauty of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and this our last
-cruise, of the season.
-
-[Illustration: 0320]
-
-
-THE END
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett
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-    <title>From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett</title>
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-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: From The Log of The "Velsa"
-
-Author: Arnold Bennett
-
-Illustrator: E. A. Rickards
-             Arnold Bennett
-
-Release Date: July 15, 2017 [EBook #55113]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM THE LOG OF THE "VELSA" ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-    <div style="height: 8em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
-    </h1>
-    <h2>
-      By Arnold Bennett
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      Pictures By E. A. Rickards
-    </h3>
-    <h3>
-      And A Frontispiece By The Author
-    </h3>
-    <h4>
-      New York: The Century Co.
-    </h4>
-    <h3>
-      1914
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0001.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0008.jpg" alt="0008 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0009.jpg" alt="0009 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <b>CONTENTS</b>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA</b> </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PART"> <b>PART I HOLLAND</b> </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I&mdash;VOYAGING ON THE CANALS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II&mdash;DUTCH LEISURE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III&mdash;DUTCH WORK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE ZUYDER ZEE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V&mdash;SOME TOWNS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI&mdash;MUSEUMS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <b>PART II&mdash;THE BALTIC</b> </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII&mdash;THE YACHT I LOST </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII&mdash;BALTIC COMMUNITIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX&mdash;A day&rsquo;s SAIL </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PART3"> <b>PART III COPENHAGEN</b> </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X&mdash;THE DANISH CAPITAL </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI&mdash;CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII&mdash;ARISTOCRACY AND ART </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII&mdash;THE RETURN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PART4"> <b>PART IV&mdash;ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COAST</b>
-      </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV&mdash;FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV&mdash;TO BELGIUM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI&mdash;BRUGES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PART5"> <b>PART V&mdash;EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES</b> </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII EAST ANGLIA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII&mdash;IN SUFFOLK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX&mdash;THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
-      </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA
-    </h1>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PART" id="link2H_PART"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PART I HOLLAND
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER I&mdash;VOYAGING ON THE CANALS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE skipper, who,
-      in addition to being a yachtsman, is a Dutchman, smiled with calm
-      assurance as we approached the Dutch frontier in the August evening over
-      the populous water of the canal which leads from Ghent to Terneuzen. He
-      could not abide Belgium, possibly because it is rather like Holland in
-      some ways. In his opinion the bureaucrats of Belgium did not understand
-      yachts and the respect due to them, whereas the bureaucrats of Holland
-      did. Holland was pictured for me as a paradise where a yacht with a
-      seventy-foot mast never had to wait a single moment for a bridge to be
-      swung open. When I inquired about custom-house formalities, I learned that
-      a Dutch custom-house did not exist for a craft flying the sacred blue
-      ensign of the British Naval Reserve. And it was so. Merely depositing a
-      ticket and a tip into the long-handled butterfly-net dangled over our deck
-      by the bridge-man as we passed, we sailed straight into Holland, and no
-      word said! But we knew immediately that we were in another country&mdash;a
-      country cleaner and neater and more garnished even than Belgium. The
-      Terneuzen Canal, with its brickwork banks and its villages &ldquo;finished&rdquo; to
-      the last tile, reminded me of the extravagant, oily perfection of the main
-      tracks of those dandiacal railroads, the North Western in England and the
-      Pennsylvania in America. The stiff sailing breeze was at length favorable.
-      We set the mainsail unexceptionably; and at once, with the falling dusk,
-      the wind fell, and the rain too. We had to depend again on our erratic
-      motor, with all Holland gazing at us. Suddenly the whole canal was lit up
-      on both sides by electricity. We responded with our lights. The
-      exceedingly heavy rain drove me into the saloon to read Dostoyevsky.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0019.jpg" alt="0019 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0019.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      At eight P. M. I was dug up out of the depths of Dostoyevsky in order to
-      see my first Dutch harbor. Rain poured through the black night. There was
-      a plashing of invisible wavelets below, utter darkness above, and a few
-      forlorn lights winking at vast distances. I was informed that we were
-      moored in the yacht-basin of Terneuzen. I remained calm. Had we been
-      moored in the yacht-basin of Kamchatka, the smell of dinner would still
-      have been issuing from the forecastle-hatch, the open page of Dostoyevsky
-      would still have invited me through the saloon skylight, and the amiable
-      ray of the saloon lamp would still have glinted on the piano and on the
-      binnacle with impartial affection. Herein lies an advantage of yachting
-      over motoring. I redescended without a regret, without an apprehension.
-      Already the cook was displacing Dostoyevsky in favor of a white
-      table-cloth and cutlery.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning we were at large on the billow&rsquo;s of the West Schelde, a
-      majestic and enraged stream, of which Flushing is the guardian and Antwerp
-      the mistress. The rain had in no wise lost heart. With a contrary wind and
-      a choppy sea, the yacht had a chance to show her qualities and defects.
-      She has both. Built to the order of a Dutch baron rather less than twenty
-      years ago, she is flat-bottomed, with lee-boards, and follows closely the
-      lines of certain very picturesque Dutch fishing-smacks. She has a length
-      of just over fifty-five feet and a beam of just over fifteen feet. Her
-      tonnage is fifty-one, except when dues have to be paid, on which serious
-      occasions it mysteriously shrinks to twenty-one net. Yachtsmen are always
-      thus modest. Her rig is, roughly, that of a cutter, with a deliciously
-      curved gaff that is the secret envy of all real cutters.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Her supreme advantage, from my point of view, is that she has well over
-      six feet of head-room in the saloon and in the sleeping-cabins. And, next,
-      that the owner&rsquo;s bed is precisely similar to the celestial bed which he
-      enjoyed on a certain unsurpassed American liner. Further, she carries a
-      piano and an encyclopedia, two necessaries of life. I may say that I have
-      never known another yacht that carried an encyclopedia in more than a
-      score of volumes. Again, she is eternal. She has timbers that recall those
-      of the <i>Constitution</i>. There are Dutch eel-boats on the Thames which
-      look almost exactly like her at a distance, and which were launched before
-      Victoria came to the throne. She has a cockpit in which Hardy might have
-      kissed Nelson. She sails admirably with a moderate wind on the quarter.
-      More important still, by far, she draws only three feet eight inches, and
-      hence can often defy charts, and slide over sands where deep-draft boats
-      would rightly fear to tread; she has even been known to sail through
-      fields.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Possibly for some folk her chief attribute would be that, once seen, she
-      cannot be forgotten. She is a lovely object, and not less unusual than
-      lovely. She is smart also, but nothing more dissimilar to the average
-      smart, conventional English or American yacht can well be conceived. She
-      is a magnet for the curious. When she goes under a railway bridge while a
-      train is going over it, the engine-driver, of no matter what nationality,
-      will invariably risk the lives of all his passengers in order to stare at
-      her until she is out of sight. This I have noticed again and again. The
-      finest compliment her appearance ever received was paid by a schoolboy,
-      who, after staring at her for about a quarter of an hour as she lay at a
-      wharf at Kingston-on-Thames, sidled timidly up to me as I leaned in my
-      best maritime style over the quarter, and asked, &ldquo;Please, sir, is this a
-      training brig?&rdquo; Romance gleamed in that boy&rsquo;s eye.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As for her defects, I see no reason why I should catalogue them at equal
-      length. But I admit that, to pay for her headroom, she has no
-      promenade-deck for the owner and his friends to &ldquo;pace,&rdquo; unless they are
-      prepared to exercise themselves on the roof of the saloon. Also that,
-      owing to her shallowness, she will ignobly blow off when put up to the
-      wind. Indeed, the skipper himself, who has proved that she will live in
-      any sea, describes her progress under certain conditions as &ldquo;one mile
-      ahead and two miles to leeward&rdquo;; but he would be hurt if he were taken
-      seriously. Her worst fault is due to her long, overhanging prow, which
-      pounds into a head sea with a ruthlessness that would shake the funnels
-      off a torpedo-boat. You must not press her. Leave her to do her best, and
-      she will do it splendidly; but try to bully her, and she will bury her
-      nose and defy you.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That morning on the wide, broad Schelde, with driving rain, and an
-      ever-freshening northwester worrying her bows, she was not pressed, and
-      she did not sink; but her fierce gaiety was such as to keep us all alive.
-      She threshed the sea. The weather multiplied, until the half-inch wire
-      rope that is the nerve between the wheel and the rudder snapped, and we
-      were at the mercy, etc. While the skipper, with marvelous resource and
-      rapidity, was improvising a new gear, it was discovered amid general
-      horror, that the piano had escaped from its captivity, and was lying
-      across the saloon table. Such an incident counts in the life of an amateur
-      musician. Still, under two hours later, I was playing the same piano again
-      in the tranquillity of Flushing lock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0026.jpg" alt="0026 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0026.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      It was at Middelburg that the leak proved its existence. Middelburg is an
-      architecturally delightful town even in heavy, persevering rain and a
-      northwest gale. It lies on the canal from Flushing to Veere, and its
-      belfry had been a beacon to us nearly all the way down the Schelde from
-      Temeuzen. Every English traveler stares at its renowned town-hall; and
-      indeed the whole place, having been till recently the haunt of more or
-      less honest English racing tipsters and book-makers, must be endeared to
-      the British sporting character. We went forth into the rain and into the
-      town, skirting canals covered with timber-rafts, suffering the lively
-      brutishness of Dutch infants, and gazing at the bare-armed young women
-      under their umbrellas. We also found a goodish restaurant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we returned at nine P. M., the deck-hand, a fatalistic philosopher,
-      was pumping. He made a sinister figure in the dark. And there was the
-      sound of the rain on our umbrellas, and the sound of the pumped water
-      pouring off our decks down into the unseen canal. I asked him why he was
-      pumping at that hour. He answered that the ship leaked. It did. The
-      forecastle floor was under an inch of water, and water was pushing up the
-      carpet of the starboard sleeping-cabin, and all the clean linen in the
-      linen-locker was drenched. In a miraculous and terrifying vision, which
-      changed the whole aspect of yachting as a recreation, I saw the yacht at
-      the bottom of the canal. I should not have had this vision had the skipper
-      been aboard; but the skipper was ashore, unfolding the beauties of Holland
-      to the cook. I knew the skipper would explain and cure the leak in an
-      instant. A remarkable man, Dutch only by the accident of birth and
-      parentage, active as a fox-terrier, indefatigable as a camel, adventurous
-      as Columbus, and as prudent as J. Pierpont Morgan, he had never failed me.
-      Half his life had been spent on that yacht, and the other half on the
-      paternal barge. He had never lived regularly in a house. Consequently he
-      was an expert of the very first order on the behavior of Dutch barges
-      under all conceivable conditions. While the ship deliberately sank and
-      sank, the pumping monotonously continued, and I waited in the saloon for
-      him to come back. Dostoyevsky had no hold on me whatever. The skipper
-      would not come back: he declined utterly to come back; he was lost in the
-      mazy vastness of Middelburg.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then I heard his voice forward. He had arrived in silence. &ldquo;I hear our
-      little ship has got a leak, sir,&rdquo; he said when I joined the group of
-      professional mariners on the forward deck, in the thick rain that veiled
-      even gas-lamps. I was disappointed. The skipper was depressed,
-      sentimentally depressed, and he was quite at a loss. Was the leak caused
-      by the buffetings of the Schelde, by the caprices of the piano, by the
-      stress of working through crowded locks? He knew not. But he would swear
-      that the leak was not in the bottom, because the bottom was double. The
-      one thing to do was to go to Veere, and put the ship on a grid that he was
-      aware of in the creek there, and find the leak. And, further, there were a
-      lot of other matters needing immediate attention. The bob-stay was all to
-      pieces, both pumps were defective, and the horn for rousing lethargic
-      bridge-men would not have roused a rabbit. All which meant for him an
-      expedition to Flushing, that bustling port!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The ship was pumped dry. But the linen was not dry. I wanted to spread it
-      out in the saloon; but the skipper would not permit such an outrage on the
-      sanctity of the saloon, he would not even let the linen rest in the saloon
-      lavatory (sometimes called the bath-room). It must be hidden like a shame
-      in the forecastle. So the crew retired for the night to the sodden, small
-      forecastle amid soaked linen, while I reposed in dry and comfortable
-      spaciousness, but worried by those sociological considerations which are
-      the mosquitos of a luxurious age&mdash;and which ought to be. None but a
-      tyrant convinced of the divine rights of riches could be always at ease on
-      board a small yacht; on board a large one, as in a house, the contrasts
-      are less point-blank. And yet must small yachts he abolished? Absurd idea!
-      Civilization is not so simple an affair as it seems to politicians
-      perorating before immense audiences.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Owing to the obstinacy of water in finding its own level, we went to bed
-      more than once during that night, and I thought of selling the ship and
-      giving to the poor. What a declension from the glory of the original
-      embarkation!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next afternoon, through tempests and an eternal downpour, we reached
-      Veere, at the other end of the canal. Veere is full of Scotch history and
-      of beauty; it has a cathedral whose interior is used by children as a
-      field, a gem of a town-hall, and various attractions less striking; but
-      for us it existed simply as a place where there was a grid, to serve the
-      purpose of a dry-dock. On the following morning we got the yacht onto the
-      grid, and then began to wait for the tide to recede. During its
-      interminable recession, we sat under a shed of the shipyard, partly
-      sheltered from the constant rain, and labored to produce abominable
-      watercolors of the yacht, with the quay and the cathedral and the
-      town-hall as a background. And then some one paddling around the yacht in
-      the dinghy perceived a trickle out of a seam. The leak! It was naught but
-      the slight starting of a seam! No trace of other damage. In an hour it had
-      been repaired with oakum and hammers, and covered with a plaster of
-      copper. The steering-gear was repaired. The pumps were repaired. The
-      bobstay was repaired. The water-color looked less abominable in the
-      discreet, kindly light of the saloon. The state of human society seemed
-      less volcanically dangerous. God was in His heaven. &ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;d like
-      to start early to-morrow morning, sir,&rdquo; said the skipper, whose one desire
-      in life is to go somewhere else. I said I should.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I went ashore with the skipper to pay bills&mdash;four gulden for repairs
-      and three gulden for the use of the grid. It would have been much more but
-      for my sagacity in having a Dutch skipper. The charming village proved to
-      be virtually in the possession of one of those formidable English families
-      whose ladies paint in water-colors when no golf-course is near. They ran
-      ecstatically about the quay with sheets of Whatman until the heavy rain
-      melted them. The owner of the grid lived in a large house with a most
-      picturesque façade. Inside it was all oilcloth, red mahogany, and crimson
-      plush, quite marvelously hideous. The shipwright was an old, jolly man,
-      with white whiskers spreading like a peacock&rsquo;s tail. He gave us cigars to
-      pass the time while he accomplished the calligraphy of a receipt. He was a
-      man sarcastic about his women (of whom he had many), because they would
-      not let him use the <i>voor-kammer</i> (front room) to write receipts in.
-      I said women were often the same in England, and he gave a short laugh at
-      England. Nevertheless, he was proud of his women, because out of six
-      daughters five had found husbands, a feat of high skill in that island of
-      Walcheren, where women far outnumber men.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Outside, through the mullioned window, I saw a young matron standing
-      nonchalant and unprotected in the heavy rain. She wore an elaborate local
-      costume, with profuse gilt ornaments. The effect of these Dutch costumes
-      is to suggest that the wearer carries only one bodice, thin and armless,
-      but ten thousand skirts. Near the young matron was a girl of seven or
-      eight, dressed in a fashion precisely similar, spectacle exquisite to
-      regard, but unsatisfactory to think about. Some day all these women will
-      put on long sleeves and deprive themselves of a few underskirts, and all
-      the old, jolly men with spreading white beards will cry out that women are
-      unsexed and that the end of the world is nigh. In another house I bought a
-      fisherman&rsquo;s knitted blue jersey of the finest quality, as being the sole
-      garment capable of keeping me warm in a Dutch summer. I was told that the
-      girl who knitted it received only half a gulden for her labor. Outrageous
-      sweating, which ought never to have been countenanced. Still, I bought the
-      jersey.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At six-thirty next day we were under way&mdash;a new ship, as it seemed to
-      me. Yachts may have leaks, but we were under way, and the heavenly smell
-      of bacon was in the saloon; and there had been no poring over time-tables,
-      no tipping of waiters, no rattling over cobbles in omnibuses, no waiting
-      in arctic railway-stations, no pugnacity for corner seats, no checking of
-      baggage. I was wakened by the vibration of the propeller; I clad myself in
-      a toga, and issued forth to laugh good-by at sleeping Veere&mdash;no other
-      formalities. And all along the quay, here and there, I observed an open
-      window among the closed ones. Each open window denoted for me an English
-      water-colorist sleeping, even as she or he had rushed about the quay, with
-      an unconcealed conviction of spiritual, moral, and physical superiority.
-      It appeared to me monstrous that these English should be so ill bred as to
-      inflict their insular notions about fresh air on a historic Continental
-      town. Every open window was an arrogant sneer at Dutch civilization, was
-      it not? Surely they could have slept with their windows closed for a few
-      weeks! Or, if not, they might have chosen Amsterdam instead of Veere, and
-      practised their admirable Englishness on the &ldquo;Victorian Tea-Room&rdquo; in that
-      city.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0035.jpg" alt="0035 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0035.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      We passed into the Veeregat and so into the broad Roompot Channel, and
-      left Veere. It was raining heavily, but gleams near the horizon allowed me
-      to hope that before the day was out I might do another water-color.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER II&mdash;DUTCH LEISURE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>VERY tourist knows
-      that Holland is one of the historic cradles of political freedom, and also
-      a chain of cities which are in effect museums of invaluable art. The
-      voyager in a little ship may learn that in addition to all this Holland is
-      the home of a vast number of plain persons who are under the necessity of
-      keeping themselves alive seven days a week, and whose experiments in the
-      adventure of living have an interest quite equal to the interest of
-      ancient art. To judge that adventure in its final aspect, one should see
-      Holland on a Sunday, and not the Holland of the cities, but of the little
-      towns.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We came one Sunday morning to a place called Zieriksee, on an island to
-      the north of the East Schelde. Who has heard of Zieriksee? Nevertheless,
-      Zieriksee exists, and seven thousand people prosecute the adventure
-      therein without the aid of museums and tourists. At first, from the mouth
-      of its private canal, it seems to be a huge, gray tower surrounded by
-      tiniest doll&rsquo;s-houses with vermilion roofs; and as you approach, the tower
-      waxes, until the stones of it appear sufficient to build the whole
-      borough; then it wanes, and is lost in the town, as all towers ultimately
-      are. The cobbled quay and streets were empty as we moored. And in an
-      instant a great crowd sprang up out of the earth,&mdash;men and boys and
-      girls, but few women,&mdash;staring, glaring, giggling, gabbling, pushing.
-      Their inquisitiveness had no shame, no urbanity. Their cackle deafened.
-      They worried the <i>Velsa</i> like starving wolves worrying a deer. The <i>Velsa</i>
-      was a godsend, unhoped for in the enormous and cruel tedium which they had
-      created for themselves. To escape them we forced our way ashore, and trod
-      the clean, deathlike, feet-torturing streets. One shop was open; we
-      entered it, and were supplied with cigarettes by two polite and gracious
-      very old women who knew no English. On emerging from this paganism, we met
-      a long, slow-slouching, gloomy procession of sardonic human beings,&mdash;not
-      a pretty woman among them, not a garment that was comely or unclean or
-      unrespectable, not a smile,&mdash;the great, faithful congregation
-      marching out of the great church. Here was the life of leisure in Holland
-      as distinguished from the week-day life of industry. It was a tragic
-      spectacle. When we returned to the yacht, the other congregation was still
-      around it. And it was still there, just as noisy and boorish, when we left
-      several hours later. And it would still have been there if we had remained
-      till midnight. The phenomenon of that crowd, wistful in its touching
-      desire for distraction, was a serious criticism of the leaders of men in
-      Holland. As we slid away, we could see the crowd rapidly dissolving into
-      the horror of its original ennui. I asked the cook, a cockney, what he
-      thought of Zieriksee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His face lightened to a cheerful smile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Rather a nice sort of place, sir. More like England.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0007" id="linkimage-0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0040.jpg" alt="0040 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0040.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The same afternoon we worked up the Schelde in a dead calm to Zijpe. The
-      rain had pretermitted for the first time, and the sun was hot. Zijpe is a
-      village, a haven, a dike, and a junction of train and steamer. The village
-      lies about a mile inland. The haven was pretty full of barges laid up for
-      Sunday. On the slopes of the haven, near the railway-station and the
-      landing-stage, a multitude of at least a thousand people were strolling to
-      and fro or sitting on the wet grass, all in their formidable Sabbath best.
-      We joined them, in order, if possible, to learn the cause of the
-      concourse; but the mystery remained for one hour and a half in the
-      eventless expanse of the hot afternoon, when the train came in over the
-      flat, green leagues of landscape. We then understood. The whole of Zijpe
-      had turned out to see the afternoon train come in! It was a simple modest
-      Dutch local train, making a deal of noise and dust, and bearing perhaps a
-      score of passengers. But it marked the grand climacteric of leisured
-      existence at Zijpe. We set off to the village, and discovered a village
-      deserted, and a fair-ground, with all its booths and circuses swathed up
-      in gray sheeting. Scarcely a soul! The spirit of romance had pricked them
-      all to the railway-station to see the train come in!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Making a large circuit, we reached again the river and the dike, and
-      learned what a dike is in Holland. From the top of it we could look down
-      the chimneys of houses on the landward side. The population was now on the
-      dike, promenading in magnificent solemnity and self-control. Everybody
-      gravely saluted us in passing. We gravely saluted everybody, and had not a
-      moment to ourselves for miles.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Over there,&rdquo; said the skipper afterward, pointing vaguely to the
-      southeast over the Schelde, &ldquo;they &rsquo;re Roman Catholics. There &rsquo;s
-      a lot of Spaniards left in Holland.&rdquo; By Spaniards he meant Dutchmen with
-      some Spanish blood.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then they enjoy their Sundays?&rdquo; I suggested.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered sarcastically, &ldquo;they enjoy their Sundays. They put
-      their playing-cards in their pockets before they go to church, and then
-      they go straight from the church to the café, and play high, and as like
-      as not knife each other before they &rsquo;ve done.&rdquo; Clearly it takes all
-      sorts to make a little world like Holland, and it is difficult to strike
-      the mean between absolute nullity and homicidal knives. My regret is that
-      the yacht never got as far as those Spaniards gaming and knifing in cafés.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On Monday morning every skipper on every river and canal of Holland tries
-      to prove that the stagnation of Sunday is only a clever illusion. The East
-      Schelde hummed with express barges at five A. M. It was exactly like a
-      Dutch picture by an old master. Even we, in no hurry, with a strong tide
-      under us and a rising northwester behind us, accomplished fifteen
-      sea-miles in ninety minutes. Craft were taking shelter from the threatened
-      gale. In spite of mistakes by an English crew unaccustomed to a heavy
-      mainsail in tortuous navigation and obstreperous weather, we reached
-      Dordrecht railway bridge without public shame; and then the skipper
-      decided that our engine could not be trusted to push us through the narrow
-      aperture against wind and tide. Hence we bargained with a tug, and were
-      presently attached thereto, waiting for the bridge to open.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Considering that Holland is a country where yachts are understood, and
-      where swing-bridges open at a glance, we had to wait some little time for
-      that bridge; namely, three hours. The patriotism of the skipper was
-      strained. During the whole period the tug rushed to and fro, frisking us
-      wildly about like a kettle at the tail of a busy dog, and continuously
-      collecting other kettles, so that our existence was one long shock and
-      collision. But we saw a good deal of home life on the barges, from a minor
-      barge which a girl will steer to the three-thousand-ton affair that
-      surpasses mail steamers in capacity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0045.jpg" alt="0045 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0045.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      There are two homes on these monsters, one at the stem and the other at
-      the stern; the latter is frequently magnificent in spaciousness and
-      gilding. That the two families in the two distant homes are ever intimate
-      is impossible, that they are even acquainted is improbable; but they seem
-      to share a tireless dog, who runs incessantly along the leagues of
-      planking which separate them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The bridge did at last open, and everything on the river, unmindful of
-      everything else, rushed headlong at the opening, like a crowd of sinners
-      dashing for a suddenly unbarred door into heaven. Our tug jerked us into
-      the throng, a fearful squeeze, and we were through. We cast off, the
-      gulden were collected in a tin, and within five minutes we were moored in
-      the New Haven, under the lee of the Groote Kerk, with trees all around us,
-      in whose high tops a full gale was now blowing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning our decks were thickly carpeted with green leaves, a
-      singular sight. The harbor-master came aboard to demand dues, and demanded
-      them in excellent English.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Where did you learn English?&rdquo; I asked, and he answered with strange
-      pride:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sir, I served seven years under the British flag.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Standing heedless in the cockpit, under driving rain, he recounted the
-      casualties of the night. Fifteen miles higher up the river a
-      fifteen-hundred-ton barge had sunk, and the master and crew, consisting,
-      <i>inter alia</i>, of all his family, were drowned. I inquired how such an
-      event could happen in a narrow river amid a numerous population, and
-      learned that in rough weather these barges anchor when a tug can do no
-      more with them, and the crew go to bed and sleep. The water gradually
-      washes in and washes in, until the barge is suddenly and silently
-      engulfed. Dutch phlegm! Corresponding to their Sabbatic phlegm, no doubt.
-      Said the harbor-master:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, there is a load-line, but they never takes no notice of it in
-      Holland; they just loads them up till they won&rsquo;t hold any more.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The fatalism of the working-classes everywhere is perhaps the most utterly
-      astounding of all human phenomena.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Thoughtful, I went off to examine the carved choir-stalls in the Groote
-      Kerk. These choir-stalls are among the most lovely sights in Holland.
-      Their free, fantastic beauty is ravishing and unforgetable; they make you
-      laugh with pleasure as you behold them. I doubt not that they were
-      executed by a rough-tongued man, in a dirty apron, with shocking
-      finger-nails.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0052.jpg" alt="0052 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0052.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER III&mdash;DUTCH WORK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e passed through
-      Rotterdam more than once, without seeing more of it than the amazing
-      traffic of its river and its admirable zoological gardens full of
-      chromatically inclined parrots; but we stopped at a minor town close by,
-      on a canal off the Meuse, Schiedam. Instinct must have guided me, for the
-      sociological interest of Schiedam was not inconsiderable. Schiedam is
-      called by the Dutch &ldquo;stinking Schiedam.&rdquo; I made a circuit of the town
-      canals in the dinghy and convinced myself that the epithet was just and
-      not malicious. On the lengthy quays were a large number of very dignified
-      gin distilleries, whose architecture was respectable and sometimes even
-      very good, dating from perhaps early in the last century. Each had a
-      baptismal name, such as &ldquo;Liverpool,&rdquo; inscribed in large letters across its
-      façade. This rendering decent and this glorification of gin constituted an
-      impressive phenomenon. But it was the provinciality and the uncouth
-      melancholy of the apparently prosperous town that took my fancy. We walked
-      through all its principal streets in the rain, and I thought I had never
-      seen a provinciality so exquisitely painful and perfect. In this city of
-      near thirty thousand people there was not visible one agreeably imposing
-      shop, or one woman attired with intent to charm, or one yard of smooth
-      pavement. I know not why I find an acrid pleasure in thus beholding
-      mediocrity, the average, the everyday ordinary, as it is; but I do. No
-      museum of Amsterdam, The Hague, or Haarlem touched me so nearly as the
-      town of Schiedam, which, after all, I suppose I must have liked.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Toward six o&rsquo;clock we noticed an unquiet, yet stodgy, gathering in the
-      square where is the electric-tram terminus, then a few uniforms. I asked a
-      superior police officer what there was. He said in careful, tranquil
-      English:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;There is nothing. But there is a strike of glass-workers in the town.
-      Some of them don&rsquo;t want to work, and some of them do want to work. Those
-      that have worked to-day are being taken home in automobiles. That is all.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I was glad it was all, for from his manner I had expected him to continue
-      to the effect that the glass-workers had been led away by paid agitators
-      and had no good reason to strike. The automobiles began to come along, at
-      intervals, at a tremendous pace, each with a policeman by the chauffeur&rsquo;s
-      side. In one was a single artisan, middle-aged, with a cigar in the corner
-      of his mouth, and a certain adventurous look in his eye. The crowd grimly
-      regarded. The police tried to seem as if they were there by accident, but
-      obviously they lacked histrionic training. In short, the scene was one of
-      the common objects of the wayside of existence all over the civilized
-      world. It presented no novelty whatever, and yet to witness it in Holland
-      was piquant, and caused one to think afresh and perhaps more clearly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At night, when it had ceased to rain. I was escorting a friend to the
-      station. Musicians were climbing up into the bandstand in the same square.
-      It was Wednesday, the evening of the weekly municipal concert. The
-      railway-station, far out, was superbly gloomy, and it was the only station
-      in Holland where I failed to get a non-Dutch newspaper. The train, with
-      the arrogance of an international express, slid in, slid out, and forgot
-      Schiedam. I emerged from the station alone. A one-horse tram was waiting.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The tram, empty, with a sinking, but everlasting, white horse under a
-      yellow cloth, was without doubt the most provincial and melancholy thing
-      that destiny has yet brought me in contact with. The simple spectacle of
-      it, in the flickering gaslights and in the light of its own lamps, filled
-      the heart, with an anguish inexplicable and beautiful. I got in. An age
-      passed. Then an old workman got in, and saluted; I saluted. Save for the
-      saluting, it was the Five Towns of the eighties over again, intensified,
-      and the last tram out of Hanbridge before the theater-tram.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An age passed. Then a mysterious figure drew the cloth off the horse, and
-      the horse braced up all its four legs. We were starting when a
-      tight-folded umbrella waved in the outer obscurity. An elderly,
-      easy-circumstanced couple arrived upon us with deliberation; the umbrella
-      was a good one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We did start. We rumbled and trundled in long curves of suburban
-      desolation. Then a few miserable shops that ought to have been shut; then
-      the square once more, now jammed in every part with a roaring, barbaric
-      horde. In the distance, over a floor of heads, was an island of
-      illumination, with the figures of puffing and blowing musicians in it; but
-      no rumor of music could reach us through the din. The white horse trotted
-      mildly into and right through the multitude, which jeered angrily, but
-      fell back. An enormous multitude, Gothic, Visi-gothic, savage,
-      uncivilized, chiefly consisting of young men and big boys&mdash;the weekly
-      concert of humanizing music!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0057.jpg" alt="0057 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0057.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      I left the tram, and walked along the dark, empty canal-side to the yacht.
-      The impression of stagnation, tedium, provincialism was overwhelming.
-      Nevertheless, here, as in other towns, we were struck by the number of
-      shop-windows with artist&rsquo;s materials for sale. Such was Schiedam. If it is
-      asked whether I went to Holland on a yachting cruise to see this sort of
-      thing, the answer is that I just did.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After a few weeks I began to perceive that Schiedam and similar places,
-      though thrilling, were not the whole of Holland, and perhaps not the most
-      representative of Holland. As the yacht worked northward, Holland seemed
-      to grow more Dutch, until, in the chain of shallow lakes and channels that
-      hold Friesland in a sort of permanent baptism, we came to what was for me
-      the ideal or celestial Holland&mdash;everything done by water, even grass
-      cut under water, and black-and-white cows milked in the midst of ponds,
-      and windmills over the eternal flatness used exclusively to shift
-      inconvenient water from one level to another. The road is water in
-      Friesland, and all the world is on the road. If your approach to a town is
-      made perilous by a succession of barges that will obstinately keep the
-      middle of the channel, you know that it is market-day in that town, and
-      the farmers are rolling home in agreeable inebriation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The motor broke down in Friesland, and we were immobolized in the midst of
-      blue-green fields, red dogs, the cows aforesaid, green milk-floats,
-      blue-bloused sportsmen, and cargoes of cannon-ball cheese. We decided to
-      tow the yacht until we got to a favorable reach. Certain barges sailed
-      past us right into the eye of the wind, against all physical laws, but the
-      <i>Velsa</i> possessed not this magic. We saw three men comfortably towing
-      a string of three huge barges, and we would tow. Unfortunately the only
-      person, the skipper, who knew how to tow had to remain on board. The cook,
-      the deck-hand, and I towed like Greeks pulling against Greeks, and could
-      scarcely move one little yacht. The cook, neurasthenic by temperament,
-      grew sad, until he fell into three feet of inundation, which adventure
-      struck him as profoundly humorous, so that he was contorted with laughter.
-      This did not advance the yacht. Slowly we learned that towing is not mere
-      brute striving, but an art.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We at last came to terms with a tug, as our desire was to sleep at Sneek.
-      Sneek is the veritable metropolis of those regions. After passing, at late
-      dusk, the mysterious night-watchers of eel-nets, who are wakened in their
-      elaborate green-and-yellow boats by a bell, like a Paris concierge, we
-      gradually emerged into nocturnal Sneek through a quadruple lane of barges
-      and tugs so long as to put Sneek among the seven great ports of the world.
-      And even in Sneek at nightfall the impression of immense quantities of
-      water and of greenness, yellowness, and redness was continued. It rained,
-      as usual, in Sneek the next day, but no rain and no water could damp
-      Sneek. It was the most active town any of us had ever seen. It must have
-      been the original &ldquo;hive of industry.&rdquo; It was full, and full of everything.
-      The market was full of cattle, pigs, and sheep, crowded in pens and in
-      carts; calves, prone, with all four legs tied together, filled acres of
-      pavement. The cafés were full of dealers and drovers, mostly rather jolly,
-      being served by slatternly, pleasant women. The streets were full of good
-      shops, and of boys and girls following us and touching us to see if we
-      existed. (Dreadful little boors!) The barges were full of cauliflowers,
-      cabbages, apples, potatoes, sabots, cheeses, and barrels. The canals were
-      full of barges and steamers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And immediately one sat down to sketch a group of craft one learned that
-      nothing was stationary. Everything moved that floated&mdash;everything on
-      the surface of miles of canal! Everybody, without haste, but without
-      stopping ever, was tirelessly engaged in shifting matter from one spot to
-      another. At intervals a small steamer, twenty, thirty, fifty, eighty tons,
-      would set off for a neighboring village with a few passengers,&mdash;including
-      nice girls,&mdash;a few cattle, and high piles of miscellaneous packages;
-      or would come in from a neighboring village. The kaleidoscope was
-      everlasting; but it did not fatigue, because it never hurried. Only it
-      made us ashamed of our idleness. Gently occupied old country-women, with
-      head-dresses of lace-work and a gold casque, the whole ridiculously
-      surmounted by a black bonnet for fashion&rsquo;s sake&mdash;even these old women
-      made us ashamed of our untransporting idleness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0063.jpg" alt="0063 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0063.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Having got our engine more or less repaired, we departed from Sneek, a
-      spot that beyond most spots abounds in its own individuality. Sneek is
-      memorable. Impossible to credit that it has fewer than thirteen thousand
-      inhabitants!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As, at breakfast, we dropped down the canal on the way to Leeuwarden, a
-      new guest on board, whose foible is the search for the ideal, and who had
-      been declaiming against the unattractiveness of the women of Munich, spoke
-      thus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Is this Dutch bread? I think I should like to become a Dutchman, and live
-      at Sneek, and marry a Dutch girl. They have such nice blue eyes, and they
-      &lsquo;re so calm.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I remarked that I should have thought that his recent experiences in
-      Munich would have frightened him right off the entire sex. He said:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, they &lsquo;re all beautiful in Vienna, and that worries you just as much
-      in another way. Sneek is the mean.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE ZUYDER ZEE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E reached the
-      Zuyder Zee, out of a canal, at Monnikendam, which is a respectably
-      picturesque townlet and the port of embarkation for Marken, the alleged
-      jewel of the Zuyder Zee, the precious isle where the customs and the
-      costumes of a pure age are mingled with the prices of New York for the
-      instruction of tourists. We saw Marken, but only from the mainland, a
-      long, serrated silhouette on the verge. The skipper said that Marken was a
-      side-show and a swindle, and a disgrace to his native country. So I
-      decided to cut it out of the program, and be the owner of the only foreign
-      yacht that had cruised in the Zuyder Zee without visiting Marken. My real
-      reason was undoubtedly that the day&rsquo;s program had been upset by undue
-      lolling in the second-hand shops of Monnikendam. Thus we sailed due north
-      for Hoorn, secretly fearing that at Marken there might be something
-      lovely, unforgetable, that we had missed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, provided you don&rsquo;t mind rain,
-      and provided your craft does not draw more than about six feet. It has the
-      appearance of a sea, but we could generally touch the bottom with our
-      sounding-pole; after all, it is not a sea, but a submerged field. The
-      skipper would tell inclement stories of the Zuyder Zee under ice, and how
-      he had crossed it on foot between Enkhuizen and Stavoren, risking his life
-      for fun; and how he had been obliged to recross it the next day, with more
-      fatigue, as much risk, and far less fun, because there was no other way
-      home. We ourselves knew it only as a ruffled and immense pond, with a
-      bracing atmosphere and the silhouettes of diminished trees and houses
-      sticking up out of its horizons here and there. When these low silhouettes
-      happen to denote your destination, they have the strange faculty of
-      receding from your prow just as fast as you sail toward them, a magic sea
-      of an exquisite monotony; and when you arrive anywhere, you are so
-      surprised at having overtaken the silhouette that your arrival is a dream,
-      in the unreal image of a city.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead cities, and never saw
-      one. Hoorn is a delightful vision for the eye&mdash;beautiful domestic
-      architecture, beautiful warehouses, beautiful towers, beautiful
-      water-gate, beautiful aniline colors on the surface of dreadful canals. If
-      it were as near to London and Paris as Bruges is, it would be inhabited
-      exclusively by water-colorists. At Hoorn I went mad, and did eight
-      sketches in one day, a record which approaches my highest break at
-      billiards. Actually, it is inhabited by cheese-makers and dealers. No
-      other town, not even Chicago, can possibly contain so many cheeses per
-      head of the population as Hoorn. At Hoorn I saw three men in blue blouses
-      throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the second story of a brown
-      and yellow and green warehouse into a yellow cart. One man was in the
-      second story, one in the first, and one in the cart. They were flinging
-      cheeses from hand to hand when we arrived and when we left, and they never
-      dropped a cheese or ceased to fling. They flung into the mysterious night,
-      when the great forms of little cargo-steamers floated soundless over
-      romance to moor at the dark quays, and the long, white English
-      steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and its flulfy chambermaid,
-      and its polished mahogany motor-launch, and its myriad lights and gleams,
-      glided to a berth by the water-tower, and hung there like a cloud beyond
-      the town, keeping me awake half the night while I proved to myself that I
-      did not really envy its owner and that the Velsa was really a much better
-      yacht.
-    </p>
-
-<div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0070.jpg" alt="0070 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0070.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-
-    <p>
-      The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the
-      English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who
-      spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was
-      selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British army
-      officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the Dutch
-      army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh, British army
-      officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand the phrase
-      &ldquo;East Indian cigar.&rdquo; He said there were no such cigars in his parents&rsquo;
-      shop. When I said &ldquo;Sumatra,&rdquo; he understood, and fetched his mother. When I
-      said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn, his mother put away all
-      the samples already exhibited and fetched his father. The family had begun
-      to comprehend that a serious customer had strayed into the shop. The
-      father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity and deference went
-      up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of cigars that were warm to
-      the touch. &ldquo;These are the best?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;These are the best.&rdquo; I bought. They were threepence apiece.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling
-      sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the
-      Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have
-      atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have
-      adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for
-      the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like too
-      many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of dogs&mdash;dogs
-      that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order to prove that
-      they are of the race that has always ended by expelling invaders with
-      bloodshed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I was safer in the yacht&rsquo;s dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though
-      the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched,
-      three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into the
-      canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone on the
-      quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as table-tops&mdash;cleaner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though
-      Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived
-      there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first glance,
-      exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I remember it as
-      the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner steering, and foul
-      the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his owner, as if to say,
-      &ldquo;You see what owners do when they take charge.&rdquo; I admitted it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy and
-      recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having taken to
-      his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail in a jiffy.
-      The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become an omnibus
-      conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus conductor
-      will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young man, and
-      himself painted in water-colors.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0076.jpg" alt="0076 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0076.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town; but I
-      know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely practical
-      town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the cook. We
-      were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised even by E.
-      V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation. Kampen has
-      architecture,&mdash;wonderful gates,&mdash;but it also has the crudest
-      pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east wind
-      was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner of Kampen
-      was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen, which
-      perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning was warm
-      and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven weeks
-      continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three hours we
-      were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was steering.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Please keep the center of the channel,&rdquo; the skipper enjoined me.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are
-      privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within
-      half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on
-      to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had
-      seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is
-      the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at
-      high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs
-      and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go to
-      Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the
-      town.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end surcease,
-      and all their long-colored <i>weins</i> (vanes) streamed in the wind
-      against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was the
-      spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses that
-      pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue ensign),
-      and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay and held
-      him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the spectacle of
-      his aged father&rsquo;s trading barge, unexpectedly making for the same port,
-      with his mother, brother, and sister on deck&mdash;the crew! Arrived in
-      port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the skipper
-      boarded his old home with becoming placidity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful
-      forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom nated
-      by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a smack
-      arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed to be
-      always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect
-      picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an
-      establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass. The
-      town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick
-      water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an
-      avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched
-      off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a square.
-      Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in Indian
-      reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely imitated
-      from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the church was a
-      picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a sacristan out of a
-      late novel by Huysmans.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The churchyard was a mass of tall flowers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The women&rsquo;s costumes here showed a difference, the gilt casque being more
-      visibly divided into two halves. All bodices were black, all skirts blue.
-      Some of the fishermen make majestic figures, tall, proud, commanding, fit
-      adversaries of Alva; in a word, exemplifications of the grand manner.
-      Their salutes were sometimes royal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The gaiety of the color; the distinction of the forms; the strange warmth;
-      the completeness of the entity of the town, which seemed to have been
-      constructed at one effort; the content of the inhabitants, especially the
-      visible, unconscious gladness of the women at the return of their
-      mariners; the urbanity of everybody&mdash;all these things helped to
-      produce a comfortable and yet disconcerting sensation that the old,
-      unreformed world was not quite ripe for utter destruction.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All day until late in the evening smacks ceased not to creep up the canal.
-      The aspect of the basin altered from minute to minute, with disastrous
-      effect on water-colorists. In the dusk we ferreted In a gloomy and
-      spellbound second-hand shop, amid dozens of rococo wall-clocks, and bought
-      a few little things. As we finally boarded the yacht in the dark, we could
-      see a group of sailors in a bosky arbor bending over a table on which was
-      a lamp that harshly lighted their grave faces. They may have thought that
-      they were calculating and apportioning the week&rsquo;s profits; but in reality
-      they were playing at masterpieces by Rembrandt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0081.jpg" alt="0081 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0081.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER V&mdash;SOME TOWNS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>AARLEM is the
-      capital of a province, and has the airs of a minor metropolis. When we
-      moored in the Donkere Spaarne, all the architecture seemed to be saying to
-      us, with innocent pride, that this was the city of the illustrious Frans
-      Hals, and the only place where Frans Hals could be truly appreciated.
-      Haarlem did not stare at strangers, as did other towns. The shops in the
-      narrow, busy Saturday-night streets were small and slow, and it took us
-      most of an evening, in and out of the heavy rain, to buy three shawls, two
-      pairs of white stockings, and some cigarettes; but the shopmen and
-      shop-women, despite their ignorance of English, American, and French,
-      showed no openmouthed provinciality at our fantastic demands. The
-      impression upon us of the mysterious entity of the town was favorable; we
-      felt at home.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The yacht was just opposite the habitation of a nice middle-class family,
-      and on Sunday morning, through the heavy rain, I could see a boy of
-      sixteen, a girl of fourteen, and a child of five or six, all dressing
-      slowly together in a bedroom that overlooked us, while the father in
-      shirt-sleeves constantly popped to and fro. They were calmly content to
-      see and be seen. Presently father and son, still in shirt-sleeves,
-      appeared on the stoop, each smoking a cigar, and the girl above, arrayed
-      in Sunday white, moved about setting the bedroom in order. It was a
-      pleasant average sight, enhanced by the good architecture of the house,
-      and by a certain metropolitan self-unconsciousness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We went to church later, or rather into a church, and saw beautiful models
-      of ships hung in the nave, and aged men entering, with their hats on and
-      good cigars in their mouths. For the rest, they resembled superintendents
-      of English Sunday-schools or sidesmen of small parishes. In another church
-      we saw a Sunday-school in full session, a parson in a high pulpit
-      exhorting, secretary and minor officials beneath him, and all the boys
-      standing up with shut eyes and all the girls sitting down with shut eyes.
-      We felt that we were perhaps in the most Protestant country in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the afternoon, when the rain-clouds lifted for a few moments and the
-      museums were closed, we viewed the residential prosperity of Haarlem, of
-      which the chief seat is the Nieuwe Gracht, a broad canal, forbidden to
-      barges, flanked by broad quays beautifully paved in small red brick, and
-      magnificent houses. A feature of the noble architecture here was that the
-      light ornamentation round the front doors was carried up and round the
-      central windows of the first and second stories. A grand street! One
-      properly expected to see elegant women at the windows of these lovely
-      houses,&mdash;some were almost palaces,&mdash;and one was disappointed.
-      Women there were, for at nearly every splendid window, the family was
-      seated, reading, talking, gazing, or drinking tea; but all the women were
-      dowdy; the majority were middle-aged; none was beautiful or elegant. Nor
-      was any of the visible furniture distinguished.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The beauty of Haarlem seems to be limited to architecture, pavements, and
-      the moral comeliness of being neat and clean. The esthetic sense
-      apparently stops there. Charm must be regarded in Haarlem with suspicion,
-      as a quality dangerous and unrespectable. As daylight failed, the groups
-      within gathered closer and closer to the windows, to catch the last yellow
-      drops of it, and their curiosity about the phenomena of the streets grew
-      more frank. We were examined. In return we examined. And a discussion
-      arose as to whether inspection from within justified inquisitiveness from
-      the street. The decision was that it did not; that a person inside a house
-      had the right to quiz without being quizzed. But this merely academic
-      verdict was not allowed to influence our immediate deportment. In many
-      houses of the lesser streets tables were already laid for supper, and one
-      noticed heavy silver napkin-rings and other silver. In one house the
-      shadowy figures of a family were already grouped round a repast, and
-      beyond them, through another white-curtained window at the back of the
-      spacious room, could be discerned a dim courtyard full of green and yellow
-      foliage. This agreeable picture, typifying all the domestic tranquillity
-      and dignity of prosperous Holland, was the last thing we saw before the
-      dark and the rain fell, and the gas-lamps flickered in.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0087.jpg" alt="0087 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0087.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      We entered The Hague through canals pitted by heavy rain, the banks of
-      which showed many suburban residences, undistinguished, but set in the
-      midst of good gardens. And because it was the holiday week,&mdash;the week
-      containing the queen&rsquo;s birthday,&mdash;and we desired quietude, we
-      obtained permission to lie at the private quay of the gasworks. The
-      creators of The Hague gas-works have made only one mistake: they ought to
-      have accomplished their act much earlier, so that Balzac might have
-      described it; for example, in &ldquo;The Alkahest,&rdquo; which has the best
-      imaginative descriptions of Dutch life yet written. The Hague gas-works
-      are like a toy, gigantic; but a toy. Impossible to believe that in this
-      vast, clean, scrubbed, swept expanse, where every bit of coal is
-      scrupulously in place, real gas is made. To believe, you must go into the
-      city and see the gas actually burning. Even the immense traveling-cranes,
-      when at work or otherwise, have the air of life-size playthings. Our quay
-      was bordered with flower-beds. The workmen, however, seemed quite real
-      workmen, realistically dirty, who were not playing at work, nor rising at
-      five-thirty a.m. out of mere joyous ecstasy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor did the bargemen who day and night ceaselessly and silently propelled
-      their barges past us into the city by means of poles and sweat, seem to be
-      toying with existence. The procession of these barges never stopped. On
-      the queen&rsquo;s birthday, when our ship was dressed, and the whole town was
-      flagged, it went on, just as the decorated trams and tram-drivers went on.
-      Some of the barges penetrated right through the populous districts, and
-      emerged into the oligarchic quarter of ministries, bureaus, official
-      residences, palaces, parks, art dealers, and shops of expensive lingerie&mdash;the
-      quarter, as in every capital, where the precious traditions of
-      correctness, patriotism, red-tape, order, luxury, and the moral grandeur
-      of devising rules for the nice conduct of others are carefully conserved
-      and nourished. This quarter was very well done, and the bargemen, with
-      their perspiring industry, might have had the good taste to keep out of
-      it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The business center of The Hague, lying between the palaces and the
-      gas-works, is cramped, crowded, and unimpressive. The cafés do not
-      glitter, and everybody knows that the illumination of cafés in a capital
-      is a sure index of a nation&rsquo;s true greatness. Many small cafés, veiled in
-      costly curtains at window and door, showed stray dazzling shafts of bright
-      light, but whether the true greatness of Holland was hidden in these
-      seductive arcana I never knew. Even in the holiday week the principal
-      cafés were emptying soon after ten o&rsquo;clock. On the other hand, the large
-      stores were still open at that hour, and the shop-girls, whose pale faces
-      made an admirable contrast to their black robes, were still serving ladies
-      therein. At intervals, in the afternoons, one saw a chic woman, moving
-      with a consciousness of her own elegance; but she was very exceptional.
-      The rest might have run over for the day from Haarlem, Delft, Utrecht, or
-      Leyden. In the really excellent and well-frequented music-halls there was
-      no elegance either. I have never anywhere seen better music-hall
-      entertainments than in Holland. In certain major capitals of Europe and
-      elsewhere the public is apt to prove its own essential naïveté by allowing
-      itself to be swindled nightly in gorgeous music-halls. The Dutch are more
-      astute, if less elegant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The dying engine of the yacht lost consciousness, for about the twentieth
-      time during this trip, as we were nearing Amsterdam; but a high wind,
-      carrying with it tremendous showers of rain, kindly blew us, under bare
-      poles, up the last half-mile of the North Sea Canal into the private haven
-      of the Royal Dutch Yacht-Club, where we were most amicably received, as,
-      indeed, in all the yacht-club basins of Holland. Baths, telephones, and
-      smoking-rooms were at our disposal without any charge, in addition to the
-      security of the haven, and it was possible to get taxicabs from the
-      somewhat distant city. We demanded a chauffeur who could speak English.
-      They sent us a taxi with two chauffeurs neither of whom could speak any
-      language whatsoever known to philologists. But by the use of maps and a
-      modification of the pictorial writing of the ancient Aztecs, we contrived
-      to be driven almost where we wanted. At the end of the excursion I had
-      made, in my quality of observer, two generalizations: first, that
-      Amsterdam taxis had two drivers for safety; and, second, that taxi-travel
-      in Amsterdam was very exciting and dangerous. But our drivers were so
-      amiable, soft-tongued, and energetic that I tipped them both. I then,
-      somehow, learned the truth: one of the men was driving a taxi for the
-      first time, and the other was teaching him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0094.jpg" alt="0094 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0094.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      After driving and walking about Amsterdam for several days, I decided that
-      it would be completely civilized when it was repaved, and not before. It
-      is the paradise of stomachs and the hell of feet. Happily, owing to its
-      canals and its pavements, it has rather fewer of the rash cyclists who
-      menace life in other Dutch cities. In Holland, outside Amsterdam,
-      everybody uses a cycle. If you are ran down, as you are, it is just as
-      likely to be by an aged and toothless female peasant as by an office boy.
-      Also there are fewer homicidal dogs in Amsterdam than elsewhere, and there
-      is the same general absence of public monuments which makes other Dutch
-      cities so agreeably strange to the English and American traveler. You can
-      scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue of a nonentity in Holland,
-      because there are scarcely any statues.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland. Its
-      architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively immanent
-      in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of it in the
-      mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the
-      inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer. Amsterdam
-      has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever passed through
-      the head of a stock-broker. It is excessively ugly and graceless, but I
-      admire it for being a caprice, and especially for being a stock-broker&rsquo;s
-      caprice. No English stock-broker would have a caprice. Amsterdam has small
-      and dear restaurants of the first order, where a few people with more
-      money than appetite can do themselves very well indeed in hushed privacy.
-      It also has prodigious cafés. Krasnopolshy&rsquo;s&mdash;a town, not a café&mdash;is
-      said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It isn&rsquo;t; but it is
-      large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a million people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0099.jpg" alt="0099 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0099.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the quality
-      which above all others a great city ought to possess. It pullulates. Vast
-      masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and boil over into its
-      public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the rain, is thronged
-      with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of its shops. The
-      Kalver-Straat will compete handsomely with Bond Street. Go along the
-      length of it, and you will come out of it thoughtful. Make your way thence
-      to the Rembrandt-Plein, where pleasure concentrates, and you will have to
-      conclude that the whole of Amsterdam is there, and all its habitations
-      empty. The mirrored, scintillating cafés, huge and lofty and golden, are
-      crowded with tables and drinkers and waiters, and dominated by rhapsodic
-      orchestras of women in white who do what they can against the hum of ten
-      thousand conversations, the hoarse calls of waiters, and the clatter of
-      crockery. It is a pandemonium with a certain stolidity. The excellent
-      music-halls and circuses are equally crowded, and curiously, so are the
-      suburban resorts on the rim of the city. Among the larger places, perhaps,
-      the Café Américain, on the Leidsche-Plein, was the least feverish, and
-      this was not to be counted in its favor, because the visitor to a city
-      which pullulates is, and should he, happiest in pullulating. The crowd,
-      the din, the elbowing, the glitter for me, in a town like Amsterdam! In a
-      town like Gouda, which none should fail to visit for the incomparable
-      stained-glass in its church, I am content to be as placid and solitary as
-      anybody, and I will follow a dancing bear and a Gipsy girl up and down the
-      streets thereof with as much simplicity as anybody. But Amsterdam is the
-      great, vulgar, inspiring world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER VI&mdash;MUSEUMS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> DID not go
-      yachting in Holland in order to visit museums; nevertheless, I saw a few.
-      When it is possible to step off a yacht clean into a museum, and heavy
-      rain is falling, the temptation to remain on board is not sufficiently
-      powerful to keep you out of the museum. At Dordrecht there is a municipal
-      museum manned by four officials. They received us with hope, with
-      enthusiasm, with the most touching gratitude. Their interest in us was
-      pathetic. They were all dying of ennui in those large rooms, where the
-      infection hung in clouds almost visible, and we were a specific stimulant.
-      They seized on us as the morphinomaniac seizes on an unexpected find of
-      the drug.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0106.jpg" alt="0106 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0106.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Just as Haarlem is the city of Frans Hals, so Dordrecht is the city of Ary
-      Scheffer. Posterity in the end is a good judge of painters, if not of
-      heroes, but posterity makes mistakes sometimes, and Ary Scheffer is one of
-      its more glaring mistakes. (Josef Israels seems likely to be another.) And
-      posterity is very slow in acknowledging an error. The Dordrecht museum is
-      waiting for such an acknowledgment. When that comes, the museum will be
-      burned down, or turned into a brewery, and the officials will be delivered
-      from their dreadful daily martyrdom of feigning ecstatic admiration for
-      Ary Scheffer. Only at Dordrecht is it possible to comprehend the full
-      baseness, the exquisite unimportance, of Scheffer&rsquo;s talent. The best thing
-      of his in a museum full of him is a free, brilliant copy of a head by
-      Rembrandt done at the age of eleven. It was, I imagine, his last tolerable
-      work. His worst pictures, solemnly hung here, would be justifiably laughed
-      at in a girls&rsquo; schoolroom. But his sentimentality, conventionality, and
-      ugliness arouse less laughter than nausea. By chance a few fine pictures
-      have come into the Dordrecht museum, as into most museums. Jakob Maris and
-      Bosboom are refreshing, but even their strong influence cannot disinfect
-      the place nor keep the officials alive. We left the museum in the nick of
-      time, and saw no other visitors.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now, the tea-shop into which we next went was far more interesting and
-      esthetically valuable than the museum. The skipper, who knew every shop,
-      buoy, bridge, and shoal in Holland, had indicated this shop to me as a
-      high-class shop for costly teas. It was. I wanted the best tea, and here I
-      got it. The establishment might have survived from the age when Dordrecht
-      was the wealthiest city in Holland. Probably it had so survived. It was
-      full of beautiful utensils in practical daily use. It had an architectural
-      air, and was aware of its own dignity. The head-salesman managed to convey
-      to me that the best tea&mdash;that was, tea that a connoisseur would call
-      <i>tea</i>&mdash;cost two and a half florins a pound. I conveyed to him
-      that I would take two pounds of the same. The head-salesman then displayed
-      to me the tea in its japanned receptacle. He next stood upright and
-      expectant, whereupon an acolyte, in a lovely white apron, silently
-      appeared from the Jan-Steen shadows at the back of the shop, and with
-      solemn gestures held a tun-dish over a paper bag for his superior to pour
-      tea into. Having performed his share in the rite, he disappeared. The
-      parcel was slowly made up, every part of the process being evidently a
-      matter of secular tradition. I tendered a forty-gulden note. Whereon the
-      merchant himself arrived in majesty at the counter from his office, and
-      offered the change with punctilio. He would have been perfect, but for a
-      hole in the elbow of his black alpaca coat. I regretted this hole. We left
-      the shop stimulated, and were glad to admit that Dordrecht had atoned to
-      us for its museum. Ary Scheffer might have made an excellent tea-dealer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The museum at Dordrecht only showed in excess an aspect of displayed art
-      which is in some degree common to all museums. For there is no museum
-      which is not a place of desolation. Indeed, I remember to have seen only
-      one collection of pictures, public or private, in which every item was a
-      cause of joy&mdash;that of Mr. Widener, near Philadelphia. Perhaps the
-      most wonderful thing in the tourist&rsquo;s Holland is the fact that the small
-      museum at Haarlem, with its prodigious renown, does not disappoint. You
-      enter it with disturbing preliminaries, each visitor having to ring a
-      bell, and the <i>locus</i> is antipathetic; but one&rsquo;s pulse is immediately
-      quickened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces of Hals. And
-      Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influential here, and even the mediocre
-      paintings have often an interest of perversity, as to which naturally the
-      guide-books say naught.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up
-      with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant,
-      who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired
-      the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum of the
-      kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by Rembrandt, of
-      which he managed to exaggerate the value.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces
-      than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one&rsquo;s first sight of Rembrandt&rsquo;s
-      &ldquo;Lesson in Anatomy&rdquo; therein would constitute a dramatic event in any
-      yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy
-      one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday of
-      the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared coarsely
-      around, and understood nothing&mdash;nothing. True, they gazed in a
-      hypnotized semicircle at &ldquo;The Lesson in Anatomy,&rdquo; and I can hear amiable
-      persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant and
-      the simple. I don&rsquo;t believe it. I believe that if &ldquo;The Lesson in Anatomy&rdquo;
-       had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of Carolus-Duran, the
-      ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized just the same. And I
-      have known the ignorant and the simple to be overwhelmed with emotion by
-      spurious trickery of the most absurd and offensive kind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic
-      experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic sense the
-      majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be artistically
-      civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can make any
-      appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy of art, by
-      which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in the midst of a
-      vast, dangerous population&mdash;a few adventurous whites among indigenous
-      hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may have splendid
-      qualities, but they have not that one quality which more than any other
-      vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the manifestations of art
-      which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not very agreeable either. A
-      string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth, came into the Mauritshuis
-      out of the rain, and mildly and politely scorned it. Their attitude was
-      unmistakable. They were not intimidated. Well, I like that. I preferred
-      that, for example, to the cant of ten thousand tourists.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag
-      was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste, as
-      illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact that
-      many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two superb
-      works&mdash;a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau&mdash;could not make up for
-      the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full
-      of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having time to
-      spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is famous, and
-      is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea, but it does not
-      rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a sky full of kites.
-      Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left Scheveningen, my
-      secret melancholy was profoundly established within me, and in that there
-      is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it becomes
-      uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0112.jpg" alt="0112 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0112.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town of
-      fine architecture, is that they should both&mdash;the Ryks and the
-      municipal&mdash;be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the
-      age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs, and the
-      result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities. Michelangelo
-      often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects and artists more
-      skilled than he in pleasing city councils and building-committees muddled
-      away opportunities which he would have glorified; but he did obtain part
-      of a job now and then, subject to it being &ldquo;improved&rdquo; by some duffer like
-      Bernini, who of course contrived to leave a large fortune, whereas if
-      Michelangelo had lived to-day he might never have got any job at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the
-      Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, &ldquo;The Night-Watch&rdquo;
-       of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on the
-      part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you: &ldquo;Hats
-      off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.&rdquo; The truth is
-      that &ldquo;The Night-Watch&rdquo; is neither very lovable nor very beautiful. It is
-      an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering centuries in the eye,
-      and it does so. But how long it will continue to do so is a nice question.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of room,
-      despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me with youth.
-      It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful mistakes, but at
-      any rate it is being made under the guidance of somebody who is not afraid
-      of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced with such a collection, one
-      realizes the shortcomings of London museums and the horror of that steely
-      English official conservatism, at once timid and ruthless, which will
-      never permit itself to discover a foreign artist until the rest of the
-      world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks there are Van Goghs and
-      Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best, but they are there. Also
-      there are some of the most superb water-colors of the age, and good things
-      by a dozen classic moderns who are still totally unrepresented in London.
-      I looked at a celestial picture of women&mdash;the kind of thing that Guys
-      would have done if he could&mdash;painted perhaps fifty years ago, and as
-      modern as the latest Sargent water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T.
-      C.? T. C.? Who on earth could T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas
-      Couture, of course! A great artist! He will appear in the National
-      Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about the middle of the twenty-first century.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then there was Daumier&rsquo;s &ldquo;Christ and His Disciples,&rdquo; a picture that I
-      would have stolen had it been possible and quite safe to do so. It might
-      seen incredible that any artist of the nineteenth century should take the
-      subject from the great artists of the past, and treat it so as to make you
-      think that it had never been treated before. But Daumier did this. It is
-      true that he was a very great artist indeed. Who that has seen it and
-      understood its tender sarcasm can forget that group of the exalted,
-      mystical Christ talking to semi-incredulous, unperceptive disciples in the
-      gloomy and vague evening landscape? I went back to the yacht and its
-      ignoble and decrepit engine, full of the conviction that art still lives.
-      And I thought of Wilson Steer&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Music-Room&rdquo; in the Tate Gallery,
-      London, which magnificent picture is a proof that in London also art still
-      lives.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0117.jpg" alt="0117 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0117.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PART II&mdash;THE BALTIC
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER VII&mdash;THE YACHT I LOST
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>UR adventures
-      toward the Baltic began almost disastrously, because I put into the
-      planning of them too much wisdom and calculation. We had a month of time
-      at our disposal. Now, a fifty-ton yacht in foreign parts thinks nothing of
-      a month. It is capable of using up a month in mere preliminaries. Hence,
-      with admirable forethought, I determined to send the yacht on in advance.
-      The <i>Velsa</i> was to cross from her home port, Brightlingsea, to the
-      Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many islands, to creep along the
-      coasts of Hanover, Holstein, Schleswig, and Denmark, past the mouths of
-      the Elbe, Weser, and Eider, to the port of Esbjerg, where we were to join
-      her by a fast steamer from Harwich. She was then to mount still farther
-      the Danish coast, as far as Liim Fjord and, by a route combining fjords
-      and canals, cross the top of the Jutland peninsula, and enter the desired
-      Baltic by Randers Fjord. The banal way would have been through the Kiel
-      Canal. Yachts never take the Liim Fjord; but to me this was a fine reason
-      for taking the Liim Fjord. Moreover, English yachts have a habit of
-      getting into trouble with the German Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English
-      yachtsmen are apt to languish in German prisons on charges of espionage. I
-      was uncertain about the comforts provided for spies in German prisons, and
-      I did not wish to acquire certitude.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So the yacht was despatched. The skipper gave himself the large allowance
-      of a fortnight for the journey to Esbjerg. He had a beautiful new
-      30-horse-power engine, new sails, a new mast. Nothing could stop him
-      except an east wind. It is notorious that in the North Sea the east wind
-      never blows for more than three days together, and that in July it never
-      blows at all. Still, in this July it did start to blow a few days before
-      the yacht&rsquo;s intended departure. And it continued to blow hard. In a week
-      the skipper had only reached Harwich, a bare twenty miles from
-      Brightlingsea. Then the yacht vanished into the North Sea. The wind held
-      in the east. After another week I learned by cable that my ship had
-      reached the Helder, in North Holland. By a wondrous coincidence, my Dutch
-      skipper&rsquo;s wife and family are established at the Helder. The east wind
-      still held. The skipper spent money daily in saddening me by cable. Then
-      he left the Helder, and the day came for us to board the mail-steamer at
-      Harwich for Esbjerg.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0123.jpg" alt="0123 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0123.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her very
-      first trip. She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced Danes, who
-      had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom they chattered
-      in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and incomprehensible.
-      Also she was full of original Danish food, and especially of marvelous and
-      mysterious sandwiches, which, with small quantities of champagne, we ate
-      at intervals in a veranda cafe passably imitated from Atlantic liners.
-      Despite the east wind, which still held, that steamer reached Esbjerg in
-      the twinkling of an eye.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. It was in the
-      dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an unknown
-      foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it as great
-      ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant. There was a vast
-      fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid imperceptibly past the
-      mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the multitudinous masts for
-      the mast of the <i>Velsa</i>. Her long Dutch streamer was ever
-      unmistakable. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What the
-      mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have done in
-      more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the distance
-      was simply nothing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes,
-      though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on the
-      quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound to be
-      on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great ship,
-      because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have
-      accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. The <i>Velsa</i> was
-      definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of the
-      Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled us
-      out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of purgatory.
-      He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he consented to be our
-      friend, no serious harm could happen to our universe. And the hotel was
-      excellent, the food was excellent, the cigars were excellent. And the
-      three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting demurely about the long corridor
-      at their nightly tasks, fair, clad in prints, foreign, separated
-      romantically from us by the palisades of language&mdash;the three modest
-      chambermaids were all young and beautiful, with astounding complexions.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than
-      east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless, I
-      more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the extreme
-      end of the jetty&mdash;about a mile each way each time&mdash;in the hope
-      of descrying the <i>Velsa&rsquo;s</i> long, red streamer in the offing. It was
-      Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly
-      modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though
-      extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of the
-      same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger,
-      especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful or
-      even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong, gusty
-      breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we not
-      gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the
-      standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other
-      place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday
-      summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a degree
-      really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at all they
-      wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been a southern
-      zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but we retained
-      them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound compensations.
-      There were two types of beautiful women, one with straight lips, and the
-      other with the upper lip like the traditional bow. The latter, of course,
-      was the more generously formed, acquiescent and yet pouting, more blonde
-      than the blonde. Both types had the effect of making the foreigner feel
-      that to be a foreigner and a stranger in Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all
-      the daily frequentations and intimacies of the social organism, was a
-      mistake.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0130.jpg" alt="0130 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0130.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      In the afternoon we hired an automobile, ostensibly to inspect the
-      peninsula, but in fact partly to see whether similar women prevailed
-      throughout the peninsula, and partly to give the yacht a chance of
-      creeping in during our absence. In our hearts we knew that so long as we
-      stood looking for it it would never arrive. In a few moments, as it
-      seemed, we had crossed the peninsula to Veile, a sympathetic
-      watering-place on its own fjord, and were gazing at the desired Baltic,
-      whereon our yacht ought to have been floating, but was not. It seemed a
-      heavenly sea, as blue as the Mediterranean.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had driven fast along rather bad and dusty roads, and had passed about
-      ten thousand one-story farmsteads, brick-built, splendidly thatched, and
-      each bearing its date on the walls in large iron figures. These
-      farmsteads, all much alike, showed that some great change, probably for
-      the better, must have transformed Danish agriculture about thirty or forty
-      years ago. But though farmers were driving abroad in two-horse vehicles,
-      and though certain old men strolled to and fro, smoking magnificent pipes
-      at least a foot and a half long, the weight of which had to be supported
-      with the hand, there was little evidence of opulence or even of ease.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The passage of the automobile caused real alarm among male cyclists and
-      other wayfarers, who, in the most absurd, girlish manner, would even leap
-      across ditches to escape the risks of it. The women, curiously, showed
-      much more valor. The dogs were of a reckless audacity. From every
-      farmyard, at the sound of our coming, a fierce dog would rush out to
-      attack us, with no conception of our speed. Impossible to avoid these
-      torpedoes! We killed one instantaneously, and ran over another, which
-      somersaulted, and, aghast, then balanced itself on three legs. Scores of
-      dogs were saved by scores of miracles. Occasionally we came across a wise
-      dog that must have had previous altercations with automobiles, and learned
-      the lesson. By dusk we had thoroughly familiarized ourselves with the flat
-      Danish landscape, whose bare earth is of a rich gray purple; and as we
-      approached Esbjerg again, after a tour of 120 miles, we felt that we knew
-      Jutland by heart, and that the yacht could not fail to be waiting for us
-      in some cranny of the port, ready to take us to other shores. But the
-      yacht had not come.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then the head waiter grew to be our uncle, our father, our consoler. It is
-      true that he told us stories of ships that had set forth and never been
-      heard of again; but his moral influence was invaluable. He soothed us, fed
-      us, diverted us, interpreted us, and despatched cables for us. We called
-      him &ldquo;Ober,&rdquo; a name unsuitable to his diminutive form, his few years, and
-      his chubby face. Yet he was a true Ober. He expressed himself in four
-      languages, and could accomplish everything. In response to all our
-      requests, he would murmur in his exquisitely soft voice, &ldquo;Oh, yes! oh,
-      yes!&rdquo; He devised our daily excursions. He sent us to Ribe, the one ancient
-      town that we saw on the peninsula, in the cathedral of which was a young
-      girl who had stepped out of a picture by Memling, and who sold post-cards
-      with the gestures of a virgin saint and the astuteness of a dealer. He
-      sent us to the island of Fano, where the northeaster blows straight from
-      Greenland across a ten-mile bathing-beach peopled by fragile women who
-      saunter in muslin in front of vast hotels beneath a canopy of flags that
-      stand out horizontally in the terrible breeze. He provided us with
-      water-bottles and with plates (for palettes ), so that we could descend to
-      the multicolored port, and there, half sheltered from the wind by a pile
-      of fish-boxes and from the showers by an umbrella, produce wet
-      water-colors of fishing-smacks continually in motion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Day followed day. We had lived at Esbjerg all our lives. The yacht was
-      lost at sea. The yacht had never existed. The wife of the skipper, or,
-      rather, his widow, had twice cabled that she had no news. But the Ober
-      continued to bear our misfortunes with the most astounding gallantry. And
-      then there came a cable from the skipper, dated from the island of
-      Wangeroog.... Wan-geroog! Wangeroog! What a name for an impossible island!
-      What a name for an island at which to be weatherbound! We knew it not.
-      Baedeker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of it. We found it at
-      last on a map more than a hundred miles to the south. And I had been
-      walking down to the jetty thrice a day to gaze forth for the <i>Velsa&rsquo;s
-      wein!</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0136.jpg" alt="0136 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0136.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The skipper in his cable asked us to meet him at Friedrichstadt, on the
-      Eider, in Holstein, Germany. The trains were very slow and awkward. The
-      Ober said:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why do you not take an automobile? Much quicker.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes; but the German customs?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Everything shall be arranged,&rdquo; said the Ober.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I said:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see myself among the German bureaucracy in a hired car.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The Ober said calmly:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I will go with you.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;All the way?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I will go with you all the way. I will arrange everything. I speak German
-      very well. Nothing will go wrong.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Such a head waiter deserved encouragement. I encouraged him. He put on his
-      best clothes, and came, smoking cigars He took us faultlessly through the
-      German customs at the frontier. He superintended our first meal at a small
-      German hotel. I asked him to join us at table. He bowed and accepted. When
-      the meal was over, he rose and bowed again. It was a good meal. He took us
-      through three tire-bursts amid the horrid wastes of Schleswig-Holstein. He
-      escorted us into Friedrichstadt, and secured rooms for us at the hotel.
-      Then he said he must return. No! no! We could not let him abandon us in
-      the harsh monotony of that excessively tedious provincial town. But he
-      murmured that he must depart. The yacht might not arrive for days yet. I
-      shuddered.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;At any rate,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;before you leave, inquire where the haven is, and
-      take me to it, so that I may know how to find it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He complied. It was a small haven; a steamer and several ships were in it.
-      Behind one ship I saw a mast and a red pennant somewhat in the style of
-      the <i>Velsa</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;There,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;my yacht has a mast rather like that.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I looked again. Utterly impossible that the <i>Velsa</i> could have
-      arrived so quickly; but it was the <i>Velsa</i>. Joy! Almost tears of joy!
-      I led the Ober on board. He said solemnly:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It is very beautiful.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      So it was.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But our things were at the hotel. We had our rooms engaged at the hotel.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Ober said:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I will arrange everything.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In a quarter of an hour our baggage was on board, and there was no hotel
-      hill. And then the Ober really did depart, with sorrow. Never shall I look
-      on his like again. The next day we voyaged up the Eider, a featureless
-      stream whose life has been destroyed by the Kiel Canal, to its junction
-      with the Kiel Canal, eighty-six dull, placid kilometers. But no matter the
-      dullness; we were afloat and in motion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We spent about seventy-two hours in the German Empire, and emerged from
-      it, at Kiel, by the canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had
-      several times groaned in the formidable clutch of the Fatherland&rsquo;s
-      bureaucracy. She had been stopped by telephone at Friedrichstadt for
-      having passed the custom-house at the mouth of the Eider, the said
-      custom-house not being distinguished, as it ought to have been, by the
-      regulation flag. Again we were stopped by telephone at Rendsburg, on the
-      canal, for having dared to ascend the Eider without a pilot. Here the
-      skipper absolutely declined to pay the pilot-fees, and our papers were
-      confiscated, and we were informed that the panjandrum of the harbor would
-      call on us. However, he did not call on us; he returned our papers, and
-      let us go, thus supporting the skipper&rsquo;s hotly held theory that by the law
-      of nations yachts on rivers are free.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We were obliged to take a pilot for the canal. He was a nice,
-      companionable man, unhealthy, and gently sardonic. He told us that the
-      canal would be remunerative if war-ships paid dues. &ldquo;Only they don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he
-      added. Confronted with the proposition that the canal was very ugly
-      indeed, he repudiated it. He went up and down the canal forever and ever,
-      and saw nothing but the ships on it and the navigation signals. He said
-      that he had been piloting for twelve years, and had not yet had the same
-      ship twice. And there were 150 pilots on the canal!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We put him ashore and into the arms of his wife at Kiel, in heavy rain and
-      the customary northeaster, and we pushed forward into the comparative
-      freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort, which looked attractive
-      on the chart. But Friedrichsort was too naval for us; it made us feel like
-      spies. We crossed hastily to Moltenort, a little pleasure town. Even here
-      we had not walked a mile on land before we were involved in forts and
-      menacing sign-boards. We retreated. The whole fjord was covered with
-      battle-ships, destroyers, submarines, Hydro-aëroplanes curved in the
-      atmosphere, or skimmed the froth off the waves. The air was noisy with the
-      whizzing of varied screws. It was enormous, terrific, intimidating,
-      especially when at dusk search-lights began to dart among the lights of
-      the innumerable fjord passenger-steamers. We knew that we were deeply
-      involved in the tremendous German system. Still, our blue ensign flew
-      proudly, unchallenged.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0141.jpg" alt="0141 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0141.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The population of Moltenort was not seductive, though a few young men here
-      and there seemed efficient, smart, and decent. The women and girls left us
-      utterly unmoved. The major part of the visitors were content to sit
-      vacantly on the promenade at a spot where a powerful drain, discharging
-      into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the sense. These quiet,
-      tired, submissive persons struck us as being the raw slavish material of
-      the magnificent imperial system, and entirely unconnected with the
-      wondrous brains that organized it and kept it going. The next morning we
-      departed very early, but huge targets were being towed out in advance of
-      us, and we effected our final escape into the free Baltic only by braving
-      a fleet of battleships that fired into the checkered sky. Sometimes their
-      shells glinted high up in the sun, and seemed to be curving along the top
-      edge of an imaginary rainbow. We slowly left them astern, with, as I say,
-      a certain relief. Little, unmilitary Denmark lay ahead.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER VIII&mdash;BALTIC COMMUNITIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>T Vordingborg, a
-      small town at the extreme south of Sjaelland, the largest and easternmost
-      of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to be really for the first time
-      in pure and simple Denmark (Esbjerg had a certain international quality).
-      We had sailed through the Langelands Belt, skirting the monotonous
-      agricultural coasts of all sorts of islands, great and small, until one
-      evening we reached this city, which looked imposing on the map. When we
-      had followed the skipper ashore on his marketing expedition, and trodden
-      all the stony streets of little Vordingborg, we seemed to know what
-      essential Denmark, dozing in the midst of the Baltic, truly was.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Except a huge and antique fort, there was no visible historical basis to
-      this town. The main thoroughfare showed none of the dignity of tradition.
-      It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and comfortable bourgeoises were placidly
-      shopping therein&mdash;the same little bourgeoises that one sees all over
-      the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacconists; a bookseller who
-      also sold wall-papers; a sausage-shop, with a girl actuating an efficient
-      sausage-slicing machine, and in the window an electric fan whirring close
-      to a gigantic sausage. In the market, on a vague open space, a few carts,
-      with their shafts on the ground; a few stalls; a few women; a butcher
-      whipping off a hungry dog; three cheeses on a stand; baskets of fruit and
-      vegetables on the Danish ground; our skipper chattering by signs and
-      monosyllables in the middle. That was Vordingborg.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0146.jpg" alt="0146 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0146.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      In the churchyard there were only two graves. The church had no more
-      architectural interest than a modern church in a London suburb, though it
-      was older. We went within. The numbers of the hymns at the last service
-      were still forlornly stuck up on the indicator. The altar and screen were
-      ingenuously decorated in the style of a high-class booth at a fair. Three
-      women in huge disfiguring aprons were cleaning the interior. Their cloaks
-      and a white umbrella lay on the stone floor. They never even glanced at
-      us. We left the church, and then skirting market-gardens and climbing over
-      the ramparts of the fort, we descended to the mournful little railway
-      station, and as we watched a little train amble plaintively in and out of
-      that terminus, we thought of the numbers of the hymns sung at the last
-      service in the church, and the immense devastating ennui of provincial
-      existence in remote places enveloped us like a dank fog. We set sail, and
-      quitted Vordingborg forever, lest we might harden our hearts and be unjust
-      to Vordingborg, which, after all, at bottom, must be very like a million
-      other townlets on earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Compared with some of the ports we made, Vordingborg was a metropolis and
-      a center of art. When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and the Stege
-      Strand and the intricacies of the Rogestrommen, we found shelter in a
-      village harbor of the name of Faxo. Faxo had nothing&mdash;nothing but a
-      thousand trucks of marl, a girl looking out of a window, and a locked
-      railway station. We walked inland into a forest, and encountered the
-      railway track in the middle of the forest, and we walked back to Faxo, and
-      it was the same Faxo, except that a splendid brig previously at anchor in
-      the outer roads was slipping away in the twilight, and leaving us alone in
-      Faxo.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Spotsbjerg, on the north of the island of Sjælland, a small, untidy
-      fishing village with a harbor as big as a swimming-bath, there was not
-      even a visible church; we looked vainly for any church. But there was a
-      telephone, and on the quay there was a young and pretty girl leaning
-      motionless on her father&rsquo;s, or her grandfather&rsquo;s, tarpaulin shoulder. Full
-      of the thought that she would one day be old and plain, we fled from
-      Spotsbjerg, and traveled an incredible distance during the whole of a
-      bright Sunday, in order to refresh our mundane instincts at the capital of
-      the Jutland peninsula, Aarhus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0151.jpg" alt="0151 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0151.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And on approaching Aarhus, we ran into a regatta, and the <i>Velsa</i> had
-      less of the air of an aristocrat among the industrial classes than in such
-      ports as Spotsbjerg and Faxo. Further, a reporter came to obtain a &ldquo;story&rdquo;
-       about the strange Dutch yacht with the English ensign. It was almost equal
-      to being anchored off the Battery, New York.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Aarhus the pulse of the world was beating rather loud. In the windows
-      of the booksellers&rsquo; shops were photographs of the director of the
-      municipal theater surrounded by his troupe of stars. And he exactly
-      resembled his important brethren in the West End of London. I myself was
-      among the authors performed in the municipal theater, and I had a strange,
-      comic sensation of being world-renowned. Crowds surged in the streets of
-      Aarhus and in its cafés and tram-cars, and at least one of its taxicabs
-      was driven by a woman. It had a really admirable hotel, the Royal, with
-      first-class cooking, and a concert every night in its winter garden, where
-      the ruling classes met for inexpensive amusement, and succeeded in amusing
-      themselves with a dignity, a simplicity, and a politeness that could not
-      possibly be achieved in any provincial town in England, were it five times
-      the size of Aarhus. And why?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Withal, Aarhus, I have to confess, was not much of a place for elegance.
-      Its women failed, and the appearance of the women is the true test of a
-      civilization. So far in our Danish experience the women of Esbjerg stood
-      unrivaled. The ladies of Aarhus, even the leading ladies gathered together
-      in the Royal Hotel, lacked style and beauty. Many of them had had the
-      sense to retain the national short sleeve against the ruling of fashion,
-      but they did not arrive at any effect of individuality. They were neither
-      one thing nor the other. Their faces showed kindness, efficiency,
-      constancy, perhaps all the virtues; but they could not capture the
-      stranger&rsquo;s interest.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was more style at Helsingôr (Elsinore), a town much smaller than
-      Aarhus, but probably enlivened by naval and military influences, by its
-      close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry communication therewith, and
-      by its connection with Hamlet and Shakspere. The night ferries keep the
-      town unduly awake, but they energize it. Till a late hour the station and
-      the quay are busy with dim figures of chattering youth in pale costumes,
-      and the departure of the glittering train-laden ferry to a foreign country
-      two miles off is a romantic spectacle. The churches of Helsingôr have an
-      architectural interest, and its fruit shops display exotic fruits at high
-      prices. Officers flit to and fro on bicycles. Generals get out of a closed
-      cab at the railway station, and they bear a furled standard, and vanish
-      importantly with it into the arcana of the station. The newspapers of many
-      countries are for sale at the kiosk. The harbor-master is a great man, and
-      a suave.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The pride of Helsingor is the Kronborg Castle, within sight of the town
-      and most grandiosely overlooking sea and land. Feudal castles are often
-      well placed, but one seldom sees a renaissance building of such heroic
-      proportions in such a dramatically conceived situation. The castle is of
-      course used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enormous precincts, we
-      saw through a window a private sitting on a chair on a table, in fatigue
-      uniform, playing mildly a flageolet, and by his side on the table another
-      private in fatigue uniform, with a boot in one hand, doing nothing
-      whatever. And from these two figures, from the whitewashed bareness of the
-      chamber, and from the flageolet, was exhaled all the monstrous melancholy
-      of barrack-life, the same throughout the world. Part of the castle is set
-      aside as a museum, wherein, under the direction of a guide, one is
-      permitted to see a collection of pictures the surpassing ugliness of which
-      nearly renders them interesting. The guide points through a window in the
-      wall ten feet thick to a little plot of turf. &ldquo;Where Hamlet walked.&rdquo; No
-      historical authority is offered to the visitor for this statement. The
-      guide then leads one through a series of large rooms, empty save for an
-      occasional arm-chair, to the true heart of the Kronborg, where he
-      displayed to us a seated statue of Mr. Hall Caine, tinted an extreme
-      unpleasant bluish-white. An inscription told that it had been presented to
-      Kronborg by a committee of Englishmen a few years earlier to mark some
-      anniversary. The guide said it was a statue of Shakspere. I could not
-      believe him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0157.jpg" alt="0157 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0157.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER IX&mdash;A day&rsquo;s SAIL
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>LTHOUGH there is a
-      lively pleasure in discovering even the dullest and smallest towns and
-      villages, the finest experience offered by the Baltic is the savor of the
-      Baltic itself in a long day&rsquo;s sail. I mean a day of fourteen hours at
-      least, from six in the morning till eight at night, through varied
-      seascapes and landscapes and varied weather. As soon as the yacht leaves
-      harbor in the bracing chill of sunrise she becomes a distinct entity,
-      independent, self-reliant. The half-dozen men on her, cut off from the
-      world, are closely knitted into a new companionship, the sense of which is
-      expressed not in words, but by the subtleties of tone and mien; and if
-      only one amoung them falls short of absolute loyalty and good-will toward
-      the rest, the republic is a failure, and the air of ocean poisoned. The
-      dictum of an older and far more practised yachtsman than myself used
-      always to be, &ldquo;I &rsquo;ll have no man aboard my ship who can&rsquo;t smile all
-      the time.&rdquo; It is a good saying. And it could be applied to my yacht in the
-      Baltic. We had days at sea in the Baltic which were ideal and thrilling
-      from one end to the other.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0161.jpg" alt="0161 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0161.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      To make a final study of the chart in the cabin while waiting for
-      breakfast is a thrilling act. You choose a name on the chart, and decide:
-      &ldquo;We will go to that name.&rdquo; It is a name. It is not yet a town or a
-      village. It is just what you imagine it to be until you first sight it,
-      when it instantly falsifies every fancy. The course is settled. The ship
-      is on that course. The landmarks will suffice for an hour or two, but the
-      sea-marks must be deciphered on the chart, which is an English chart, and
-      hence inferior in fullness and clearness to either French or Dutch charts.
-      Strange, this, for a nation preëminently maritime! To compensate, the
-      English &ldquo;Sailing Directions&rdquo;&mdash;for example, the &ldquo;Pilot&rsquo;s Guide to the
-      Baltic&rdquo;&mdash;are so admirably written that it is a pleasure to read them.
-      Lucid, succinct, elegant, they might serve as models to a novelist. And
-      they are anonymous.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      To pick up the first buoy is thrilling. We are all equally ignorant of
-      these waters; the skipper himself has not previously sailed them, and we
-      are all, save the cook, engulfed below amid swaying saucepans, on the
-      lookout for that buoy. It ought to be visible at a certain hour, but it is
-      not. The skipper points with his hand and says the buoy must be about
-      there, but it is not. He looks through my glasses, and I look through his;
-      no result. Then the deck-hand, without glasses, cries grinning that he has
-      located her. After a quarter of an hour I can see the thing myself. That a
-      buoy? It is naught but a pole with a slightly swollen head. Absurd to call
-      it a buoy! Nevertheless, we are relieved, and in a superior manner we
-      reconcile ourselves to the Baltic idiosyncrasy of employing broom-handles
-      for buoys. The reason for this dangerous idiosyncrasy neither the skipper
-      nor anybody else could divine. Presently we have the broom close abeam, a
-      bobbing stick all alone in the immense wilderness of water. There it is on
-      the chart, and there it is in the water, a romantic miracle. We assuage
-      its solitude for a few minutes, and then abandon it to loneliness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We resume the study of the chart; for although we are quite sure of our
-      course, the skipper can never be sure enough. My attention is drawn to a
-      foot-note that explains the ice-signals of the Baltic. And the skipper
-      sets to telling tales of terror about the ice, in the Zuyder Zee and other
-      seas. He tells how the ice forms under the ship surreptitiously, coming up
-      from the bottom like treacle. You say, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s freezing to-night,&rdquo; and the
-      next morning the ship can&rsquo;t move; and you may die of starvation, for
-      though the ice will hold the ship, it won&rsquo;t hold you. The skipper knew men
-      who could remember ice in the Zuyder Zee in June. He himself had once
-      oscillated for a whole week between two ports on the Zuyder Zee, visible
-      to each other, pushed hither and thither by the ice, and unable to get
-      anywhere at all. But ice was less terrible than it used to he, owing to
-      the increased strength and efficiency of ice-breakers. And climate was
-      less rigorous. Thus the skipper would reassure us for a moment, only to
-      intimidate us afresh. For it seems that the ice has a way of climbing; it
-      will climb up over everything, and inclose a ship. Indeed, he was most
-      impressive on the subject of ice. He said that the twin horrors of the sea
-      were ice and fog. But of fog he told no tales, being occupied with the
-      forward valve of the engine. We perceived that yachtsmen who go out when
-      it happens to suit them, between May and September only, can never achieve
-      intimacy with the entire individuality of the sea.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The weather has now cleared for a while. The sun is hot, the saloon
-      skylight warm to the touch. You throw off a jersey. The tumbling water is
-      a scale of deep blues, splendid against the brass of the bollard and the
-      reddishness of the spars. The engine is running without a &ldquo;knock&rdquo;; the
-      sails are nicely filled; the patent log is twirling aft. A small rainbow
-      shines steadily in the foam thrown up from the bows, and a great rainbow
-      stretches across all heaven, with its own ghost parallel to it. Among the
-      large, soft clouds rags of dark cloud are uneasily floating. On the flat
-      shores of near islands the same cereals ripen as ripen at home. And this
-      is thrilling. Distant islands are miraged. Even a distant battleship seems
-      to be lifted clean out of the water by the so-called mirage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then a trading-schooner, small, but much larger than us, relentlessly
-      overhauls us. She laughs at the efforts of our engine to aid our sails,
-      and forges ahead, all slanting, with her dinghy slung up tight aft, over
-      her rudder. And then it is the still small voice of the stomach that
-      speaks. Hunger and repletion follow each other very swiftly on such days.
-      The after-breakfast cigar is scarcely finished before a genuine curiosity
-      as to the menu of lunch comes to birth within. We glance into the saloon.
-      Yes, the white cloth is laid, but we cannot eat cloth. The cook and the
-      chronometer are conspiring together against us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the afternoon the weather is thick and squally. And we are creeping
-      between sad and forlorn veiled islands that seem to exude all the
-      melancholy of the seas. There is plenty of water, but only in a deceiving
-      horizontal sense. The channel is almost as narrow and as tortuous as a
-      Devonshire lane. English charts are criminally preposterous, and so are
-      Danish brooms. Hardly can one distinguish between a starboard and a port
-      broom. Is the life of a yacht to depend on such negligent devices? The
-      skipper is worried. And the spectacle of a ship aground in mid-sea does
-      not tranquilize. Sometimes the hail wipes out for a few seconds the whole
-      prospect. The eyes of everybody are strained with looking for distant
-      brooms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0168.jpg" alt="0168 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0168.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Then we are free of the archipelago, and also the sky clears. The sun,
-      turning orange, is behind us, and the wind in our teeth. Ahead is a
-      schooner, beating. And she is the schooner of the morning. Our engine now
-      has the better of her. As we overtake her, she runs away on one tack, and
-      comes back on the next. She bears down on our stern, huge, black,
-      glittering. A man and a boy are all her crew. This man and this boy are
-      entitled to be called mariners, as distinguished from yachtsmen. We can
-      see their faces plainly as they gaze down at us from their high deck. And
-      you may see just the same faces on the liners that carry emigrants from
-      Denmark to the West, and the same limbs sprawling on the decks of the
-      Esbjerg steamers, as the same hands scrawl Danish characters on picture
-      postal cards to the inhabitants of these very islands.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sea is now purple, and the schooner a little black blot on the red
-      panorama of the sunset; and ahead, amid faint yellow and green fields, is
-      a white speck, together with sundry red specks and blue specks. The name
-      on the chart! And then the haven is descried, and a ring of masts with
-      fluttering rags. And then the lighthouse and the roofs detach themselves,
-      and the actual mouth of the haven appears. Twilight falls; the engine is
-      moderated; the deck-hand stands by with a pole. Very slowly we slide in,
-      and the multitudinous bright tints of the fishing-smacks are startlingly
-      gay even in the dusk. The skipper glances rapidly about him, and yells out
-      in Dutch to a fisherman, who replies in Danish. The skipper shakes his
-      head, at a loss, and gives an order to the deck-hand. The deck-hand claws
-      with a pole at a yellow smack. We have ceased to be independent. The name
-      on the chart is a name no longer. It is a living burg, a poor little
-      place, good enough to sleep in, and no more. But another stage on the
-      journey to that magic capital Copenhagen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PART3" id="link2H_PART3"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PART III COPENHAGEN
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER X&mdash;THE DANISH CAPITAL
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>CROSS the great
-      expanse of Kjoge Bay, Copenhagen first became visible as a group of
-      factory chimneys under a firmament of smoke. We approached it rapidly upon
-      smooth water, and ran into the narrowing bottle-neck of Kallebo, with the
-      main island of Sjælland to the west and the appendant island of Amager to
-      the east. Copenhagen stands on both, straddling over a wide connecting
-      bridge which carries double lines of electric trams and all the traffic of
-      a metropolis. When a yacht, even a small one, wishes to enter the harbor,
-      this bridge is cut in two and lifted into the air, and the traffic
-      impatiently champs its bit while waiting for the yacht.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0174.jpg" alt="0174 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0174.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Apparently they understand yachts at Copenhagen, as they do in Holland. At
-      the outer harrier of the harbor we were not even requested to stop. A
-      cheerful and beneficent functionary cried out for our name, our captain&rsquo;s
-      name, our tonnage, and our immediate origin, and, his curiosity being
-      sated, waved us onward. The great bridge bisected itself for us with
-      singular promptitude. Nevertheless, the gold-buttoned man in charge
-      thereof from his high perch signaled to us that our burgee was too small.
-      We therefore, having nothing else handy to placate him, ran up a blue
-      ensign to the masthead; but it looked so excessively odd there, so acutely
-      contrary to the English etiquette of yachts, that we at once hauled it
-      down again. No further complaint was made.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We were now in the haven, and over the funnels of many ships we could see
-      the city. It was all copper domes and roofs; and we saw that it was a
-      proud city, and a city where exposed copper turns to a beautiful green
-      instead of to black, as in London. Splendid copper domes are the chief
-      symptom of Copenhagen. After all the monotonous, tiny provincialism of the
-      peninsula and of the islands, it was sensational to find a vast capital at
-      the far end of the farthest island. We thought we were coming to the end
-      of the world, and we came to a complete and dazzling city that surpassed,
-      for example, Brussels in its imposingness. We turned westward out of the
-      main channel into the heart of the town, and in a moment were tied up to a
-      smack, and the red-and-green bourse was leaning over us; the rattle and
-      ringing and stamping of horses, lorries, tram-cars, and taxi-cabs deafened
-      us on three sides; and a bridge trembling with traffic barred our way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Towers and spires rose beyond the bridge; crowds stood to gaze at us;
-      steamers and warehouses filled the prospect to the north; and under our
-      bows the petrol-engined gondolas of Copenhagen, each holding a dozen
-      passengers or so, continually shot. We were in the midst of a terrific
-      din, but we cared not. We had arrived, and we had arrived in a grand town;
-      we knew that at the first glance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0179.jpg" alt="0179 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0179.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      In something less than half an hour one of us had gone forth and returned
-      with grave tidings: &ldquo;This is a most exciting city. I&rsquo;ve already seen lots
-      of beautiful women, some with lovely tow-colored hair.&rdquo; The charm of
-      distant Esbjerg was at last renewed. I went forth myself, into a very
-      clean, fresh-looking city, with simple and lively inhabitants. In a trice
-      I had gazed at the Thorvaldsen Museum (which I had no intention of
-      entering, Thorvaldsen being for me on about the same artistic plane as the
-      inexcusable Ary Scheffer of Dordrecht), the Christianborg Palace, which
-      had an austere and kingly air, the very modern and admirable town hall,
-      the old railway station, which has been transformed into the largest
-      kinema in the world, the floating fish shops and fish restaurants (made
-      out of old smacks and schooners), the narrow, thronged shopping streets,
-      the celebrated Tivoli establishment, and the yacht-like steamers that from
-      a quay, which might almost be called the gate to Sweden, in the very
-      middle of the town, are constantly setting sail for Scandinavia. From
-      Copenhagen you go to Sweden as thoughtlessly as in New York you go from
-      Forty-second to Sixty-ninth Street, or in London from the Bank to Chelsea,
-      and with less discipline. If the steamer has cast off, and the captain
-      sees you hurrying up the street, he stops his engines and waits for you,
-      and you are dragged on board by a sailer; whereupon the liner departs,
-      unless the captain happens to see somebody else hurrying up the street.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen was enough to convince my feet
-      that it was not a city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped back
-      to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a carriage. He knew no more of
-      the city than I did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak a single
-      word of Danish; but I felt sure that he would return with an equipage.
-      What I desired was an equipage with a driver who could speak either
-      English, French, or Dutch. He did return with an equipage, and it was
-      overpowering. Rather like a second-hand state carriage, it was drawn by
-      two large gray horses, perhaps out of a circus, and driven by a liveried
-      being who was alleged to speak French. I shuddered at the probable cost of
-      this prodigious conveyance, but pretended I did not care. The ligure named
-      was just seven dollars a day. We monopolized the carriage during our
-      sojourn, and the days were long; but the coachman never complained.
-      Possibly because he had no language in which to complain. We learned in a
-      moment that his ability to speak French was entirely mythical. Then some
-      one said that a misunderstanding had occurred at the livery-stables, and
-      that German was the foreign language he spoke, But he did not speak German
-      either, nor anything else. He was just another of those strange creatures
-      met in the course of travel who are born, who mature, and who die without
-      speaking or comprehending any language whatever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From the height of his spacious and sedate vehicle we gazed down upon the
-      rushing population of Copenhagen&mdash;beautiful women, with lovely
-      tow-colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The driver only made one
-      mistake, but it was a bad one. We wanted tea, and we asked him to go to a
-      teagarden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went. He took us up an
-      interminable boulevard, with a special strip for cyclists. Thousands upon
-      thousands of cyclists, all fair, passed and repassed us. He went on and
-      on. One of the horses fell lame, but it made no difference. We could not
-      stop him. And repetitions of the word for tea in French and German had no
-      effect save to make him smile. We constantly descried what seemed in the
-      distance to be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens. We saw an
-      incomprehensible colony of doll&rsquo;s houses&mdash;well-kept suburban huts
-      exteriorly resembling houses&mdash;in a doll&rsquo;s garden. We could not
-      conceive the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not a tea-garden.
-      Presently the carriage was stopped by a man demanding money. He wore no
-      uniform, but conveyed to us that he was an official of the town of
-      Hillerup, and that strange carriages had to pay forty-eight ore in order
-      to traverse Hillerup.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It seemed a lot of money; but as it only amounted to sixpence, we paid.
-      The man may have been a highwayman. We looked at the map for Hillerup, and
-      found it miles away from Copenhagen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We were now in serious need of tea, and helpless. The driver drove on. He
-      conducted us through half a dozen seaside resorts on the quite unjustly
-      celebrated &ldquo;Danish Riviera&rdquo;; he came actually to the end of the tram-line,
-      and then he curved inland into a forest (more to pay). We were now angry
-      and still helpless. The forest had no end, and the roads in it no
-      direction. Desperate, we signaled to him to turn back. He would not. He
-      informed us on his lingers that he would be arriving in twenty minutes or
-      so. When he did arrive, we solved the mystery. He had confused the word
-      for tea with the word for deer, and had brought us to a well-known country
-      resort called the Deer Park. A few miserable tourists were in fact
-      drinking cold, bad tea on a windy terrace overlooking a distant horizon,
-      far beyond which lay Copenhagen. We swallowed the tea, the driver
-      swallowed beer, and we started hack. We had no overcoats, and the Baltic
-      evening was cold. Trams overtook us flying at a tremendous pace into
-      Copenhagen, and we were behind a lame horse. In the dusk we reached once
-      more the desirable city, whose women never seemed more fair to us than
-      they did then. This adventure taught us that the yachtsman must be
-      prepared for any adventure, even the wildest.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XI&mdash;CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE most
-      interesting thing, to the complete stranger, in a large foreign city that
-      does not live on its own past is not the museums, but the restaurants and
-      cafés, even in the dead season. We were told that August was the dead
-      season in Copenhagen, and that all the world was at the seaside resorts.
-      We had, however, visited a number of Danish seaside resorts, and they were
-      without exception far more dead than Copenhagen. In particular Marienlyst,
-      reputed to be the haunt of fashion and elegance, proved to be a very sad,
-      deserted strand. Copenhagen was not dead.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restaurant, signalized to us by
-      authority as the finest in Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold
-      place, full of waiters who had learned English in America, of
-      hors-d&rsquo;ouvre, and of music. The hand was much better than the food, but it
-      has to be said that we arrived at half-past seven, when Danish dinner is
-      over and Danish supper not begun. Still, many middle-class people were
-      unceremoniously and expensively eating&mdash;in the main hors-d&rsquo;ouvre. The
-      metropolitanism of Copenhagen was at once apparent in this great
-      restaurant. The people had little style, but they had the assurance and
-      the incuriousness of metropolitans, and they were accustomed to throwing
-      money about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the idiosyncrasies of
-      waiters, and to being in the swim. Wivels might show itself on Fifth
-      Avenue or in the Strand without blushing. And its food had the wholesale,
-      crude quality of the food offered in these renowned streets to persons in
-      the swim.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Next we went to the Hôtel d&rsquo;Angleterre, which was just the restaurant of
-      the standardized international hotel. Once within its walls, and you might
-      as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harrogate, Rome, Algiers, Brussels, as
-      at Copenhagen. The same menu, the same cooking, the same waiters, the same
-      furniture, the same toothpicks, and the same detestable, self-restrained
-      English travelers, with their excruciating Englishness. The café on the
-      ground floor of this hotel, overlooking a large and busy circular <i>place</i>,
-      with the opera and other necessaries of metropolitan life close by, was
-      more amusing than the restaurant. It was a genuine resort in the
-      afternoon. The existence of Copenhagen rolled to and fro in front of its
-      canopied terrace, and one might sit next to an English yachting party of
-      astounding correctness and complacency (from one of those conceited
-      three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white, and jeweled in many holes, like a
-      watch), or to a couple of Danish commercials, or to a dandy and his love.
-      Here we one night singled out for observation a very characteristic Danish
-      young man and young woman with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive
-      voices, and the soothing gestures of the North. It was an agreeable sight;
-      but when we had carried our observation somewhat further, we discovered
-      that they were an English pair on their honeymoon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0186.jpg" alt="0186 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0186.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      In a day or two, feeling more expert in things Danish, we wanted a truly
-      Danish restaurant, unspoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the
-      Wiener Café, appanage of the Hotel King of Denmark. A long, narrow room,
-      anciently and curiously furnished, with mid-Victorian engravings on the
-      somber walls. The waiters had the austerity of priests presiding at a
-      rite. Their silent countenances said impassively: &ldquo;This is the most select
-      resort in our great and historic country. It has been frequented by the
-      flower of Danish aristocracy, art, and letters for a thousand years. It
-      has not changed. It never will. No upstart cosmopolitanism can enter here.
-      Submit yourselves. Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the niceties of
-      our ceremonial, for we have consented to receive you.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In brief, it was rather like an English bank, or a historic hotel in an
-      English cathedral town, though its food was better, I admit. The menu was
-      in strict Danish. We understood naught of it, but it had the air of a
-      saga. At the close of the repast, the waiter told us that, for the <i>prix
-      fixe</i>, we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said, &ldquo;Will you let
-      me have a look at the cake, and then I &lsquo;ll decide.&rdquo; He replied that he
-      could not; that the cake could not be produced unless it was definitively
-      ordered. The strange thing was that he persisted in this attitude. Cake
-      never had been shown on approval at the Wiener Café of the Hotel King of
-      Denmark, and it never would he. I bowed the head before an august
-      tradition, and ordered cheese. The Wiener Café ought to open a branch in
-      London; it was the most English affair I have ever encountered out of
-      England.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely English. That very night we chose
-      the restaurant of the Hotel&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;for dinner. The
-      room was darkly gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly shown to
-      an empty table, and a menu was dung at us. The head waiter and three
-      inefficient under waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for
-      fifteen minutes; they had their habitués to serve. At the end of fifteen
-      minutes we softly and apologetically rose and departed, without causing
-      any apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat boy, whom we basely
-      omitted to tip.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0191.jpg" alt="0191 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0191.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets, searching hungrily for a
-      restaurant that seemed receptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck
-      guided us into the Café de l&rsquo;Industrie, near the Tivoli. The managers of
-      this industrious café had that peculiar air, both independent and
-      amicable, which sits so well on the directors of an organism that is
-      firmly established in the good-will of the flourishing mass. No
-      selectness, no tradition, no formality, no fashion, no preposterous
-      manners about the Café de l&rsquo;Industrie, but an aspect of solid, rather
-      vulgar, all-embracing, all-forgiving prosperity. It was not cheap, neither
-      was it dear. It was gaudy, but not too gaudy. The waiters were men of the
-      world, experienced in human nature, occupied, hasty, both curt and
-      expansive, not servile, not autocratic. Their faces said: &ldquo;Look here, I
-      know the difficulties of running a popular restaurant, and you know them,
-      too. This is not heaven, especially on a Sunday night; but we do our best,
-      and you get value for your money.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The customers were samples of all Copenhagen. They had money to spend, but
-      not too much. There were limits to their recklessness in the pursuit of
-      joy. They were fairly noisy, quite without affectation, fundamentally
-      decent, the average Danish. Elegance was rarer than beauty, and
-      spirituality than common sense, in that restaurant. We ate moderately in
-      the din and clash of hors d&rsquo;ouvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music,
-      and thanked our destiny that we had had the superlative courage to leave
-      the Hotel &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, with its extreme correctitude.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Finally, among our excursions &lsquo;n restaurants, must be mentioned a crazy
-      hour in the restaurant of the Hotel &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, supreme
-      example of what the enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accomplish
-      when it sets about to imitate the German <i>art nouveau</i>. The &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
-      is a grand hotel in which everything, with the most marvelous and
-      terrifying ingenuity, has been designed in defiance of artistic tradition.
-      A fork at the &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; resembles no other fork on
-      earth, and obviously the designer&rsquo;s first and last thought was to be
-      unique. It did not matter to him what kind of fork he produced so long as
-      it was different from any previous fork in human history. The same with
-      the table-cloth, the flower-vase, the mustard-pot, the chair, the carpet,
-      the dado, the frieze, the tessellated pavement, the stair-rail, the
-      wash-basin, the bedstead, the quilt, the very door-knobs. The proprietors
-      of the place had ordered a new hotel in the extreme sense, and their order
-      had been fulfilled. It was a prodigious undertaking, and must certainly
-      have been costly. It was impressive proof of real initiative. It
-      intimidated the beholder, who had the illusion of being on another planet.
-      Its ultimate effect was to outrival all other collections of ugliness. I
-      doubt whether in Berlin itself such ingenious and complete ugliness could
-      be equaled in the same cubic space. My idea is that the creators of the
-      Hotel &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; may lawfully boast of standing alone on
-      a pinnacle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was an inspiration on the part of the creators, when the hotel was
-      finished to the last salt-spoon, to order a number of large and
-      particularly bad copies of old masters, in inexpensive gilt frames, and to
-      hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls. The resulting effect of
-      grotesquery is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
-      justly ranks as one of the leading European hotels. It is a mercy that the
-      architect and the other designers were forbidden to meddle with the
-      cooking, which sins not by any originality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The summary and summit of the restaurants and cafes of Copenhagen is the
-      Tivoli. New York has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can only
-      say with regret that the Tivoli is what Earl&rsquo;s Court ought to be, and is
-      not. The Tivoli comprises, within the compass of a garden in the midst of
-      the city, restaurants, cafés, theater, concert-hall, outdoor theater,
-      bands, pantomime, vaudeville, dancing-halls, and very numerous side-shows
-      on both land and water. The strangest combinations of pleasure are
-      possible at the Tivoli. You can, for instance, as we did, eat a French
-      dinner while watching a performance of monkeys on a tightrope. The
-      opportunities for weirdness in felicity are endless. We happened to arrive
-      at Copenhagen just in time for the fêtes celebrating the seventieth
-      anniversary of the Tivoli, which is as ancient as it is modern. On the
-      great night the Tivoli reveled until morning. It must be the pride of the
-      populace of Copenhagen, and one of the city&rsquo;s dominating institutions. It
-      cannot be ignored. It probably uses more electric light than any other ten
-      institutions put together. And however keenly you may resent its
-      commonplace attraction, that attraction will one day magnetize you to
-      enter its gates&mdash;at the usual fee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand people at once in the Tivoli,
-      not a bad total for one resort in a town of only half a million
-      inhabitants. And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to the foreign
-      observer, not merely for the pervading beauty and grace cf the women,
-      which was remarkable, but also for the evident fact that as a race the
-      Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety, dignity, and simplicity.
-      Their demeanor was a lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to discover how
-      to enjoy themselves freely without being either ridiculous or vulgar or
-      brutish. The twenty thousand represented in chief the unassuming
-      middle-class of Copenhagen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0197.jpg" alt="0197 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0197.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, &ldquo;nuts,&rdquo; rascals, obelisks,
-      and mere artisans among the lot, but the solid bulk was the middle-class,
-      getting value for its money in an agreeable and unexceptionable manner.
-      The memory of those thousands wandering lightly clad in the cold Northern
-      night, under domes and festoons and pillars of electric light, amid the
-      altercations of conflicting orchestras, or dancing in vast, stuffy
-      inclosures, or drinking and laughing and eating hors-d&rsquo;ouvre under rustling
-      trees, or submitting gracefully to Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose
-      glazed aisles were two restaurants, or floating on icy lakes, or just
-      beatifically sitting on al-fresco seats in couples&mdash;this memory
-      remains important in the yachtsman&rsquo;s experiences of the Baltic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XII&mdash;ARISTOCRACY AND ART
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE harbor-master
-      would not allow us to remain for more than three days in our original
-      berth, which served us very well as a sort of grand stand for viewing the
-      life of Copenhagen. His theory was that we were in the way of honest
-      laboring folk, and that we ought to be up in the &ldquo;sound,&rdquo; on the
-      northeastern edge of the city, where the yachts lie. We contested his
-      theory, but we went, because it is unwise to quarrel with a bureaucracy of
-      whose language you are ignorant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was opposite a coaling station,
-      and also opposite a shipbuilding yard, and from the west came a strong
-      odor out of a manufactory of something unpleasant. We could have tolerated
-      the dust, the noise, and the smell, but what we could not tolerate was the
-      heavy rolling, for the north wind was blowing and the anchorage exposed to
-      it. Indeed, the Royal Danish Yacht Club might have chosen more comfortable
-      quarters for itself. We therefore unostentatiously weighed anchor again,
-      and reëntered the town, and hid ourselves among many businesslike tugs in
-      a little creek called the New Haven, whose extremity was conveniently
-      close to the Café d&rsquo;Angleterre. We hoped that the prowling harbor-master
-      would not catch sight of us, and he did not.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0204.jpg" alt="0204 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0204.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The aristocratic and governing quarter of the town lay about us, including
-      the Bregade, a street full of antiquaries, marble churches, and baroque
-      houses, and the Amalienborg Palace, which is really four separate similar
-      palaces (in an octagonal <i>place</i>) thrown into one. Here all the
-      prospects and vistas were dignified, magnificent, and proudly exclusive.
-      The eighteenth century had nobly survived, when the populace was honestly
-      regarded as a horde created by divine providence in order that the ruling
-      classes might practise upon it the art of ruling. There was no Tivoli when
-      those beautiful pavements were made, and as you stand on those pavements
-      and gaze around at the royal grandiosity, speckless and complete, you can
-      almost imagine that even the French Revolution has not yet occurred. The
-      tiny, colored sentry at the vast, gray gates is still living in the
-      eighteenth century. The architecture is not very distinguished, but it has
-      style. It shames the &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; Hotel. The Frederiks
-      Church, whose copper dome overtops the other copper domes, is a fair
-      example of the quarter. Without being in the least a masterpiece, it
-      imposes by its sincerity and its sense of its own importance. And the
-      interior is kept as scrupulously as a boudoir. The impeccability of the
-      marble flooring is wondrous, and each of the crimson cushions in the
-      polished pews is like a lady&rsquo;s pillow. Nothing rude can invade this
-      marmoreal fane.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Rosenborg Palace, not far off, is open to the public, so that all may
-      judge what was the life of sovereigns in a small country, and what
-      probably still is. The royal villas outside Florence are very ugly, but
-      there is a light grace about their furnishing which lifts them far above
-      the heavy, stuffy, tasteless mediocrity of such homes as the Rosenborg.
-      Badly planned, dark, unhygienic, crammed with the miscellaneous ugliness
-      of generations of royal buying, the Rosenborg is rather a sad sight to
-      people of taste; and the few very lovely tilings that have slipped in here
-      and there by inadvertence only intensify its mournfulness. The phantoms of
-      stupid courtiers seem to pervade, strictly according to etiquette, its
-      gloomy salons. And yet occasionally, in the disposition of an arm-chair or
-      a screen, one realizes that it must, after all, have been a home,
-      inhabited by human beings worthy of sympathy. It is the most bourgeois
-      home I ever entered. In a glass case, with certain uniforms, were hung the
-      modern overcoat (a little frayed) and the hat of a late monarch. They
-      touched the heart of the sardonic visitor, their exposure was so naive.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Even more depressing than this mausoleum of nineteenth-century maimers was
-      the museum of art. As a colossal negation of art, this institution ranks
-      with the museum of Lausanne. It is an enormous and ugly building, full of
-      enormous ugliness in painting and sculpture. It contained a fine Rembrandt&mdash;&ldquo;Christ
-      at Emmaus&rdquo;&mdash;and one good modern picture, a plowing scene by
-      Wilhelmson. We carefully searched the immense rooms for another good
-      modern picture, and found it not. Even the specimens of Gauguin, Van Gogh,
-      and Bonnard were mediocre.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sculpture was simply indescribable. The eye roamed like a bird over
-      the waters of the deluge, and saw absolutely nothing upon which to alight
-      with safety. Utter desolation reigned. The directors of this museum had
-      never, save in the case of Wilhelmson, been guilty of an inadvertence.
-      Their instinct against beauty in any form was unerring. Imagine the stony
-      desert of rooms and corridors and giant staircases on a wet Sunday
-      morning, echoing to the footsteps of the simple holiday crowd engaged
-      patriotically in the admiration of Danish art; imagine ingenuous,
-      mackintoshed figures against the vast flanks of stiff and terrific marble
-      Venuses and other gods; imagine the whispering in front of anecdotes in
-      paint; imagine the Inferno of an artist&mdash;and you have the art museum,
-      the abode and lurking-place of everlasting tedium.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Quite different is the Glyptothek, a museum whose existence is due to
-      private enterprise and munificence. It is housed in an ugly and
-      ill-planned building, but the contents are beautiful, very well arranged,
-      and admirably exposed. The Glyptothek has an entrancing small picture by
-      Tiepolo, of Antony and Cleopatra meeting, which I was informed must be a
-      study for a larger picture in Venice It alone should raise the museum to a
-      shrine of pilgrimage, and it is not even mentioned in Baedeker! But the
-      Glyptothek triumphs chiefly by its sculpture. Apart from its classical
-      side, it has a superb collection of Meuniers, which impressed, without
-      greatly pleasing, me; a roomful of Rodin busts which are so honest and
-      lifelike and jolly that when you look at them you want to laugh&mdash;you
-      must laugh from joy. And the Carpeaux busts of beautiful women&mdash;what
-      a profound and tranquil satisfaction n gazing at them!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0209.jpg" alt="0209 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0209.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Some of the rooms at the Glyptothek are magical in their effect on the
-      sensibility. They would make you forget wife and children, yachts, income
-      tax, and even the Monroe Doctrine. Living Danish women were apposite
-      enough to wander about the sculpture rooms for our delectation, making
-      delicious contrasts against the background of marble groups.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XIII&mdash;THE RETURN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E left Copenhagen
-      with regrets, for the entity of the town was very romantic and attractive.
-      Even the humble New Haven, where we sheltered from the eye of the
-      harbor-master, had its charm for us. It was the real sailors&rsquo; quarter,
-      thoroughly ungentlemanly and downright. The shops on each side of the
-      creek were below the level of the street and even of the water, and every
-      one of them was either a café, with mysterious music heating behind glazed
-      doors, or an emporium of some sort for sailors. Revelries began in the
-      afternoon. You might see a nice neat Danish wife guiding an obstreperously
-      intoxicated Danish sailor down the steps leading to a cigar shop. Not a
-      pleasant situation for a nice wife! But, then, you reflected that he was a
-      sailor, and that he had doubtless been sober and agreeable a short while
-      before, and would soon be sober and agreeable again; and that perhaps
-      there were great compensations in his character. At night Bacchus and Pan
-      were the true gods of that quarter, and the worship of them was loud and
-      yet harmonious.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We prepared reluctantly to depart; the engine also. The engine would not
-      depart, and it was a new engine. Two hours were spent in wheedling and
-      conciliating its magneto. After that the boat traveled faster than it had
-      ever traveled. We passed out of Copenhagen into the sound, leaving a noble
-      array of yachts behind, and so up the sound. Soon Copenhagen was naught
-      but a bouquet of copper domes, and its beautiful women became legendary
-      with us, and our memory heightened their beauty. And then the engine
-      developed a &ldquo;knock.&rdquo; Now, in a small internal-combustion engine a &ldquo;knock&rdquo;
-       may be due to bad petrol or to a misplacement of the magneto or to a
-      hundred other schisms in the secret economy of the affair. We slowed to
-      half-speed and sought eagerly the origin of the &ldquo;knock,&rdquo; which, however,
-      remained inexplicable. We were engloomed; we were in despair.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had just decided to stop the engine when it stopped of itself, with a
-      fearful crash of broken metal One side of the casing was shattered. The
-      skipper&rsquo;s smile was tragical. The manliness of all of us trembled under
-      the severity of the ordeal which fate had administered. To open out the
-      engine-box and glance at the wreck in the depths thereof was
-      heart-rending. We could not closely examine the chaos of steel and brass
-      because it was too hot, but we knew that the irremediable had occurred in
-      the bowels of the <i>Velsa</i>. We made sail, and crawled back to the
-      sound, and mournfully anchored with our unseen woe among the other yachts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The engine was duly inspected bit by bit; and it appeared that only the
-      bearing of the forward piston was broken, certainly owing to careless
-      mounting of the engine in the shops. It was an enormous catastrophe, but
-      perhaps not irremediable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Indeed, within a short time the skipper was calculating that he could get
-      a new bearing made in Copenhagen in twenty-four hours. Anyhow, we had to
-      reconcile ourselves to a second visit to Copenhagen. And Copenhagen, a few
-      hours earlier so sweet a name in our ears, was now hateful to us, a kind
-      of purgatory to which we were condemned for the sins of others.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0216.jpg" alt="0216 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0216.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The making and fitting of the new bearing occupied just seventy hours.
-      During this interminable period we enjoyed the scenery of the sound and
-      grew acquainted with its diverse phenomena. The weather, if wet, was calm,
-      and the surface of the water smooth; but every steamer that passed would
-      set up a roll that flung hooks, if not crockery, about the saloon. And the
-      procession of steamers in both directions was constant from five a. m. to
-      midnight. They came from and went to every part of the archipelago and of
-      Sweden and of northern Germany. We gradually understood that at Copenhagen
-      railways are a trifle, and the sea a matter of the highest importance.
-      Nearly all traffic is seaborne.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We discovered, too, that the immediate shore of the sound, and of the
-      yacht-basin scooped out of it, was a sort of toy seaside resort for the
-      city. Part of the building in which the Royal Danish Yacht Club is housed
-      was used as a public restaurant, with a fine terrace that commanded the
-      yacht-club landing-stage and all the traffic of the sound. Moreover, it
-      was a good restaurant, except that the waiters seemed to be always eating
-      some titbit on the sly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Here we sat and watched the business and pleasure of the sound. The czar&rsquo;s
-      yacht came to anchor, huge and old-fashioned and ungraceful, with a
-      blue-and-white standard large enough to make a suit of sails for a
-      schooner&mdash;the biggest yacht afloat, I think, but not a pleasing
-      object, though better than the antique ship of the Danish king. The
-      unwieldy ceremoniousness of Russian courts seemed to surround this pompous
-      vessel, and the solitary tragedy of imperial existence was made manifest
-      in her. Ah, the savage and hollow futility of saluting guns! The two
-      English royal yachts, both of which we saw in the neighborhood, were in
-      every way strikingly superior to the Russian.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Impossible to tire of the spectacle offered by that restaurant terrace. At
-      night the steamers would slip down out of Copenhagen one after the other
-      to the ends of the Baltic, and each was a moving parterre of electricity
-      on the darkness. And then we would walk along the nocturnal shore and find
-      it peopled with couples and larger groups, whose bicycles were often
-      stacked in groups, too. And the little yachts in the little yacht-basin
-      were each an illuminated household! A woman would emerge from a cabin and
-      ask a question of a man on the dark bank, and he would flash a
-      lantern-light in her face like a missile, and &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she would cry. And
-      farther on the great hulk which is the home of the Copenhagen Amateur
-      Sailing Club would be lit with festoons of lamps, and from within it would
-      come the sounds of song and the laughter of two sexes. And then we would
-      yell, &ldquo;<i>Velsa</i>, ahoy!&rdquo; and keep on yelling until all the lightly clad
-      couples were drawn out of the chilly night like moths by the strange
-      English signaling. And at last the <i>Velsa</i> would wake up, and the
-      dinghy would detach itself from her side, and we would go aboard. But not
-      until two o&rsquo;clock or so would the hilarity and music of the Amateur
-      Sailing Club cease, and merge into a frantic whistling for taxicabs from
-      the stand beyond the restaurant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then a few hours&rsquo; slumber, broken by nightmares of the impossibility of
-      ever quitting Copenhagen, and we would get up and gaze at the sadness of
-      the dismantled engine, and over the water at the yachts dozing and rocking
-      in the dawn. And on a near yacht, out of the maw of a forecastle-hatch
-      left open for air, a half-dressed sailor would appear, and yawn, and
-      stretch his arms, and then begin to use a bucket on the yacht&rsquo;s deck.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0221.jpg" alt="0221 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0221.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The day was born. A green tug would hurry northward, splashing; and the
-      first of the morning steamers would arrive from some mystical distant
-      island, a vessel, like most of the rest, of about six hundred tons, red
-      and black funnels, the captain looking down at us from the bridge; a nice
-      handful of passengers, including a few young women in bright hats;
-      everything damp and fresh, and everybody expectant and braced for
-      Copenhagen. A cheerful, ordinary sight! And then our skipper would emerge,
-      and the cook with my morning apple on a white plate. And the skipper would
-      say, &ldquo;We ought to be able to make a start to-day, sir.&rdquo; And on the third
-      day we did make a start, the engine having been miraculously recreated;
-      and we left Copenhagen, hating it no more.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PART4" id="link2H_PART4"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PART IV&mdash;ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COAST
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XIV&mdash;FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E waited for the
-      weather a day and a night at Folkestone, which, though one of the gateways
-      of England, is a poor and primitive place to lie in. Most of the time we
-      were on the mud, and to get up into England we had to climb a craggy
-      precipice called the quay-wall. Nevertheless, the harbor (so styled) is
-      picturesque, and in the less respectable part of the town, between the big
-      hotels and band-stands and the mail-steamers; there are agreeable
-      second-hand book shops, in one of which I bought an early edition of
-      Gray&rsquo;s poems bound in ancient vellum.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The newspapers were very pessimistic about the weather, and smacks
-      occasionally crept in for shelter, with wild reports of what was going on
-      in the channel. At four o&rsquo;clock in the morning, however, we started,
-      adventurous, for the far coasts of Brittany, via Boulogne. The channel was
-      a gray and desolate sight, weary and uneasy after the gale. And I also was
-      weary and uneasy, for it is impossible for a civilized person of regular
-      habits to arise at four a. m. without both physical and psychical
-      suffering, and the pleasure derived from the experience, though real, is
-      perverse. The last gleams of the Gris-Nez and the Varne lights were
-      visible across the heaving waste, feebly illuminating the intense
-      melancholy of the dawn. There was nothing to do except steer and keep your
-      eyes open, because a favorable and moderate southwest wind rendered the
-      engine unnecessary. The ship, and the dinghy after her, pitched and rolled
-      over the heavy swell. The skipper said naught. I said naught. The lights
-      expired. The dark gray of the sea turned to steel. The breeze was icy.
-      Vitality was at its lowest. Brittany seemed exceedingly remote, even
-      unattainable. Great, vital questions presented themselves to the enfeebled
-      mind, cutting at the very root of all conduct and all ambitions. What was
-      the use of yachting? What was the use of anything? Why struggle? Why
-      exist? The universe was too vast, and the soul homeless therein.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft, bearing a brass tray,
-      and on the tray an electro-teapot, sugar-basin, and milk-jug, and a white
-      cup and saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernalia! Exquisite and potent
-      draft, far surpassing champagne drunk amid the bright glances of beauty!
-      Only the finest China tea is employed aboard the <i>Velsa</i>. I drank,
-      and was healed; and I gave also to the shipper. Earth was transformed. We
-      began to talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling over, spurted. It was
-      a grand life. We descried the French coast. The hours flew. Before
-      breakfast-time we were becalmed, in sunshine, between the piers at
-      Boulogne, and had to go in on the engine. At 8:15 we ran her on the mud,
-      on a rising tide, next to a pilot-boat, the <i>Jean et Marie</i>,
-      inhabited by three jolly French sailors. We carried a warp to the Quai
-      Chanzy, and another to a buoy, and considered ourselves fairly in France.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0228.jpg" alt="0228 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0228.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The officials of the French republic on the quay had been driven by the
-      spectacle of our peculiar Dutch lines and rig to adopt strange, emotional
-      attitudes; and as soon as we were afloat, the French republic came aboard
-      in a dinghy manned by two acolytes. The skipper usually receives the
-      representatives of foreign powers, but as the skipper speaks no French,
-      and as this was the first time I had entered France in this style, I
-      thought I would be my own ambassador. I received the French republic in my
-      saloon; we were ravishingly polite to each other; we murmured sweet
-      compliments to each other. He gave me a clean bill of health, and went off
-      with four francs and one half-penny. There is no nation like the French. A
-      French milliner will make a hat out of a piece of felt and nothing; and a
-      French official will make a diplomatic episode out of nothing at all,
-      putting into five minutes of futility all the Gallic civilization of
-      centuries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as its area is narrowly
-      limited, and its entrance difficult, the amount of signaling that goes on
-      is extraordinary. A single ship will fill the entrance; hence a flag flies
-      to warn the surrounding seas when the entrance is occupied or about to be
-      occupied. The state of the tide is also indicated, and the expert can read
-      from hieroglyphics slung in the air the exact depth of water at a
-      particular moment between the piers. In addition, of course, there is the
-      weather signaling. We had scarcely been in port a couple of hours before
-      the weather signaling shocked us; nay, we took it as an affront to
-      ourselves. The south cone went up. We had come in at the tail-end of one
-      south gale, and now another was predicted! How could small people like us
-      hope to work our way down to Brittany in the teeth of the gale! And I had
-      an appointment in the harbor of Carantec, a tiny village near Morlaix, in
-      a week&rsquo;s time! The thing was monstrous. But the south cone was hoisted,
-      and it remained hoisted. And the cone is never displayed except for a real
-      gale,&mdash;not a yachtsman&rsquo;s gale, but a sailor&rsquo;s gale, which is serious.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A tender went forth to meet a Dutch American liner in the roads. We
-      followed her along the jetty. At the end of the jetty the gale was already
-      blowing; and rain-squalls were all round the horizon. Soon we were in the
-      midst of a squall ourselves. The rain hid everything for a minute. It
-      cleared. The vast stretch of sands glistened wet, with the variegated
-      bathing-tents, from which even then beautiful creatures were bathing in a
-      shallow surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex roofs of
-      Boulogne, and to the north a road climbing up to the cliff-top, and the
-      illimitable dunes that are a feature of this part of the country. Above
-      all floated thunder-clouds, white in steely blue. The skipper did not like
-      those thunder-clouds; he said they were the most dangerous of all clouds,
-      &ldquo;because anything might come out of them.&rdquo; He spoke as if they already
-      contained in their bosoms every conceivable sort of weather, which they
-      would let loose according to their caprice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The rain resumed heavily. The wind compelled us to hold tight to the rail
-      of the pier. A poster announced that in the casino behind the rain,
-      Suppé&rsquo;s &ldquo;Boccaccio&rdquo; was to be performed that night, and Massenet&rsquo;s &ldquo;Thaïs&rdquo;
-       the next night. And opera seemed a very artificial and unnecessary form of
-      activity as we stood out there in the reality of the storm. The Atlantic
-      liner had now bid good-by to the tender, and was hugely moving. She found
-      sea-room, and then turned with the solemnity of her bigness, and headed
-      straight into the gale, pitching like a toy. The rain soon veiled her, and
-      she was gone. I could not picture the <i>Velsa</i> in such a situation, at
-      any rate with the owner on board. We went back, rather pensive, to the
-      Quai Chanzy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0234.jpg" alt="0234 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0234.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The men in the pilot-boat alongside the <i>Velsa</i> were not in the least
-      reassuring as to the chances of the <i>Velsa</i> ever getting to Brittany;
-      but they were uplifted because the weather was too rough for them to go
-      out. When the cone is on view, the pilot-service is accomplished by a
-      powerful steam-vessel. Our friends, in their apparently happy idleness,
-      sculled forth in a dinghy about fifty yards from where we lay, and almost
-      immediately rejoined us with three eels that they had caught. I bought the
-      three eels for two shillings, and the cook cooked them perfectly, and I
-      ate one of them with ecstasy a few hours later; but eels are excessively
-      antipathetic to the digestive organs, and may jaundice the true bright
-      color of the world for days.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The transaction of the eels, strengthened our intimacy with the pilot&rsquo;s
-      crew, who imparted to us many secrets; as, for example, that they were the
-      selfsame men who act as porters at the quay for the transfer of luggage
-      when the cross-channel steamers arrive and depart. On one day they are the
-      pilot&rsquo;s crew, and on the next they are porters to carry your handbags
-      through the customs. This was a blow to me, because on the innumerable
-      occasions when I had employed those porters I had always regarded them as
-      unfortunate beings who could earn money only during about an hour each
-      day, victims of the unjust social system, etc., and who were therefore
-      specially deserving of compassion and tips. I now divined that their
-      activities were multiple, and no doubt dovetailed together like a Chinese
-      puzzle, and all reasonably remunerative. The which was very French and
-      admirable. Herein was a valuable lesson to me, and a clear saving in
-      future of that precious commodity, compassion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a day or two the horrid fact emerged that we were imprisoned in
-      Boulogne. The south cone did not budge. Neither could we. The tide ebbed;
-      the tide flowed; we sank softly into the mud; we floated again. A sailor
-      cut our warp because it was in his way, and therefore incurred our anger
-      and the comminations of the harbor-master. But we were not released. An
-      aeroplane meeting was announced, and postponed. We witnessed the
-      preparations for the ceremonial opening of a grand new dock. We went to
-      the casino and listened to Russian music, which in other circumstances
-      would have enchanted us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But none of these high matters could hold our attention. Even when the
-      cook criticized our water-colors with faint praise, and stated calmly that
-      he, too, was a water-colorist, and brought proofs of his genius cut of the
-      forecastle, even then we were not truly interested. We thirsted to depart,
-      and could not. Our sole solace was to walk round and round the basini in
-      the rain-squalls, and observe their tremendous vitality, which, indeed,
-      never ceased, day or night save at low water, when most craft were
-      aground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At such periods of tranquillity the trucks of the fishing-smacks were
-      nearly level with the quay, and we noticed that every masthead was
-      elaborately finished with gilded sculpture&mdash;a cross, a star, or a
-      small figure of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or an angel. The names, too, of
-      these smacks were significant: <i>Resurrection, Jesus-Marie</i>, and so
-      on. The ornamentation of the deck-houses and companions of these vessels
-      showed a great deal of fantasy and brilliant color, though little taste.
-      And the general effect was not only gay, but agreeable, demonstrating, as
-      it did, that the boats were beloved. English fishing-boats are beloved by
-      their owners, but English affection does not disclose itself in the same
-      way, if it discloses itself at all. On the third afternoon we assisted at
-      the departure of an important boat for the herring fisheries. It had a
-      crew of seventeen men, all dressed in brown, young and old, and an
-      enormous quantity of gear. It bore the air of a noble cooperative
-      enterprise, and went off on the tide, disdainfully passing the
-      still-hoisted cone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps it was this event that gave us to think. If a herring-boat could
-      face the gale, why not we? Our ship was very seaworthy, and the coast was
-      dotted with sheltering ports. Only it was impossible to go south, since we
-      could not have made headway. Then why not boldly cancel the rendezvous in
-      Brittany, and run northward before the gale? The skipper saluted the idea
-      with enthusiasm. He spoke of Ostend. He said that if the wind held we
-      could easily run to Ostend in a day. He did not care for Ostend, but it
-      would be a change. I, however, did care for Ostend. And so it was decided
-      that, unless the wind went right round in the night, we would clear out of
-      Boulogne at the earliest tidal hour the next morning. The joy of
-      expectancy filled the ship, and I went into the town to buy some of the
-      beautiful meat-pies that are offered in its shops.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0239.jpg" alt="0239 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0239.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XV&mdash;TO BELGIUM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>T 6 a. M. we, too,
-      were passing disdainfully the still-hoisted cone. Rain descended in
-      sheets, in blankets, and in curtains, and when we did not happen to be in
-      the rain, we could see rain-squalls of the most theatrical appearance in
-      every quarter of the horizon. The gale had somewhat moderated, but not the
-      sea; the wind, behind us, was against the tide, and considerably
-      quarreling therewith. Now we were inclosed in walls of water, and now we
-      were balanced on the summit of a mountain of water, and had a momentary
-      view of many leagues of tempest. I personally had never been out in such
-      weather in anything smaller than a mail-steamer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Here I must deal with a distressing subject, which it would be pleasanter
-      to ignore, but which my training in realism will not allow me to ignore. A
-      certain shameful crime is often committed on yachts, merchantmen, and even
-      men-of-war. It is notorious that Nelson committed this crime again and
-      again, and that other admirals have copied his iniquity. Sailors, and
-      particularly amateur sailors, would sooner be accused of any wickedness
-      rather than this. Charge them with cheating at cards, ruining innocent
-      women, defrauding the Government, and they will not blench; but charge
-      them with this offense, and they will blush, they will recriminate, and
-      they will lie disgracefully against all evidence; they cannot sit still
-      under the mere suspicion of it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we slipped out of the harbor that morning the secret preoccupation of
-      the owner and his friend was that circumstances might tempt them to
-      perpetrate the sin of sins. Well, I am able to say that they withstood the
-      awful temptation; but only just! If out of bravado they had attempted to
-      eat their meals in the saloon, the crime would assuredly have been
-      committed, but they had the sense to order the meals to be served in the
-      cockpit, in the rain, in the blast, in the cold. No matter the conditions!
-      They were saved from turpitude, and they ate heartily thrice during the
-      day. And possibly nobody was more astonished than themselves at their
-      success in virtue. I have known a yachtsman, an expert, a member of an
-      exceedingly crack club, suddenly shift his course shoreward in
-      circumstances not devoid of danger.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What are you about?&rdquo; was the affrighted question. He replied:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to beach her. If I don&rsquo;t, I shall be sick, and I won&rsquo;t be sick
-      aboard this yacht.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Such is the astounding influence of convention, which has transformed into
-      a crime a misfortune over which the victim has no control whatever. We did
-      not beach the <i>Velsa</i>, nor were our appetites impaired. We were
-      lucky, and merely lucky; and yet we felt as proud as though we had, by our
-      own skill and fortitude, done something to be proud of. This is human
-      nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we rounded Cape Gris-Nez, amid one of the most majestic natural scenes
-      I have ever witnessed, not a gale, but about half of a gale, was blowing.
-      The wind continued to moderate. Off Calais the tide was slack, and between
-      Calais and Dunkirk we had it under our feet, and were able to dispense
-      with the engine and still do six and a half knots an hour. Thenceforward
-      the weather grew calm with extraordinary rapidity, while the barometer
-      continuously fell. At four o&rsquo;clock the wind had entirely expired, and we
-      restarted the engine, and crawled past Westend and Nieuport, resorts very
-      ugly in themselves, but seemingly beautiful from the sea. By the time we
-      sighted the whiteness of the kursaal at Ostend the water was as flat as an
-      Inland lake.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0246.jpg" alt="0246 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0246.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The sea took on the most delicate purple tints, and the pallor of the
-      architecture of Belgian hotels became ethereal. While we were yet a mile
-      and a half from the harbor-mouth, flies with stings wandered out from the
-      city to meet us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We passed between the pierheads at Ostend at 6:10 p. m., and the skipper
-      was free to speak again. When he had done manouvering in the basin, he
-      leaned over the engine-hatch and said to me:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I &lsquo;ve had a bit o&rsquo; luck this week.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;With the engine?&rdquo; I suggested, for the engine had been behaving itself
-      lately.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No, sir. My wife presented me with a little boy last Tuesday. I had the
-      letter last night. I&rsquo;ve been expecting it.&rdquo; But he had said nothing to me
-      before. He blushed, adding, &ldquo;I should like you to do me a very great
-      favor, sir&mdash;give me two days off soon, so that I can go to the
-      baptism.&rdquo; Strange, somehow, that a man should have to ask a favor to be
-      present at the baptism of his own son! The skipper now has two sons. Both,
-      I was immediately given to understand, are destined for the sea. He has
-      six brothers-in-law, and they all follow the sea. On a voyage he will
-      never willingly leave the wheel, even if he is not steering. He will rush
-      down to the forecastle for his dinner, swallow it in two minutes and a
-      half, and rush back. I said to him once:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I believe you must be fond of this wheel.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I am, sir,&rdquo; he said, and grinned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We lay nearly opposite the railway station, and our rudder was within a
-      foot of the street. Next to us lay the <i>Velsa&rsquo;s</i> sister (occasion for
-      the historic remark that &ldquo;the world is very small&rdquo;), a yacht well known to
-      the skipper, of exactly the same lines as the <i>Velsa</i>, nearly the
-      same size, and built within four miles of her in the same year! The next
-      morning, which was a Sunday, the sisters were equally drenched in
-      tremendous downpours of rain, but made no complaint to each other. I had
-      the awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to keep the saloon
-      skylights open.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The rain had no effect on the traditional noisiness of Ostend. Like sundry
-      other cities, Ostend has two individualities, two souls. All that fronts
-      the sea and claims kinship with the kursaal is grandiose, cosmopolitan,
-      insincere, taciturn, blatant, and sterile. It calls itself the finest
-      sea-promenade in Europe, and it may he, but it is as factitious as a
-      meringue. All that faces the docks and canals is Belgian, more than
-      Belgian&mdash;Flemish, picturesque, irregular, strident, simple,
-      unaffected, and swarming with children. Narrow streets are full of little
-      cafés that are full of little men and fat women. All the little streets
-      are cobbled, and everything in them produces the maximum quantity of
-      sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and all the dogs drawing little carts
-      hark loudly. Add to this the din of the tram-cars and the whistling of
-      railway engines.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On this Sunday morning there was a band festival of some kind, upon which
-      the pitiless rain had no effect whatever. Band after band swung past our
-      rudder, blaring its uttermost. We had some marketing to do, as the cook
-      declared that he could market neither in French nor Flemish, and we waited
-      impatiently under umbrellas for the procession of bands to finish. It
-      would not finish, and we therefore had to join it. All the way up the Rue
-      de la Chapelle we could not hear ourselves speak in the brazen uproar; and
-      all the brass instruments and all the dark uniforms of the puffy
-      instrumentalists were glittering and melting in the rain. Occasionally at
-      the end of the street, over the sea, lightning feebly flickered against a
-      dark cloud. At last I could turn off into a butcher&rsquo;s shop, where under
-      the eyes of a score of shopping matrons I purchased a lovely piece of beef
-      for the nominal price of three francs seventy-five centimes, and bore it
-      off with pride into the rain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we got back to the yacht with well-baptized beef and vegetal des and
-      tarts, we met the deck-hand, who was going alone into the interesting and
-      romantic city. Asked what he was about, he replied:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to buy a curio, sir; that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo; He knew the city. He had been
-      to Ostend before in a cargo-steamer, and he considered it neither
-      interesting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal toward the country.
-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a pretty walk over there,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but there&rsquo;s nothing here,&rdquo;
-       pointing to the town. I had been coming to Ostend for twenty years, and
-      enjoying it like a child, but the deck-hand, with one soft-voiced
-      sentence, took it off the map.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the afternoon, winding about among the soaked cosmopolitanism of the
-      promenade, I was ready to agree with him. Nothing will destroy fashionable
-      affectations more surely than a wet Sunday, and the promenade seemed to
-      rank first in the forlorn tragedies of the world. I returned yet again to
-      the yacht, and was met by the skipper with a disturbed face.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t get any fresh water, sir. Horse is n&rsquo;t allowed to work on
-      Sundays. <i>Everything&rsquo;s changed in Belgium.</i>&rdquo; The skipper was too
-      Dutch to be fond of Flanders. His mightiest passion was rising in him&mdash;the
-      passion to go somewhere else.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;we &lsquo;ll manage with mineral water, and then we &lsquo;ll
-      move on to Bruges.&rdquo; In rain it is, after all, better to be moving than to
-      be standing still.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to leave Ostend was not easy, because the railway bridge would not
-      swing for us, nor would it yield, for over an hour, to the song of our
-      siren. Further, the bridge-man deeply insulted the skipper. He said that
-      he was not supposed to swing for <i>canal-boats</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Canal-boat!&rdquo; the skipper cried. &ldquo;By what canal do you think I brought
-      this ship across the North Sea?&rdquo; He was coldly sarcastic, and his sarcasm
-      forced the bridge open. We passed through, set our sails, and were
-      presently heeling over and washing a wave of water up the banks of the
-      canal. I steered, and, as we overtook an enormous barge, I shaved it as
-      close as I could for the fun of the thing. Whereupon the skipper became
-      excited, and said that for a yacht to touch a barge was fatal, because the
-      barges were no stronger than cigar-boxes, having sides only an inch thick,
-      and would crumble at a touch; and the whole barge-population of Belgium
-      and Holland, but especially Belgium, was in a conspiracy to extract
-      damages out of yachts on the slightest pretext. It seemed to me that the
-      skipper&rsquo;s alarm was exaggerated. I understood it a few days later, when he
-      related to me that he had once quite innocently assisted at the cracking
-      of a cigar-box, for which his employer had had to pay five thousand
-      francs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0251.jpg" alt="0251 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0251.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The barge which I had failed to sink had two insignificant square-sails
-      set, like pocket-handkerchiefs, but was depending for most of its motion
-      on a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-rope in good order.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and simultaneously the
-      weather improved and brightened. It was a strange summer, was that summer!
-      The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleasantly through the water,
-      and we had to start the engine, which is much less amusing than the sails.
-      And the towers of Bruges would not appear on the horizon of the monotonous
-      tree-lined canal, upon whose banks every little village resembles every
-      other little village. We had to invent something to pass the time, and we
-      were unwise enough to measure the speed of the engine on this smooth water
-      in this unusual calm. A speed trial is nearly always an error of tact, for
-      the reason that it shatters beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful
-      illusion that under favorable conditions the engine would drive the yacht
-      at the rate of twelve kilometers an hour. The canal-bank had small posts
-      at every hundred meters and large posts at every thousand. The first test
-      gave seven and a half kilometers an hour. It was unthinkable. The
-      distances must be wrong. My excellent watch must have become capricious.
-      The next test gave eight kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to
-      the engine, and we rose to nine, only to fall again to eight. Allowing
-      even that the dinghy took a kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of
-      the test was very humiliating. We crawled. We scarcely moved.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would go ashore and walk
-      along the bank against the yacht until we could see Bruges. I swore it,
-      and I kept the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred meters; and
-      by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted the memorable belfry of Bruges in
-      the distance, I had decided that the engine was perhaps a better engine
-      than I had fancied. I returned on board, and had to seek my berth in a
-      collapse. Nevertheless the <i>Velsa</i> had been a most pleasing object as
-      seen from the bank.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XVI&mdash;BRUGES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E moored at the
-      Quai Spinola, with one of the most picturesque views in Bruges in front of
-      us, an irresistible temptation to the watercolorist, even in wet weather.
-      I had originally visited Bruges about twenty years earlier. It was the
-      first historical and consistently beautiful city I had ever seen, and even
-      now it did not appear to have sunk much in my esteem. It is incomparably
-      superior to Ghent, which is a far more important place, but in which I
-      have never been fortunate.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0258.jpg" alt="0258 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0258.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a different and a finer
-      attribute. I have had terrible, devastating adventures in the restaurants
-      of Ghent, and the one first-class monument there is the medieval castle of
-      the counts of Flanders, an endless field for sociological speculation, but
-      transcendency ugly and depressing. Ghent is a modern town in an old suit
-      of clothes, and its inhabitants are more formidably Belgian than those of
-      any other large city of Flanders. I speak not of the smaller industrial
-      places, where Belgianism is ferocious and terrible.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished, we went straight to Notre
-      Dame, where there was just enough light left for us to gaze upon
-      Michelangelo&rsquo;s &ldquo;Virgin and Child,&rdquo; a major work. Then to the streets and
-      lesser canals. I found changes in the Bruges of my youth. Kinematographs,
-      amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be expected, for no show-city
-      in Europe has been able to keep them out. Do they not enliven and illumine
-      the ground floors of some of the grandest renaissance palaces in Florence?
-      But there were changes more startling than the advent kinematographs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced the ordinary burners in the
-      street-lamps of the town! In another fifty years the corporation of Bruges
-      will be using electricity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats were running on the canals,
-      and at the improvised landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges &ldquo;The
-      Venice of the North.&rdquo; I admit that my feelings were hurt&mdash;not by the
-      motor-boats, but by the signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the North,
-      than Venice is the Bruges of the South.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to descend upon us and penetrate
-      us, as the motorboats ceased to run and the kinematographs grew more
-      brilliant in the deepening night. We had to dine, and all the restaurants
-      of the town were open to us. Impossible to keep away from the Grande Place
-      and the belfry, still incessantly chattering about the time of day.
-      Impossible not to look with an excusable sentimentality at the Hôtel du
-      Panier d&rsquo;Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with the fattest
-      landlord in the world, and thousands of mosquitos ready among its
-      bed-hangings to assist the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep. The Panier
-      d&rsquo;Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-loving tourist who
-      could carry all his luggage and was firmly resolved not to spend more than
-      seven francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d&rsquo;Or one was sure to
-      encounter other travelers who took both art and life seriously.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      No, we would not dine at the Panier d&rsquo;Or, because we would not disturb our
-      memories. We glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior, and we
-      slipped into the café restaurant next door, and were served by a postulant
-      boy waiter who had everything to learn about food and human nature, but
-      who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost saturated with the exquisite
-      melancholy of the Grande Place, we were too enchanted to move. We drank
-      coffee and other things, and lingered until all the white cloths were
-      removed from the tables; and the long, high room became a café simply. A
-      few middle-aged male habitués wandered in separately,&mdash;four in all,&mdash;and
-      each sat apart and smoked and drank beer. The mournfulness was sweet and
-      overwhelming. It was like chloroform. The reflection that each of these
-      sad, aging men had a home and an <i>intimité</i> somewhere in the
-      spacious, transformed, shabby interiors of Bruges, that each was a living
-      soul with aspirations and regrets, this reflection was excruciating in its
-      blend of forlornness and comedy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A few more habitués entered, and then a Frenchman and a young Frenchwomen
-      appeared on a dais at the back of the café and opened a piano. They were
-      in correct drawing-room costume, with none of the eccentricities of the <i>cafe-chantant</i>,
-      and they produced no effect whatever on the faces or in the gestures of
-      the habitués, They performed. He sang; she sang; he played; she played.
-      Just the common songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls, vulgar, but
-      more inane than vulgar, The young woman was agreeable, with the large, red
-      mouth which is the index of a comfortable, generous, and good-natured
-      disposition They sang and played a long time. Nobody budged; nobody
-      smiled. Certainly we did not; in a contest of phlegm Englishmen can, it is
-      acknowledged, hold their own. Most of the habitués doggedly read
-      newspapers, but at intervals there was a momentary dull applause. The
-      economic basis of the entertainment was not apparent to us. The prices of
-      food and drink were very moderate, and no collection was made by or on
-      behalf of the artists.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed, because
-      we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed. Yes,
-      incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in Bruges.
-      And in the café adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls in white
-      were performing gaily to a similar audience of habitués. We glimpsed them
-      through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph a bell was
-      ringing loudly and continuously to invite habitués, and no habitués were
-      responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of the belfry
-      flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of these and of
-      the habitués gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps, after all,
-      Bruges had not changed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0263.jpg" alt="0263 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0263.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the
-      Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of
-      large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited by
-      the historical past and also no doubt by habitués. And after much
-      wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was
-      supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street,
-      beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold it and
-      peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of tourists.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the belfry
-      suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the clockwork
-      chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells, a bravura
-      piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing, as different from
-      that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a barrel-organ. All the magic
-      of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine force. Bruges was no more a
-      hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers and amateur painters and
-      poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their attendant chaplains. It was
-      the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed before I had ever even seen
-      the place&mdash;just that.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0267.jpg" alt="0267 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0267.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded
-      up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again,
-      reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed under
-      the shadows of rococo churches, the façades and interiors of which are
-      alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according to the
-      instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the maze upon a
-      long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was set in a frame
-      of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by high towers, and
-      by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the lake floated the
-      <i>Velsa</i>, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be real, and yet
-      real. It was the most magical thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We could scarcely believe that there was our yacht right in the midst of
-      the town. This was the same vessel that only a little earlier had rounded
-      Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage whatever. Proof enough of
-      the advantage of the barge-build, with a light draft, and heavy lee-boards
-      for use with a beam wind when close-hauled. Some yachtsmen, and expert
-      yachtsmen, too, are strongly against the barge. But no ordinary yacht of
-      the <i>Velsas</i> size could have scraped into that lake by the Quai
-      Spinola and provided us with that unique sensation. The <i>Velsa</i> might
-      have been designed specially for the background of Bruges. She fitted it
-      with exquisite perfection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the shaft of light slanting up from her forecastle hatch rendered her
-      more domestic than the very houses around, which were without exception
-      dark and blind, and might have been abandoned. We went gingerly aboard
-      across the narrow, yielding gangway, and before turning in gazed again at
-      the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit that a little way off the
-      kinematograph was tintinnabulating for custom, and a Parisian couple
-      singing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked girls coarsely dancing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PART5" id="link2H_PART5"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PART V&mdash;EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XVII EAST ANGLIA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>FTER the exoticism
-      of foreign parts, this chapter is very English. But no island could be
-      more surpassingly strange, romantic, and baffling than this island. I had
-      a doubt about the propriety of using the phrase &ldquo;East Anglia&rdquo; in the
-      title. I asked, therefore, three educated people whether the northern part
-      of Essex could be termed East Anglia, according to current usage. One said
-      he did n&rsquo;t know. The next said that East Anglia began only north of the
-      Stour. The third said that East Anglia extended southward as far as
-      anybody considered that it ought to extend southward. He was a true
-      Englishman. I agreed with him. England was not made, but born. It has
-      grown up to a certain extent, and its pleasure is to be full of anomalies,
-      like a human being. It has to be seen to be believed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Thus, my income tax is assessed in one town, twelve miles distant. After
-      assessment, particulars of it are forwarded to another town in another
-      county, and the formal demand for payment is made from there; but the
-      actual payment has to be made in a third town, about twenty miles from
-      either of the other two. What renders England wondrous is not such
-      phenomena, but the fact that Englishmen see nothing singular in such
-      phenomena.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      East Anglia, including North Essex, is as English as any part of England,
-      and more English than most. Angles took possession of it very early in
-      history, and many of their descendants, full of the original Anglian
-      ideas, still powerfully exist in the counties. And probably no place is
-      more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal yachting center on the east
-      coast, and the home port of the <i>Velsa</i>. Theoretically and
-      officially, Harwich is the home port of the <i>Velsa</i>, but not in
-      practice: we are in England, and it would never do for the theory to
-      accord with the fact. Brightlingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea,
-      except at railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea. There is some
-      excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town, has found 193 different
-      spellings of the name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was &ldquo;a member of the Cinque
-      Ports.&rdquo; Not <i>one</i> of the Cinque Ports, of which characteristically
-      there were seven, but a member. A &ldquo;member&rdquo; was subordinate, and
-      Brightlingsea was subordinate to Sandwich, Heaven knows why. But it shared
-      in the responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to provide fifty-seven
-      ships for the king&rsquo;s service every year. In return it shared in the
-      privilege of carrying a canopy over the king at the coronation, and in a
-      few useful exemptions. After it had been a member of the Cinque for many
-      decades and perhaps even centuries, it began to doubt whether, after all,
-      it was a member, and demanded a charter in proof. This was in 1442. The
-      charter was granted, and it leads off with these words: &ldquo;To all the
-      faithful in Christ, to whom these present letters shall come, the Mayors
-      and Bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting.&rdquo; By
-      this time ships had already grown rather large. They carried four masts,
-      of which the aftermost went by the magnificent title of the &ldquo;bonaventure
-      mizen&rdquo;; in addition they had a mast with a square sail at the extremity of
-      the bow-sprit. They also carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of
-      navigation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Later, smuggling was an important industry at Brightlingsea, and to
-      suppress it laws were passed making it illegal to construct fast rowing-
-      or sailing-boats. In the same English, and human, way, it was suggested at
-      the beginning of the twentieth century that since fast motor-cars kicked
-      up dust on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable of traveling
-      fast should be made illegal. There are no four-masted ships now at
-      Brightlingsea; no bowsprit carries a mast; no ship puts to sea with an
-      astrolabe; the &ldquo;bonaventure mizen&rdquo; is no more; smuggling is unfashionable;
-      fast craft are encouraged.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, on a summer&rsquo;s morning I have left the <i>Velsa</i> in the
-      dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyih Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten
-      minutes have been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a border of
-      pale grass at the top, and the gray English sky overhead, and the whole
-      visible world was exactly as it must have been when the original Angles
-      first rowed up that creek. At low water the entire Christian era is
-      reduced to nothing, in many a creek of the Colne, the Black water, and the
-      Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been done; the pristine reigns
-      as perfectly as in the African jungle. And the charm of the scene is
-      indescribable. But to appreciate it one must know what to look for. I was
-      telling an Essex friend of mine about the dreadful flatness of
-      Schleswig-Holstein. He protested. &ldquo;But aren&rsquo;t you educated up to flats?&rdquo;
-       he asked. I said I was. He persisted. &ldquo;But are you educated up to mud, the
-      lovely colors on a mud-flat?&rdquo; He was a true connoisseur of Essex. The man
-      who is incapable of being ravished by a thin, shallow tidal stream running
-      between two wide, shimmering mud banks that curve through a strictly
-      horizontal marsh, without a tree, without a shrub, without a bird, save an
-      eccentric sea-gull, ought not to go yachting in Essex estuaries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0278.jpg" alt="0278 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0278.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oyster-fishing, and it
-      catches more sprats than any other port in the island, namely, about
-      fifteen hundred tons of them per annum. But its most spectacular industry
-      has to do with yachting, It began to be a yachting resort only yesterday;
-      that is to say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It has, however, steadily
-      progressed, until now, despite every natural disadvantage and every
-      negligence, it can count a hundred and twenty yachts and some eight
-      hundred men employed therewith. A yacht cannot get into Brightlingsea at
-      all from the high sea without feeling her way among sand-banks,&mdash;in
-      old days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the inhabitants made a
-      profitable specialty of salving wrecks,&mdash;and when a yacht has
-      successfully come down Brightlingsea Reach, which is really the estuary of
-      the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of Brightlingsea Creek, her
-      difficulties will multiply.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the first place, she will always discover that the mouth of the creek
-      is obstructed by barges at anchor. She may easily run aground at the
-      mouth, and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably will, mistake
-      the channel, and pile herself up on a bank known as the Cinders, or the
-      Cindery. Farther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot there is
-      no sufficiency of water except at about a yard and a half from the shore,
-      which has the appearance of being flat. Escaping all these perils, she
-      will almost certainly run into something, or something will run into her,
-      or she may entangle herself in the oyster preserves. Yachts, barges,
-      smacks, and floating objects without a name are anchored anywhere and
-      anyhow. There is no order, and no rule, except that a smack always deems a
-      yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops her anchor somewhere, and
-      asks for the harbormaster. No harbor-master exists or ever has existed or
-      ever will. Historical tradition&mdash;sacred! All craft do as they like,
-      and the craft with the thinnest sides must look to its sides.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Also, the creek has no charm whatever of landscape or seascape. You can
-      see nothing from it except the little red streets of Brightlingsea and the
-      yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some secret which is
-      uncomprehended beyond England, it prospers as a center of yachting. Yachts
-      go to it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but from choice.
-      Yachts seem to like it. Of course it is a wonderful place, because any
-      place where a hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be a wonderful
-      place. The interest of its creek is inexhaustible, once you can reconcile
-      yourself to its primitive Anglianism, which, after all, really harmonizes
-      rather well with the mud-flats of the county.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the weather eastward is
-      dangerously formidable, you can turn your back on the North Sea and go for
-      an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the Colne is always exciting
-      because you never know when you may be able to return. Even the <i>Velsa</i>,
-      which can float on puddles, has gone aground in the middle of the fair and
-      wide Colne. A few miles up are the twin villages of Wivenhoe and Rowhedge,
-      facing each other across the river, both inordinately picturesque, and
-      both given up to the industry of yachting. At Wivenhoe large yachts and
-      even ships are built, and in winter there is always a choice selection of
-      world-famous yachts on the mud, costly and huge gewgaws, with their brass
-      stripped off them, painfully forlorn, stranded in a purgatory between the
-      paradise of last summer and the paradise of the summer to come.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you are adventurous, you keep on winding along the curved reaches, and
-      as soon as the last yacht is out of sight, you are thrown hack once more
-      into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing but a thin, shallow stream,
-      two wide mud hanks, and a border of grass at the top of them. This is your
-      world, which you share with a sea-gull or a crow for several miles; and
-      then suddenly you arrive at a concourse of great barges against a quay,
-      and you wonder by w hat magic they got there, and above the quay rise the
-      towers and steeples of a city that was already ancient when William the
-      Conqueror came to England in the interests of civilization to take up the
-      white man&rsquo;s burden,&mdash;Colchester, where more oysters are eaten on a
-      certain night of the year at a single feast than at any other feast on
-      earth. Such is the boast.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But such contrasts as the foregoing do not compare in violence with the
-      contrasts offered by the River Stour, a few miles farther north on the map
-      of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its mouth, where, in confluence
-      with the River Orwell (which truly <i>is</i> in East Anglia) it forms a
-      goodish small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town, is a fairly
-      important naval port, and also &ldquo;a gate of the empire,&rdquo; where steamers go
-      forth for Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. We came into
-      Harwich Harbor on the tide one magnificent Sunday afternoon, with the sea
-      a bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and the entrance to the
-      Stour was guarded by two huge battle-ships, the <i>Blake</i> and the <i>Blenheim</i>,
-      each apparently larger than the whole of the town of Harwich. Up the
-      Stour, in addition to all the Continental steamers, was moored a fleet of
-      forty or fifty men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in a quadruple line. It
-      was necessary for the <i>Velsa</i> to review this fleet of astoundingly
-      ugly and smart black monsters, and she did so, to the high satisfaction of
-      the fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of Sunday afternoon was
-      thirsting for a distraction, even the mildest. On every sinister ship&mdash;the
-      <i>Basilisk</i>, the <i>Harpy</i>, etc., apposite names!&mdash;the young
-      bluejackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were trying bravely to
-      amuse themselves. The sound of the jews&rsquo;-harp and of the concertina was
-      heard, and melancholy songs of love. Little circles of men squatted here
-      and there on the machinery-encumbered decks playing at some game. A few
-      students were reading; some athletes were sparring; many others
-      skylarking. None was too busy to stare at our strange lines. Launches and
-      longboats were flitting about full of young men, going on leave to the
-      ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or sadly returning therefrom. Every sound
-      and noise was clearly distinguishable in the stillness of the hot
-      afternoon. And the impression given by the fleet as a whole was that of a
-      vast masculine town, for not a woman could be descried anywhere. It was
-      striking and mournful. When we had got to the end of the fleet I had a
-      wild idea:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Let us go up the Stour.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and
-      pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever had
-      been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a
-      ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded.
-      Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had
-      quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were back
-      in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills, that was
-      all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small headlands,
-      and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated that a
-      channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys nobody
-      could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no buoys,
-      and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide, deceptive
-      waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put about, we
-      dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant fleet, in
-      another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of the forgotten town of
-      Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached mysteriously out of one of
-      those bights, and it was maimed by two men with the air of conspirators.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;D&rsquo; ye want a pilot?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We hardened ourselves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why in thunder is n&rsquo;t this river buoyed?&rdquo; I demanded of the skipper.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The skipper answered that the intention obviously was to avoid taking the
-      bread out of the mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No catastrophe.
-      The town of Mistley approached us. Then we had to pause again, reversing
-      the propeller. We were in a network of shallows. Far to port could be seen
-      a small red buoy; it was almost on the bank. Impossible that it could
-      indicate the true channel. We went straight ahead and chanced it. The next
-      instant we were hard on the mud in midstream, and the propeller was making
-      a terrific pother astern. We could only wait for the tide to float us off.
-      The rowboat appeared again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &lsquo;D&rsquo; ye want a pilot?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And it disappeared.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we floated, the skipper said to me in a peculiar challenging tone:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We &lsquo;ll go on,&rdquo; I said. I could say no less.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0288.jpg" alt="0288 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0288.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure enough, the true channel
-      was there, right under the south bank. And we came safely to the town of
-      Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even a torpedo-boat and
-      seldom indeed a yacht, certainly never a <i>Velsa</i>. And yet the smoke
-      of the harbor of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique quay. The
-      town of Mistley rose from its secular slumber to enjoy a unique sensation
-      that afternoon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Shall we go on to Manningtree, sir?&rdquo; said the skipper, adding with a
-      grin, &ldquo;There&rsquo;s only about half an hour left of the flood, and if we get
-      aground again&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was another challenge.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Manningtree is a town even more recondite than Mistley, and it marks the
-      very end of the navigable waters of the Stour. It lay hidden round the
-      next corner. We thought we could detect the channel, curving out again now
-      into midstream. We followed the lure, opened out Manningtree the desired&mdash;and
-      went on the mud with a most perceptible bump. Out, quick, with the dinghy!
-      Cover her stern-sheets with a protecting cloth, and lower an anchor
-      therein and about fifty fathoms of chain, and row away! We manned the
-      windlass, and dragged the <i>Velsa</i> off the mud.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Shall we go on, sir?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, not a hero. &ldquo;We &lsquo;ll give up Manningtree this trip.&rdquo;
-       Obstinacy in adventure might have meant twelve hours in the mud. The crew
-      breathed relief. We returned, with great care, to civilization. We knew
-      now why the Stour is a desolate stream. Thus to this day I have never
-      reached Manningtree except in an automobile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there are still stranger waters than the Stour; for example, Hamford
-      Water, where explosives are manufactured on lonely marshes, where
-      immemorial wharves decay, and wild ducks and owls intermingle, and
-      public-houses with no public linger on from century to century, and where
-      the saltings are greener than anywhere else on the coast, and the east
-      wind more east, and the mud more vivid. And the <i>Velsa</i> has been
-      there, too.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XVIII&mdash;IN SUFFOLK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Orwell is
-      reputed to have the finest estuary in East Anglia. It is a broad stream,
-      and immediately Shotley Barracks and the engines of destruction have been
-      left behind, it begins to be humane and reassuring. Thanks to the
-      surprising modernity of the town of Ipswich, which has discovered that
-      there are interests more important than those of local pilots, it is
-      thoroughly well buoyed, so that the stranger and the amateur cannot fail
-      to keep in the channel. It insinuates itself into Suffolk in soft and
-      civilized curves, and displays no wildness of any kind and, except at one
-      point, very little mud. When you are navigating the Orwell, you know
-      positively that you are in England. On each side of you modest but
-      gracefully wooded hills slope down with caution to the bank, and you have
-      glimpses of magnificent mansions set in the midst of vast, undulating
-      parks, crisscrossed with perfectly graveled paths that gleam in the
-      sunshine. Everything here is private and sacred, and at the gates of the
-      park lodge-keepers guard not only the paradisiacal acres, but the original
-      ideas that brought the estate into existence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Feudalism, benevolent and obstinate, flourishes with calm confidence in
-      itself; and even on your yacht&rsquo;s deck you can feel it, and you are awed.
-      For feudalism has been, and still is, a marvelous cohesive force. And it
-      is a solemn thought that within a mile of you may be a hushed drawingroom
-      at whose doors the notion of democracy has been knocking quite in vain for
-      a hundred years. Presently you will hear the sweet and solemn chimes of a
-      tower-clock, sound which seems to spread peace and somnolence over half a
-      county. And as you listen, you cannot but be convinced that the feudal
-      world is august and beautiful, and that it cannot be improved, and that to
-      overthrow it would be a vandalism. That is the estuary of the Orwell and
-      its influence. Your pleasure in it will be unalloyed unless you are so
-      ill-advised as to pull off in the dinghy, and try to land in one of the
-      lovely demesnes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      About half-way up the estuary, just after passing several big
-      three-masters moored in midstream and unloading into lighters, you come to
-      Pinmill, renowned among yachtsmen and among painters. Its haven is formed
-      out of the angle of a bend in the river, and the narrowness of the channel
-      at this point brings all the traffic spectacularly close to the yachts at
-      anchor. Here are all manner of yachts, and you are fairly certain to see a
-      friend, and pay or receive a visit of state. And also very probably, if
-      you are on board the Velsa some painter on another yacht will feel bound
-      to put your strange craft into a sketch. And the skipper, who has little
-      partiality for these river scenes, will take the opportunity to go
-      somewhere else on a bicycle. You, too, must go ashore, because Pinmill is
-      an exhibition-village, entirely picturesque, paintable, and English. It is
-      liable to send the foreigner into raptures, and Americans have been known
-      to assert that they could exist there in happiness forever and ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I believe that some person or persons in authority offer prizes to the
-      peasantry for the prettiest cottage gardens in Pinmill. It is well; but I
-      should like to see in every picturesque and paint-able English village a
-      placard stating the number of happy peasants who sleep more than three in
-      a room, and the number of adult able-bodied males who earn less than
-      threepence an hour. All aspects of the admirable feudal system ought to be
-      made equally apparent. The chimes of the castle-clock speak loud, and need
-      no advertisement; cottage gardens also insist on the traveler&rsquo;s attention,
-      but certain other phenomena are apt to escape it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0297.jpg" alt="0297 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0297.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The charm of Pinmill is such that you usually decide to remain there over
-      night. In one respect this is a mistake, for the company of yachts is such
-      that your early morning Swedish exercises on deck attract an audience,
-      which produces self-consciousness in the exerciser.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Ipswich closes the estuary of the Orwell, and Ipswich is a genuine town
-      that combines industrialism with the historic sense. No American can
-      afford not to visit it, because its chief hotel has a notorious connection
-      with Mr. Pickwick, and was reproduced entire a lifelike-size at a world&rsquo;s
-      fair in the United States. Aware of this important fact, the second-hand
-      furniture and curio-dealers of the town have adopted suitable measures.
-      When they have finished collecting, Americans should go to the docks&mdash;as
-      interesting as anything in Ipswich&mdash;and see the old custom-house,
-      with its arch, and the gloriously romantic French and Scandinavian
-      three-masters that usually lie for long weeks in the principal basin.
-      Times change. Less than eighty years ago the docks of Ipswich were larger
-      than those of London. And there are men alive and fighting in Ipswich
-      to-day who are determined that as a port Ipswich shall resume something of
-      her ancient position in the world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary, northward, is the estuary
-      of the River Deben. One evening, feeling the need of a little ocean air
-      after the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down there from to the
-      North Sea, and finding ourselves off Woodbridgehaven, which is at the
-      mouth of the Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined to risk the
-      entrance. According to all printed advice, the entrance ought not to be
-      risked without local aid. There is a bank at the mouth, with a patch that
-      dries at low water, and within there is another bank. The shoals shift
-      pretty frequently, and, worst of all, the tide runs at the rate of six
-      knots and more. Still, the weather was calm, and the flood only two hours
-      old. We followed the sailing directions, and got in without trouble just
-      as night fell. The rip of the tide was very marked, and the coast-guard
-      who boarded us with a coast-guard&rsquo;s usual curiosity looked at us as though
-      we were either heroes or rash fools, probably the latter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We dropped anchor for the night, and the next morning explored the
-      estuary, with the tide rising. We soon decided that the perils of this
-      famous river had been exaggerated. There were plenty of beacons,&mdash;which,
-      by the way, are continually being shifted as the shoals shift,&mdash;and
-      moreover the channel defined itself quite simply, for the reason that the
-      rest of the winding river-bed was dry. We arrived proudly at Woodbridge,
-      drawing all the maritime part of the town to look at us, and we ourselves
-      looked at Woodbridge in a fitting manner, for it is sacred to the memory
-      not of Omar Khayyam, but to much the same person, Edward Fitzgerald, who
-      well knew the idiosyncrasies of the Deben. Then it was necessary for us to
-      return, as only for about two hours at each tide is there sufficient water
-      for a yacht to lie at Woodbridge.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The exit from the Deben was a different affair from the incoming. Instead
-      of a clearly defined channel, we saw before us a wide sea. The beacons or
-      perches were still poking up their heads, of course, but they were of no
-      use, since they had nothing to indicate whether they were starboard or
-      port beacons. It is such details that harmonize well with the Old-World
-      air of English estuaries&mdash;with the swans, for instance, those
-      eighteenth-century birds that abound on the Deben. We had to take our
-      choice of port or starboard. Heaven guided us. We reached the entrance.
-      The tide was at half-ebb and running like a race; the weather was
-      unreliable. It was folly to proceed. We proceeded. We had got in alone; we
-      would get out alone. We shot past the coast-guard, who bawled after us. We
-      put the two beacons in a line astern, obedient to the sailing directions;
-      but we could not keep them in a line. The tide swirled us away, making
-      naught of the engine. We gave a tremendous bump. Yes, we were assuredly on
-      the bank for at least ten hours, if not forever; if it came on to blow, we
-      might well be wrecked. But no. The ancient <i>Velsa</i> seemed to rebound
-      elastically off the traitorous sand, and we were afloat again, In two
-      minutes more we were safe. What the coastguard said is not known to this
-      day. We felt secretly ashamed of our foolishness, but we were sustained by
-      the satisfaction of having deprived more local pilots of their fees.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Still, we were a sobered crew, and at the next river-mouth northward&mdash;Orford
-      Haven&mdash;we yielded to a base common sense, and signaled for a pilot.
-      The river Ore is more dangerous to enter, and far more peculiar even than
-      the Deben. The desolate spot, where it runs into the sea is well called
-      Shinglestreet, for it is a wilderness of shingles. The tide runs very fast
-      indeed; the bar shifts after every gale, and not more than four feet of
-      water is guaranteed on it. Last and worst, the bottom is hard. It was
-      probably the hardness of the bottom that finally induced us to stoop to a
-      pilot. To run aground on sand is bad, but to run aground on anything of a
-      rocky nature may be fatal. Our signal was simply ignored. Not the
-      slightest symptom anywhere of a pilot. We were creeping in, and we
-      continued to creep in. The skipper sent the deck-hand forward with the
-      pole. He called out seven feet, eight feet, seven feet; but these were
-      Dutch feet, of eleven inches each, because the pole is a Dutch pole. The
-      water was ominous, full of curling crests and unpleasant hollows, as the
-      wind fought the current. The deckhand called out seven, six, five and a
-      half. We could almost feel the ship bump... and then we were over the bar.
-      Needless to say that a pilot immediately hove in sight. We waved him off,
-      though he was an old man with a grievance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We approached the narrows. We had conquered the worst difficulties by the
-      sole help of the skipper&rsquo;s instinct for a channel, for the beacons were
-      incomprehensible to us; and we imagined that we could get through the
-      narrows into the river proper. But we were mistaken. We had a fair wind,
-      and we set all sails, and the engine was working well; but there was more
-      than a six-knot tide rushing out through those narrows, and we could not
-      get through. We hung in them for about half an hour. Then, imitating the
-      example of a fisherman who had followed us, we just ran her nose into the
-      shingle, with the sails still set, and jumped ashore with a rope. The
-      opportunity to paint a water-color of the <i>Velsa</i> under full sail was
-      not to be lost. Also we bought fish and we borrowed knowledge from the
-      fisherman. He informed us that we had not entered by the channel at all;
-      that we were never anywhere near it. He said that the channel had four
-      feet at that hour. Thus we learned that local wisdom is not always
-      omniscience.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After a delay of two hours, we went up the Ore on the slack. The Ore is a
-      very dull river, but it has the pleasing singularity of refusing to quit
-      the ocean. For mile after mile it runs exactly parallel with the North
-      Sea, separated from it only by a narrow strip of shingle. Under another
-      name it all but rejoins the ocean at Aldeburgh where at length it curves
-      inland. On its banks is Orford, a town more dead than any dead city of the
-      Zuyder Zee, and quite as picturesque and as full of character. The
-      deadness of Orford may be estimated from the fact that it can support a
-      kinematograph only three nights a week. It has electric light, but no
-      railway, and the chief attractions are the lofty castle, a fine church, an
-      antique quay, and a large supply of splendid lobsters. It knows not the
-      tourist, and has the air of a natural self-preserving museum.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0308.jpg" alt="0308 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0308.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XIX&mdash;THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>IME was when I
-      agreed with the popular, and the guide-book, verdict that the Orwell is
-      the finest estuary in these parts; but now that I know it better, I
-      unhesitatingly give the palm to the Blackwater. It is a nobler stream, a
-      true arm of the sea; its moods are more various, its banks wilder, and its
-      atmospheric effects much grander. The defect of it is that it does not
-      gracefully curve. The season for cruising on the Blackwater is September,
-      when the village regattas take place, and the sunrises over leagues of
-      marsh are made wonderful by strange mists.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Last September the <i>Velsa</i> came early into Mersea Quarters for Mersea
-      Regatta. The Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek that is
-      sheltered between the mainland and Mersea Island&mdash;which is an island
-      only during certain hours of the day. Crowds of small yachts have their
-      home in the Quarters, and the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley
-      of craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through five-tonners to
-      fishing-smacks, trading-barges converted into barge-yachts, real
-      barge-yachts like ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred tons or
-      so, fully &ldquo;dressed,&rdquo; and carrying ladies in bright-colored jerseys, to
-      preside over all. The principal events occur in the estuary, but the
-      intimate and amusing events, together with all the river gossip and
-      scandal, are reserved for the seclusion of the Quarters, where a long lane
-      of boats watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for the tide to
-      cover the illimitable mud, and listen to the excessively primitive band
-      which has stationed itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We managed to get on the mud, but we did that on purpose, to save the
-      trouble of anchoring. Many yachts and even smacks do it not on purpose,
-      and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A genuine yachtsman paid us a
-      visit&mdash;one of those men who live solely for yachting, who sail their
-      own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to dress like a sailor
-      before the mast or like a longshore loafer&mdash;and told us a tale of an
-      amateur who had bought a yacht that had Inhabited Mersea Quarters all her
-      life. When the amateur returned from his first cruise in her, he lost his
-      nerve at the entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a fisherman at anchor
-      in a dinghy, &ldquo;Which is the channel?&rdquo; The fisherman, seeing a yacht whose
-      lines had been familiar to him for twenty years, imagined that he was
-      being made fun of. He drawled out, &ldquo;<i>You</i> know.&rdquo; In response to
-      appeals more and more excited he continued to drawl out, &ldquo;<i>You</i>
-      know.&rdquo; At length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon he drawlingly
-      advised: &ldquo;Let the old wench alone. Let her alone. <i>She</i> &rsquo;ll
-      find her way in all right.&rdquo; Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal
-      stories, because the time has to be passed somehow while the water rises.
-      There was a tale of a smuggler on the mud-flats, pursued in the dead of
-      night by a coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler turned round to
-      face the coast-guardsman. &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; said he to the coast-guardsman with
-      warning persuasiveness, &ldquo;you&rsquo;d better not come any further. <i>You do see
-      such &lsquo;wonderful queer things in the newspapers nowadays</i>.&rdquo; The
-      coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of this dark
-      st-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, &ldquo;you&rsquo;d better not come any
-      further. <i>You do see such &lsquo;wonderful queer things in the newspapers
-      nowadays</i>.&rdquo; The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of
-      this dark saying, accepted the advice, and went home.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin to go off, and presently
-      the regatta is in full activity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with
-      white, and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter within the lane
-      of boats in the Quarters is terrific. In these affairs, at a given moment
-      in the afternoon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy events are
-      finished, and before the yachts and smacks competing in the long races
-      have come back. During this pause we escaped out of the Quarters, and
-      proceeded up the river, past Brad-well Creek, where Thames barges lie, and
-      past Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide was still slack.
-      We could not reach Maldon, which is the Mecca of the Blackwater, and we
-      anchored a few miles below that municipal survival, in the wildest part of
-      the river, and watched the sun disappear over vast, flat expanses of water
-      as smooth as oil, with low banks whose distances were enormously enhanced
-      by the customary optical delusions of English weather. Close to us was
-      Osea Island, where an establishment for the reformation of drunkards adds
-      to the weird scene an artistic touch of the sinister. From the private
-      jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in process of being reformed gazed at
-      us steadily in the deepening gloom. Then an attendant came down the jetty
-      and lighted its solitary red eye, which joined its stare to that of the
-      inebriates.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0313.jpg" alt="0313 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0313.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the
-      pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it, is
-      superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not have
-      been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway service has
-      left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of yachtsmen who are
-      content to see a town decay if only the spectacle affords esthetic
-      pleasure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the Chelmsford
-      Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and lock-house steeped
-      in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond the lock was a basin in
-      which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian schooners discharging timber
-      and all the romance of the North. The prospect was so alluring that we
-      decided to voyage on the canal, at any rate as far as the next lock, and
-      we asked the lock-keeper how far off the next lock was. He said curtly:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ye can&rsquo;t go up to the next lock.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Because there&rsquo;s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was any
-      more.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a
-      county town, having a depth of only two feet.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He sharply defended his canal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he ended caustically, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s been going on now for a hundred or a
-      hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day or
-      two.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we
-      apologized..
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Later&mdash;it was a Sunday of glorious weather&mdash;we rowed in the
-      dinghy through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of
-      Maldon was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were
-      flitting about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open
-      sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being Sunday
-      and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place was
-      naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but there
-      was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to be bored, the
-      ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its church-topped hill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Amid the waterways of the town were spacious timber-yards; and
-      eighteenth-century wharves with wharfinger&rsquo;s residence all complete, as in
-      the antique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces; plenty of
-      barges; and one steamer. We thought of Sneek, the restless and
-      indefatigable. I have not yet visited in the <i>Velsa</i> any Continental
-      port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian
-      estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was
-      at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie in
-      wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind.
-      Assuredly a Thames barge&mdash;said to be the largest craft in the world
-      sailed by a man and a boy&mdash;in full course on the Blackwater is a
-      noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of
-      enterprise in transport.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly down the river in company
-      with a fleet of fishing-smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The
-      distances seemed enormous. The faintest southeast breeze stirred the
-      atmosphere, but not the mirror of the water. All the tints of the pearl
-      were mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect anywhere that was not
-      flawlessly beautiful, enchanted with expectation of the day. The
-      unmeasured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they must have steamed two
-      thousand years ago, and herons stood sentry on them as they must have
-      stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure glittering white, a
-      sea-gull! The whole picture was ideal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At seven o&rsquo;clock we had reached Goldhanger Creek, beset with curving
-      water-weeds. And the creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the
-      mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth. A boat sailed in, scarcely
-      moving, scarcely rippling the water, and it was in charge of two old
-      white-haired fishermen. They greeted me.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Is this creek long?&rdquo; I asked. A pause. They both gazed at the creek with
-      the beautiful name, into which they were sailing, as though they had never
-      seen it before.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Aye, it&rsquo;s long.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How long is it? Is it a mile?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Aye, it&rsquo;s a mile.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Is there anything up there?&rdquo; Another pause. The boat was drawing away
-      from me.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Aye, there&rsquo;s oysters up there.&rdquo; The boat and the men withdrew
-      imperceptibly into the silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below,
-      at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress for another village
-      regatta; and an ineffable melancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme
-      beauty of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and this our last
-      cruise, of the season.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0320.jpg" alt="0320 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0320.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      THE END
-    </h3>
-    <div style="height: 6em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
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-  <head>

-    <title>From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett</title>

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-

-The Project Gutenberg EBook of From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-

-

-Title: From The Log of The "Velsa"

-

-Author: Arnold Bennett

-

-Illustrator: E. A. Rickards

-             Arnold Bennett

-

-Release Date: July 15, 2017 [EBook #55113]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM THE LOG OF THE "VELSA" ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by David Widger from page images generously

-provided by the Internet Archive

-

-

-

-

-

-

-</pre>

-

-    <div style="height: 8em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h1>

-      FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA

-    </h1>

-    <h2>

-      By Arnold Bennett

-    </h2>

-    <h3>

-      Pictures By E. A. Rickards

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      And A Frontispiece By The Author

-    </h3>

-    <h4>

-      New York: The Century Co.

-    </h4>

-    <h3>

-      1914

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0001.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0008.jpg" alt="0008 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0009.jpg" alt="0009 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <b>CONTENTS</b>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA</b> </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_PART"> <b>PART I HOLLAND</b> </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I&mdash;VOYAGING ON THE CANALS </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II&mdash;DUTCH LEISURE </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III&mdash;DUTCH WORK </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE ZUYDER ZEE </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V&mdash;SOME TOWNS </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI&mdash;MUSEUMS </a>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <b>PART II&mdash;THE BALTIC</b> </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII&mdash;THE YACHT I LOST </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII&mdash;BALTIC COMMUNITIES </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX&mdash;A day&rsquo;s SAIL </a>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_PART3"> <b>PART III COPENHAGEN</b> </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X&mdash;THE DANISH CAPITAL </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI&mdash;CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII&mdash;ARISTOCRACY AND ART </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII&mdash;THE RETURN </a>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_PART4"> <b>PART IV&mdash;ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COAST</b>

-      </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV&mdash;FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV&mdash;TO BELGIUM </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI&mdash;BRUGES </a>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_PART5"> <b>PART V&mdash;EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES</b> </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII EAST ANGLIA </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII&mdash;IN SUFFOLK </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX&mdash;THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER

-      </a>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h1>

-      FROM THE LOG OF THE VELSA

-    </h1>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_PART" id="link2H_PART"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      PART I HOLLAND

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER I&mdash;VOYAGING ON THE CANALS

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE skipper, who,

-      in addition to being a yachtsman, is a Dutchman, smiled with calm

-      assurance as we approached the Dutch frontier in the August evening over

-      the populous water of the canal which leads from Ghent to Terneuzen. He

-      could not abide Belgium, possibly because it is rather like Holland in

-      some ways. In his opinion the bureaucrats of Belgium did not understand

-      yachts and the respect due to them, whereas the bureaucrats of Holland

-      did. Holland was pictured for me as a paradise where a yacht with a

-      seventy-foot mast never had to wait a single moment for a bridge to be

-      swung open. When I inquired about custom-house formalities, I learned that

-      a Dutch custom-house did not exist for a craft flying the sacred blue

-      ensign of the British Naval Reserve. And it was so. Merely depositing a

-      ticket and a tip into the long-handled butterfly-net dangled over our deck

-      by the bridge-man as we passed, we sailed straight into Holland, and no

-      word said! But we knew immediately that we were in another country&mdash;a

-      country cleaner and neater and more garnished even than Belgium. The

-      Terneuzen Canal, with its brickwork banks and its villages &ldquo;finished&rdquo; to

-      the last tile, reminded me of the extravagant, oily perfection of the main

-      tracks of those dandiacal railroads, the North Western in England and the

-      Pennsylvania in America. The stiff sailing breeze was at length favorable.

-      We set the mainsail unexceptionably; and at once, with the falling dusk,

-      the wind fell, and the rain too. We had to depend again on our erratic

-      motor, with all Holland gazing at us. Suddenly the whole canal was lit up

-      on both sides by electricity. We responded with our lights. The

-      exceedingly heavy rain drove me into the saloon to read Dostoyevsky.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0019.jpg" alt="0019 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0019.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      At eight P. M. I was dug up out of the depths of Dostoyevsky in order to

-      see my first Dutch harbor. Rain poured through the black night. There was

-      a plashing of invisible wavelets below, utter darkness above, and a few

-      forlorn lights winking at vast distances. I was informed that we were

-      moored in the yacht-basin of Terneuzen. I remained calm. Had we been

-      moored in the yacht-basin of Kamchatka, the smell of dinner would still

-      have been issuing from the forecastle-hatch, the open page of Dostoyevsky

-      would still have invited me through the saloon skylight, and the amiable

-      ray of the saloon lamp would still have glinted on the piano and on the

-      binnacle with impartial affection. Herein lies an advantage of yachting

-      over motoring. I redescended without a regret, without an apprehension.

-      Already the cook was displacing Dostoyevsky in favor of a white

-      table-cloth and cutlery.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning we were at large on the billow&rsquo;s of the West Schelde, a

-      majestic and enraged stream, of which Flushing is the guardian and Antwerp

-      the mistress. The rain had in no wise lost heart. With a contrary wind and

-      a choppy sea, the yacht had a chance to show her qualities and defects.

-      She has both. Built to the order of a Dutch baron rather less than twenty

-      years ago, she is flat-bottomed, with lee-boards, and follows closely the

-      lines of certain very picturesque Dutch fishing-smacks. She has a length

-      of just over fifty-five feet and a beam of just over fifteen feet. Her

-      tonnage is fifty-one, except when dues have to be paid, on which serious

-      occasions it mysteriously shrinks to twenty-one net. Yachtsmen are always

-      thus modest. Her rig is, roughly, that of a cutter, with a deliciously

-      curved gaff that is the secret envy of all real cutters.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Her supreme advantage, from my point of view, is that she has well over

-      six feet of head-room in the saloon and in the sleeping-cabins. And, next,

-      that the owner&rsquo;s bed is precisely similar to the celestial bed which he

-      enjoyed on a certain unsurpassed American liner. Further, she carries a

-      piano and an encyclopedia, two necessaries of life. I may say that I have

-      never known another yacht that carried an encyclopedia in more than a

-      score of volumes. Again, she is eternal. She has timbers that recall those

-      of the <i>Constitution</i>. There are Dutch eel-boats on the Thames which

-      look almost exactly like her at a distance, and which were launched before

-      Victoria came to the throne. She has a cockpit in which Hardy might have

-      kissed Nelson. She sails admirably with a moderate wind on the quarter.

-      More important still, by far, she draws only three feet eight inches, and

-      hence can often defy charts, and slide over sands where deep-draft boats

-      would rightly fear to tread; she has even been known to sail through

-      fields.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Possibly for some folk her chief attribute would be that, once seen, she

-      cannot be forgotten. She is a lovely object, and not less unusual than

-      lovely. She is smart also, but nothing more dissimilar to the average

-      smart, conventional English or American yacht can well be conceived. She

-      is a magnet for the curious. When she goes under a railway bridge while a

-      train is going over it, the engine-driver, of no matter what nationality,

-      will invariably risk the lives of all his passengers in order to stare at

-      her until she is out of sight. This I have noticed again and again. The

-      finest compliment her appearance ever received was paid by a schoolboy,

-      who, after staring at her for about a quarter of an hour as she lay at a

-      wharf at Kingston-on-Thames, sidled timidly up to me as I leaned in my

-      best maritime style over the quarter, and asked, &ldquo;Please, sir, is this a

-      training brig?&rdquo; Romance gleamed in that boy&rsquo;s eye.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As for her defects, I see no reason why I should catalogue them at equal

-      length. But I admit that, to pay for her headroom, she has no

-      promenade-deck for the owner and his friends to &ldquo;pace,&rdquo; unless they are

-      prepared to exercise themselves on the roof of the saloon. Also that,

-      owing to her shallowness, she will ignobly blow off when put up to the

-      wind. Indeed, the skipper himself, who has proved that she will live in

-      any sea, describes her progress under certain conditions as &ldquo;one mile

-      ahead and two miles to leeward&rdquo;; but he would be hurt if he were taken

-      seriously. Her worst fault is due to her long, overhanging prow, which

-      pounds into a head sea with a ruthlessness that would shake the funnels

-      off a torpedo-boat. You must not press her. Leave her to do her best, and

-      she will do it splendidly; but try to bully her, and she will bury her

-      nose and defy you.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      That morning on the wide, broad Schelde, with driving rain, and an

-      ever-freshening northwester worrying her bows, she was not pressed, and

-      she did not sink; but her fierce gaiety was such as to keep us all alive.

-      She threshed the sea. The weather multiplied, until the half-inch wire

-      rope that is the nerve between the wheel and the rudder snapped, and we

-      were at the mercy, etc. While the skipper, with marvelous resource and

-      rapidity, was improvising a new gear, it was discovered amid general

-      horror, that the piano had escaped from its captivity, and was lying

-      across the saloon table. Such an incident counts in the life of an amateur

-      musician. Still, under two hours later, I was playing the same piano again

-      in the tranquillity of Flushing lock.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0026.jpg" alt="0026 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0026.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      It was at Middelburg that the leak proved its existence. Middelburg is an

-      architecturally delightful town even in heavy, persevering rain and a

-      northwest gale. It lies on the canal from Flushing to Veere, and its

-      belfry had been a beacon to us nearly all the way down the Schelde from

-      Temeuzen. Every English traveler stares at its renowned town-hall; and

-      indeed the whole place, having been till recently the haunt of more or

-      less honest English racing tipsters and book-makers, must be endeared to

-      the British sporting character. We went forth into the rain and into the

-      town, skirting canals covered with timber-rafts, suffering the lively

-      brutishness of Dutch infants, and gazing at the bare-armed young women

-      under their umbrellas. We also found a goodish restaurant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we returned at nine P. M., the deck-hand, a fatalistic philosopher,

-      was pumping. He made a sinister figure in the dark. And there was the

-      sound of the rain on our umbrellas, and the sound of the pumped water

-      pouring off our decks down into the unseen canal. I asked him why he was

-      pumping at that hour. He answered that the ship leaked. It did. The

-      forecastle floor was under an inch of water, and water was pushing up the

-      carpet of the starboard sleeping-cabin, and all the clean linen in the

-      linen-locker was drenched. In a miraculous and terrifying vision, which

-      changed the whole aspect of yachting as a recreation, I saw the yacht at

-      the bottom of the canal. I should not have had this vision had the skipper

-      been aboard; but the skipper was ashore, unfolding the beauties of Holland

-      to the cook. I knew the skipper would explain and cure the leak in an

-      instant. A remarkable man, Dutch only by the accident of birth and

-      parentage, active as a fox-terrier, indefatigable as a camel, adventurous

-      as Columbus, and as prudent as J. Pierpont Morgan, he had never failed me.

-      Half his life had been spent on that yacht, and the other half on the

-      paternal barge. He had never lived regularly in a house. Consequently he

-      was an expert of the very first order on the behavior of Dutch barges

-      under all conceivable conditions. While the ship deliberately sank and

-      sank, the pumping monotonously continued, and I waited in the saloon for

-      him to come back. Dostoyevsky had no hold on me whatever. The skipper

-      would not come back: he declined utterly to come back; he was lost in the

-      mazy vastness of Middelburg.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then I heard his voice forward. He had arrived in silence. &ldquo;I hear our

-      little ship has got a leak, sir,&rdquo; he said when I joined the group of

-      professional mariners on the forward deck, in the thick rain that veiled

-      even gas-lamps. I was disappointed. The skipper was depressed,

-      sentimentally depressed, and he was quite at a loss. Was the leak caused

-      by the buffetings of the Schelde, by the caprices of the piano, by the

-      stress of working through crowded locks? He knew not. But he would swear

-      that the leak was not in the bottom, because the bottom was double. The

-      one thing to do was to go to Veere, and put the ship on a grid that he was

-      aware of in the creek there, and find the leak. And, further, there were a

-      lot of other matters needing immediate attention. The bob-stay was all to

-      pieces, both pumps were defective, and the horn for rousing lethargic

-      bridge-men would not have roused a rabbit. All which meant for him an

-      expedition to Flushing, that bustling port!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The ship was pumped dry. But the linen was not dry. I wanted to spread it

-      out in the saloon; but the skipper would not permit such an outrage on the

-      sanctity of the saloon, he would not even let the linen rest in the saloon

-      lavatory (sometimes called the bath-room). It must be hidden like a shame

-      in the forecastle. So the crew retired for the night to the sodden, small

-      forecastle amid soaked linen, while I reposed in dry and comfortable

-      spaciousness, but worried by those sociological considerations which are

-      the mosquitos of a luxurious age&mdash;and which ought to be. None but a

-      tyrant convinced of the divine rights of riches could be always at ease on

-      board a small yacht; on board a large one, as in a house, the contrasts

-      are less point-blank. And yet must small yachts he abolished? Absurd idea!

-      Civilization is not so simple an affair as it seems to politicians

-      perorating before immense audiences.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Owing to the obstinacy of water in finding its own level, we went to bed

-      more than once during that night, and I thought of selling the ship and

-      giving to the poor. What a declension from the glory of the original

-      embarkation!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next afternoon, through tempests and an eternal downpour, we reached

-      Veere, at the other end of the canal. Veere is full of Scotch history and

-      of beauty; it has a cathedral whose interior is used by children as a

-      field, a gem of a town-hall, and various attractions less striking; but

-      for us it existed simply as a place where there was a grid, to serve the

-      purpose of a dry-dock. On the following morning we got the yacht onto the

-      grid, and then began to wait for the tide to recede. During its

-      interminable recession, we sat under a shed of the shipyard, partly

-      sheltered from the constant rain, and labored to produce abominable

-      watercolors of the yacht, with the quay and the cathedral and the

-      town-hall as a background. And then some one paddling around the yacht in

-      the dinghy perceived a trickle out of a seam. The leak! It was naught but

-      the slight starting of a seam! No trace of other damage. In an hour it had

-      been repaired with oakum and hammers, and covered with a plaster of

-      copper. The steering-gear was repaired. The pumps were repaired. The

-      bobstay was repaired. The water-color looked less abominable in the

-      discreet, kindly light of the saloon. The state of human society seemed

-      less volcanically dangerous. God was in His heaven. &ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;d like

-      to start early to-morrow morning, sir,&rdquo; said the skipper, whose one desire

-      in life is to go somewhere else. I said I should.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I went ashore with the skipper to pay bills&mdash;four gulden for repairs

-      and three gulden for the use of the grid. It would have been much more but

-      for my sagacity in having a Dutch skipper. The charming village proved to

-      be virtually in the possession of one of those formidable English families

-      whose ladies paint in water-colors when no golf-course is near. They ran

-      ecstatically about the quay with sheets of Whatman until the heavy rain

-      melted them. The owner of the grid lived in a large house with a most

-      picturesque façade. Inside it was all oilcloth, red mahogany, and crimson

-      plush, quite marvelously hideous. The shipwright was an old, jolly man,

-      with white whiskers spreading like a peacock&rsquo;s tail. He gave us cigars to

-      pass the time while he accomplished the calligraphy of a receipt. He was a

-      man sarcastic about his women (of whom he had many), because they would

-      not let him use the <i>voor-kammer</i> (front room) to write receipts in.

-      I said women were often the same in England, and he gave a short laugh at

-      England. Nevertheless, he was proud of his women, because out of six

-      daughters five had found husbands, a feat of high skill in that island of

-      Walcheren, where women far outnumber men.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Outside, through the mullioned window, I saw a young matron standing

-      nonchalant and unprotected in the heavy rain. She wore an elaborate local

-      costume, with profuse gilt ornaments. The effect of these Dutch costumes

-      is to suggest that the wearer carries only one bodice, thin and armless,

-      but ten thousand skirts. Near the young matron was a girl of seven or

-      eight, dressed in a fashion precisely similar, spectacle exquisite to

-      regard, but unsatisfactory to think about. Some day all these women will

-      put on long sleeves and deprive themselves of a few underskirts, and all

-      the old, jolly men with spreading white beards will cry out that women are

-      unsexed and that the end of the world is nigh. In another house I bought a

-      fisherman&rsquo;s knitted blue jersey of the finest quality, as being the sole

-      garment capable of keeping me warm in a Dutch summer. I was told that the

-      girl who knitted it received only half a gulden for her labor. Outrageous

-      sweating, which ought never to have been countenanced. Still, I bought the

-      jersey.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At six-thirty next day we were under way&mdash;a new ship, as it seemed to

-      me. Yachts may have leaks, but we were under way, and the heavenly smell

-      of bacon was in the saloon; and there had been no poring over time-tables,

-      no tipping of waiters, no rattling over cobbles in omnibuses, no waiting

-      in arctic railway-stations, no pugnacity for corner seats, no checking of

-      baggage. I was wakened by the vibration of the propeller; I clad myself in

-      a toga, and issued forth to laugh good-by at sleeping Veere&mdash;no other

-      formalities. And all along the quay, here and there, I observed an open

-      window among the closed ones. Each open window denoted for me an English

-      water-colorist sleeping, even as she or he had rushed about the quay, with

-      an unconcealed conviction of spiritual, moral, and physical superiority.

-      It appeared to me monstrous that these English should be so ill bred as to

-      inflict their insular notions about fresh air on a historic Continental

-      town. Every open window was an arrogant sneer at Dutch civilization, was

-      it not? Surely they could have slept with their windows closed for a few

-      weeks! Or, if not, they might have chosen Amsterdam instead of Veere, and

-      practised their admirable Englishness on the &ldquo;Victorian Tea-Room&rdquo; in that

-      city.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0035.jpg" alt="0035 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0035.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      We passed into the Veeregat and so into the broad Roompot Channel, and

-      left Veere. It was raining heavily, but gleams near the horizon allowed me

-      to hope that before the day was out I might do another water-color.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER II&mdash;DUTCH LEISURE

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>VERY tourist knows

-      that Holland is one of the historic cradles of political freedom, and also

-      a chain of cities which are in effect museums of invaluable art. The

-      voyager in a little ship may learn that in addition to all this Holland is

-      the home of a vast number of plain persons who are under the necessity of

-      keeping themselves alive seven days a week, and whose experiments in the

-      adventure of living have an interest quite equal to the interest of

-      ancient art. To judge that adventure in its final aspect, one should see

-      Holland on a Sunday, and not the Holland of the cities, but of the little

-      towns.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We came one Sunday morning to a place called Zieriksee, on an island to

-      the north of the East Schelde. Who has heard of Zieriksee? Nevertheless,

-      Zieriksee exists, and seven thousand people prosecute the adventure

-      therein without the aid of museums and tourists. At first, from the mouth

-      of its private canal, it seems to be a huge, gray tower surrounded by

-      tiniest doll&rsquo;s-houses with vermilion roofs; and as you approach, the tower

-      waxes, until the stones of it appear sufficient to build the whole

-      borough; then it wanes, and is lost in the town, as all towers ultimately

-      are. The cobbled quay and streets were empty as we moored. And in an

-      instant a great crowd sprang up out of the earth,&mdash;men and boys and

-      girls, but few women,&mdash;staring, glaring, giggling, gabbling, pushing.

-      Their inquisitiveness had no shame, no urbanity. Their cackle deafened.

-      They worried the <i>Velsa</i> like starving wolves worrying a deer. The <i>Velsa</i>

-      was a godsend, unhoped for in the enormous and cruel tedium which they had

-      created for themselves. To escape them we forced our way ashore, and trod

-      the clean, deathlike, feet-torturing streets. One shop was open; we

-      entered it, and were supplied with cigarettes by two polite and gracious

-      very old women who knew no English. On emerging from this paganism, we met

-      a long, slow-slouching, gloomy procession of sardonic human beings,&mdash;not

-      a pretty woman among them, not a garment that was comely or unclean or

-      unrespectable, not a smile,&mdash;the great, faithful congregation

-      marching out of the great church. Here was the life of leisure in Holland

-      as distinguished from the week-day life of industry. It was a tragic

-      spectacle. When we returned to the yacht, the other congregation was still

-      around it. And it was still there, just as noisy and boorish, when we left

-      several hours later. And it would still have been there if we had remained

-      till midnight. The phenomenon of that crowd, wistful in its touching

-      desire for distraction, was a serious criticism of the leaders of men in

-      Holland. As we slid away, we could see the crowd rapidly dissolving into

-      the horror of its original ennui. I asked the cook, a cockney, what he

-      thought of Zieriksee.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      His face lightened to a cheerful smile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Rather a nice sort of place, sir. More like England.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0007" id="linkimage-0007"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0040.jpg" alt="0040 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0040.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The same afternoon we worked up the Schelde in a dead calm to Zijpe. The

-      rain had pretermitted for the first time, and the sun was hot. Zijpe is a

-      village, a haven, a dike, and a junction of train and steamer. The village

-      lies about a mile inland. The haven was pretty full of barges laid up for

-      Sunday. On the slopes of the haven, near the railway-station and the

-      landing-stage, a multitude of at least a thousand people were strolling to

-      and fro or sitting on the wet grass, all in their formidable Sabbath best.

-      We joined them, in order, if possible, to learn the cause of the

-      concourse; but the mystery remained for one hour and a half in the

-      eventless expanse of the hot afternoon, when the train came in over the

-      flat, green leagues of landscape. We then understood. The whole of Zijpe

-      had turned out to see the afternoon train come in! It was a simple modest

-      Dutch local train, making a deal of noise and dust, and bearing perhaps a

-      score of passengers. But it marked the grand climacteric of leisured

-      existence at Zijpe. We set off to the village, and discovered a village

-      deserted, and a fair-ground, with all its booths and circuses swathed up

-      in gray sheeting. Scarcely a soul! The spirit of romance had pricked them

-      all to the railway-station to see the train come in!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Making a large circuit, we reached again the river and the dike, and

-      learned what a dike is in Holland. From the top of it we could look down

-      the chimneys of houses on the landward side. The population was now on the

-      dike, promenading in magnificent solemnity and self-control. Everybody

-      gravely saluted us in passing. We gravely saluted everybody, and had not a

-      moment to ourselves for miles.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Over there,&rdquo; said the skipper afterward, pointing vaguely to the

-      southeast over the Schelde, &ldquo;they &rsquo;re Roman Catholics. There &rsquo;s

-      a lot of Spaniards left in Holland.&rdquo; By Spaniards he meant Dutchmen with

-      some Spanish blood.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then they enjoy their Sundays?&rdquo; I suggested.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered sarcastically, &ldquo;they enjoy their Sundays. They put

-      their playing-cards in their pockets before they go to church, and then

-      they go straight from the church to the café, and play high, and as like

-      as not knife each other before they &rsquo;ve done.&rdquo; Clearly it takes all

-      sorts to make a little world like Holland, and it is difficult to strike

-      the mean between absolute nullity and homicidal knives. My regret is that

-      the yacht never got as far as those Spaniards gaming and knifing in cafés.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On Monday morning every skipper on every river and canal of Holland tries

-      to prove that the stagnation of Sunday is only a clever illusion. The East

-      Schelde hummed with express barges at five A. M. It was exactly like a

-      Dutch picture by an old master. Even we, in no hurry, with a strong tide

-      under us and a rising northwester behind us, accomplished fifteen

-      sea-miles in ninety minutes. Craft were taking shelter from the threatened

-      gale. In spite of mistakes by an English crew unaccustomed to a heavy

-      mainsail in tortuous navigation and obstreperous weather, we reached

-      Dordrecht railway bridge without public shame; and then the skipper

-      decided that our engine could not be trusted to push us through the narrow

-      aperture against wind and tide. Hence we bargained with a tug, and were

-      presently attached thereto, waiting for the bridge to open.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Considering that Holland is a country where yachts are understood, and

-      where swing-bridges open at a glance, we had to wait some little time for

-      that bridge; namely, three hours. The patriotism of the skipper was

-      strained. During the whole period the tug rushed to and fro, frisking us

-      wildly about like a kettle at the tail of a busy dog, and continuously

-      collecting other kettles, so that our existence was one long shock and

-      collision. But we saw a good deal of home life on the barges, from a minor

-      barge which a girl will steer to the three-thousand-ton affair that

-      surpasses mail steamers in capacity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0045.jpg" alt="0045 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0045.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      There are two homes on these monsters, one at the stem and the other at

-      the stern; the latter is frequently magnificent in spaciousness and

-      gilding. That the two families in the two distant homes are ever intimate

-      is impossible, that they are even acquainted is improbable; but they seem

-      to share a tireless dog, who runs incessantly along the leagues of

-      planking which separate them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The bridge did at last open, and everything on the river, unmindful of

-      everything else, rushed headlong at the opening, like a crowd of sinners

-      dashing for a suddenly unbarred door into heaven. Our tug jerked us into

-      the throng, a fearful squeeze, and we were through. We cast off, the

-      gulden were collected in a tin, and within five minutes we were moored in

-      the New Haven, under the lee of the Groote Kerk, with trees all around us,

-      in whose high tops a full gale was now blowing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning our decks were thickly carpeted with green leaves, a

-      singular sight. The harbor-master came aboard to demand dues, and demanded

-      them in excellent English.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Where did you learn English?&rdquo; I asked, and he answered with strange

-      pride:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sir, I served seven years under the British flag.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Standing heedless in the cockpit, under driving rain, he recounted the

-      casualties of the night. Fifteen miles higher up the river a

-      fifteen-hundred-ton barge had sunk, and the master and crew, consisting,

-      <i>inter alia</i>, of all his family, were drowned. I inquired how such an

-      event could happen in a narrow river amid a numerous population, and

-      learned that in rough weather these barges anchor when a tug can do no

-      more with them, and the crew go to bed and sleep. The water gradually

-      washes in and washes in, until the barge is suddenly and silently

-      engulfed. Dutch phlegm! Corresponding to their Sabbatic phlegm, no doubt.

-      Said the harbor-master:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, there is a load-line, but they never takes no notice of it in

-      Holland; they just loads them up till they won&rsquo;t hold any more.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The fatalism of the working-classes everywhere is perhaps the most utterly

-      astounding of all human phenomena.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Thoughtful, I went off to examine the carved choir-stalls in the Groote

-      Kerk. These choir-stalls are among the most lovely sights in Holland.

-      Their free, fantastic beauty is ravishing and unforgetable; they make you

-      laugh with pleasure as you behold them. I doubt not that they were

-      executed by a rough-tongued man, in a dirty apron, with shocking

-      finger-nails.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0052.jpg" alt="0052 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0052.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER III&mdash;DUTCH WORK

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e passed through

-      Rotterdam more than once, without seeing more of it than the amazing

-      traffic of its river and its admirable zoological gardens full of

-      chromatically inclined parrots; but we stopped at a minor town close by,

-      on a canal off the Meuse, Schiedam. Instinct must have guided me, for the

-      sociological interest of Schiedam was not inconsiderable. Schiedam is

-      called by the Dutch &ldquo;stinking Schiedam.&rdquo; I made a circuit of the town

-      canals in the dinghy and convinced myself that the epithet was just and

-      not malicious. On the lengthy quays were a large number of very dignified

-      gin distilleries, whose architecture was respectable and sometimes even

-      very good, dating from perhaps early in the last century. Each had a

-      baptismal name, such as &ldquo;Liverpool,&rdquo; inscribed in large letters across its

-      façade. This rendering decent and this glorification of gin constituted an

-      impressive phenomenon. But it was the provinciality and the uncouth

-      melancholy of the apparently prosperous town that took my fancy. We walked

-      through all its principal streets in the rain, and I thought I had never

-      seen a provinciality so exquisitely painful and perfect. In this city of

-      near thirty thousand people there was not visible one agreeably imposing

-      shop, or one woman attired with intent to charm, or one yard of smooth

-      pavement. I know not why I find an acrid pleasure in thus beholding

-      mediocrity, the average, the everyday ordinary, as it is; but I do. No

-      museum of Amsterdam, The Hague, or Haarlem touched me so nearly as the

-      town of Schiedam, which, after all, I suppose I must have liked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Toward six o&rsquo;clock we noticed an unquiet, yet stodgy, gathering in the

-      square where is the electric-tram terminus, then a few uniforms. I asked a

-      superior police officer what there was. He said in careful, tranquil

-      English:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There is nothing. But there is a strike of glass-workers in the town.

-      Some of them don&rsquo;t want to work, and some of them do want to work. Those

-      that have worked to-day are being taken home in automobiles. That is all.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I was glad it was all, for from his manner I had expected him to continue

-      to the effect that the glass-workers had been led away by paid agitators

-      and had no good reason to strike. The automobiles began to come along, at

-      intervals, at a tremendous pace, each with a policeman by the chauffeur&rsquo;s

-      side. In one was a single artisan, middle-aged, with a cigar in the corner

-      of his mouth, and a certain adventurous look in his eye. The crowd grimly

-      regarded. The police tried to seem as if they were there by accident, but

-      obviously they lacked histrionic training. In short, the scene was one of

-      the common objects of the wayside of existence all over the civilized

-      world. It presented no novelty whatever, and yet to witness it in Holland

-      was piquant, and caused one to think afresh and perhaps more clearly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At night, when it had ceased to rain. I was escorting a friend to the

-      station. Musicians were climbing up into the bandstand in the same square.

-      It was Wednesday, the evening of the weekly municipal concert. The

-      railway-station, far out, was superbly gloomy, and it was the only station

-      in Holland where I failed to get a non-Dutch newspaper. The train, with

-      the arrogance of an international express, slid in, slid out, and forgot

-      Schiedam. I emerged from the station alone. A one-horse tram was waiting.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The tram, empty, with a sinking, but everlasting, white horse under a

-      yellow cloth, was without doubt the most provincial and melancholy thing

-      that destiny has yet brought me in contact with. The simple spectacle of

-      it, in the flickering gaslights and in the light of its own lamps, filled

-      the heart, with an anguish inexplicable and beautiful. I got in. An age

-      passed. Then an old workman got in, and saluted; I saluted. Save for the

-      saluting, it was the Five Towns of the eighties over again, intensified,

-      and the last tram out of Hanbridge before the theater-tram.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An age passed. Then a mysterious figure drew the cloth off the horse, and

-      the horse braced up all its four legs. We were starting when a

-      tight-folded umbrella waved in the outer obscurity. An elderly,

-      easy-circumstanced couple arrived upon us with deliberation; the umbrella

-      was a good one.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We did start. We rumbled and trundled in long curves of suburban

-      desolation. Then a few miserable shops that ought to have been shut; then

-      the square once more, now jammed in every part with a roaring, barbaric

-      horde. In the distance, over a floor of heads, was an island of

-      illumination, with the figures of puffing and blowing musicians in it; but

-      no rumor of music could reach us through the din. The white horse trotted

-      mildly into and right through the multitude, which jeered angrily, but

-      fell back. An enormous multitude, Gothic, Visi-gothic, savage,

-      uncivilized, chiefly consisting of young men and big boys&mdash;the weekly

-      concert of humanizing music!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0057.jpg" alt="0057 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0057.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      I left the tram, and walked along the dark, empty canal-side to the yacht.

-      The impression of stagnation, tedium, provincialism was overwhelming.

-      Nevertheless, here, as in other towns, we were struck by the number of

-      shop-windows with artist&rsquo;s materials for sale. Such was Schiedam. If it is

-      asked whether I went to Holland on a yachting cruise to see this sort of

-      thing, the answer is that I just did.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After a few weeks I began to perceive that Schiedam and similar places,

-      though thrilling, were not the whole of Holland, and perhaps not the most

-      representative of Holland. As the yacht worked northward, Holland seemed

-      to grow more Dutch, until, in the chain of shallow lakes and channels that

-      hold Friesland in a sort of permanent baptism, we came to what was for me

-      the ideal or celestial Holland&mdash;everything done by water, even grass

-      cut under water, and black-and-white cows milked in the midst of ponds,

-      and windmills over the eternal flatness used exclusively to shift

-      inconvenient water from one level to another. The road is water in

-      Friesland, and all the world is on the road. If your approach to a town is

-      made perilous by a succession of barges that will obstinately keep the

-      middle of the channel, you know that it is market-day in that town, and

-      the farmers are rolling home in agreeable inebriation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The motor broke down in Friesland, and we were immobolized in the midst of

-      blue-green fields, red dogs, the cows aforesaid, green milk-floats,

-      blue-bloused sportsmen, and cargoes of cannon-ball cheese. We decided to

-      tow the yacht until we got to a favorable reach. Certain barges sailed

-      past us right into the eye of the wind, against all physical laws, but the

-      <i>Velsa</i> possessed not this magic. We saw three men comfortably towing

-      a string of three huge barges, and we would tow. Unfortunately the only

-      person, the skipper, who knew how to tow had to remain on board. The cook,

-      the deck-hand, and I towed like Greeks pulling against Greeks, and could

-      scarcely move one little yacht. The cook, neurasthenic by temperament,

-      grew sad, until he fell into three feet of inundation, which adventure

-      struck him as profoundly humorous, so that he was contorted with laughter.

-      This did not advance the yacht. Slowly we learned that towing is not mere

-      brute striving, but an art.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We at last came to terms with a tug, as our desire was to sleep at Sneek.

-      Sneek is the veritable metropolis of those regions. After passing, at late

-      dusk, the mysterious night-watchers of eel-nets, who are wakened in their

-      elaborate green-and-yellow boats by a bell, like a Paris concierge, we

-      gradually emerged into nocturnal Sneek through a quadruple lane of barges

-      and tugs so long as to put Sneek among the seven great ports of the world.

-      And even in Sneek at nightfall the impression of immense quantities of

-      water and of greenness, yellowness, and redness was continued. It rained,

-      as usual, in Sneek the next day, but no rain and no water could damp

-      Sneek. It was the most active town any of us had ever seen. It must have

-      been the original &ldquo;hive of industry.&rdquo; It was full, and full of everything.

-      The market was full of cattle, pigs, and sheep, crowded in pens and in

-      carts; calves, prone, with all four legs tied together, filled acres of

-      pavement. The cafés were full of dealers and drovers, mostly rather jolly,

-      being served by slatternly, pleasant women. The streets were full of good

-      shops, and of boys and girls following us and touching us to see if we

-      existed. (Dreadful little boors!) The barges were full of cauliflowers,

-      cabbages, apples, potatoes, sabots, cheeses, and barrels. The canals were

-      full of barges and steamers.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And immediately one sat down to sketch a group of craft one learned that

-      nothing was stationary. Everything moved that floated&mdash;everything on

-      the surface of miles of canal! Everybody, without haste, but without

-      stopping ever, was tirelessly engaged in shifting matter from one spot to

-      another. At intervals a small steamer, twenty, thirty, fifty, eighty tons,

-      would set off for a neighboring village with a few passengers,&mdash;including

-      nice girls,&mdash;a few cattle, and high piles of miscellaneous packages;

-      or would come in from a neighboring village. The kaleidoscope was

-      everlasting; but it did not fatigue, because it never hurried. Only it

-      made us ashamed of our idleness. Gently occupied old country-women, with

-      head-dresses of lace-work and a gold casque, the whole ridiculously

-      surmounted by a black bonnet for fashion&rsquo;s sake&mdash;even these old women

-      made us ashamed of our untransporting idleness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0063.jpg" alt="0063 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0063.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Having got our engine more or less repaired, we departed from Sneek, a

-      spot that beyond most spots abounds in its own individuality. Sneek is

-      memorable. Impossible to credit that it has fewer than thirteen thousand

-      inhabitants!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As, at breakfast, we dropped down the canal on the way to Leeuwarden, a

-      new guest on board, whose foible is the search for the ideal, and who had

-      been declaiming against the unattractiveness of the women of Munich, spoke

-      thus:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is this Dutch bread? I think I should like to become a Dutchman, and live

-      at Sneek, and marry a Dutch girl. They have such nice blue eyes, and they

-      &lsquo;re so calm.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I remarked that I should have thought that his recent experiences in

-      Munich would have frightened him right off the entire sex. He said:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, they &lsquo;re all beautiful in Vienna, and that worries you just as much

-      in another way. Sneek is the mean.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE ZUYDER ZEE

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E reached the

-      Zuyder Zee, out of a canal, at Monnikendam, which is a respectably

-      picturesque townlet and the port of embarkation for Marken, the alleged

-      jewel of the Zuyder Zee, the precious isle where the customs and the

-      costumes of a pure age are mingled with the prices of New York for the

-      instruction of tourists. We saw Marken, but only from the mainland, a

-      long, serrated silhouette on the verge. The skipper said that Marken was a

-      side-show and a swindle, and a disgrace to his native country. So I

-      decided to cut it out of the program, and be the owner of the only foreign

-      yacht that had cruised in the Zuyder Zee without visiting Marken. My real

-      reason was undoubtedly that the day&rsquo;s program had been upset by undue

-      lolling in the second-hand shops of Monnikendam. Thus we sailed due north

-      for Hoorn, secretly fearing that at Marken there might be something

-      lovely, unforgetable, that we had missed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, provided you don&rsquo;t mind rain,

-      and provided your craft does not draw more than about six feet. It has the

-      appearance of a sea, but we could generally touch the bottom with our

-      sounding-pole; after all, it is not a sea, but a submerged field. The

-      skipper would tell inclement stories of the Zuyder Zee under ice, and how

-      he had crossed it on foot between Enkhuizen and Stavoren, risking his life

-      for fun; and how he had been obliged to recross it the next day, with more

-      fatigue, as much risk, and far less fun, because there was no other way

-      home. We ourselves knew it only as a ruffled and immense pond, with a

-      bracing atmosphere and the silhouettes of diminished trees and houses

-      sticking up out of its horizons here and there. When these low silhouettes

-      happen to denote your destination, they have the strange faculty of

-      receding from your prow just as fast as you sail toward them, a magic sea

-      of an exquisite monotony; and when you arrive anywhere, you are so

-      surprised at having overtaken the silhouette that your arrival is a dream,

-      in the unreal image of a city.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead cities, and never saw

-      one. Hoorn is a delightful vision for the eye&mdash;beautiful domestic

-      architecture, beautiful warehouses, beautiful towers, beautiful

-      water-gate, beautiful aniline colors on the surface of dreadful canals. If

-      it were as near to London and Paris as Bruges is, it would be inhabited

-      exclusively by water-colorists. At Hoorn I went mad, and did eight

-      sketches in one day, a record which approaches my highest break at

-      billiards. Actually, it is inhabited by cheese-makers and dealers. No

-      other town, not even Chicago, can possibly contain so many cheeses per

-      head of the population as Hoorn. At Hoorn I saw three men in blue blouses

-      throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the second story of a brown

-      and yellow and green warehouse into a yellow cart. One man was in the

-      second story, one in the first, and one in the cart. They were flinging

-      cheeses from hand to hand when we arrived and when we left, and they never

-      dropped a cheese or ceased to fling. They flung into the mysterious night,

-      when the great forms of little cargo-steamers floated soundless over

-      romance to moor at the dark quays, and the long, white English

-      steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and its flulfy chambermaid,

-      and its polished mahogany motor-launch, and its myriad lights and gleams,

-      glided to a berth by the water-tower, and hung there like a cloud beyond

-      the town, keeping me awake half the night while I proved to myself that I

-      did not really envy its owner and that the Velsa was really a much better

-      yacht.

-    </p>

-

-<div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0070.jpg" alt="0070 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0070.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-

-    <p>

-      The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the

-      English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who

-      spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was

-      selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British army

-      officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the Dutch

-      army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh, British army

-      officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand the phrase

-      &ldquo;East Indian cigar.&rdquo; He said there were no such cigars in his parents&rsquo;

-      shop. When I said &ldquo;Sumatra,&rdquo; he understood, and fetched his mother. When I

-      said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn, his mother put away all

-      the samples already exhibited and fetched his father. The family had begun

-      to comprehend that a serious customer had strayed into the shop. The

-      father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity and deference went

-      up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of cigars that were warm to

-      the touch. &ldquo;These are the best?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;These are the best.&rdquo; I bought. They were threepence apiece.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling

-      sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the

-      Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have

-      atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have

-      adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for

-      the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like too

-      many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of dogs&mdash;dogs

-      that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order to prove that

-      they are of the race that has always ended by expelling invaders with

-      bloodshed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I was safer in the yacht&rsquo;s dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though

-      the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched,

-      three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into the

-      canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone on the

-      quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as table-tops&mdash;cleaner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though

-      Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived

-      there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first glance,

-      exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I remember it as

-      the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner steering, and foul

-      the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his owner, as if to say,

-      &ldquo;You see what owners do when they take charge.&rdquo; I admitted it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy and

-      recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having taken to

-      his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail in a jiffy.

-      The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become an omnibus

-      conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus conductor

-      will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young man, and

-      himself painted in water-colors.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0076.jpg" alt="0076 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0076.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town; but I

-      know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely practical

-      town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the cook. We

-      were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised even by E.

-      V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation. Kampen has

-      architecture,&mdash;wonderful gates,&mdash;but it also has the crudest

-      pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east wind

-      was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner of Kampen

-      was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen, which

-      perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning was warm

-      and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven weeks

-      continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three hours we

-      were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was steering.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Please keep the center of the channel,&rdquo; the skipper enjoined me.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are

-      privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within

-      half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on

-      to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had

-      seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is

-      the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at

-      high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs

-      and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go to

-      Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the

-      town.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end surcease,

-      and all their long-colored <i>weins</i> (vanes) streamed in the wind

-      against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was the

-      spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses that

-      pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue ensign),

-      and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay and held

-      him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the spectacle of

-      his aged father&rsquo;s trading barge, unexpectedly making for the same port,

-      with his mother, brother, and sister on deck&mdash;the crew! Arrived in

-      port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the skipper

-      boarded his old home with becoming placidity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful

-      forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom nated

-      by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a smack

-      arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed to be

-      always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect

-      picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an

-      establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass. The

-      town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick

-      water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an

-      avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched

-      off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a square.

-      Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in Indian

-      reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely imitated

-      from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the church was a

-      picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a sacristan out of a

-      late novel by Huysmans.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The churchyard was a mass of tall flowers.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The women&rsquo;s costumes here showed a difference, the gilt casque being more

-      visibly divided into two halves. All bodices were black, all skirts blue.

-      Some of the fishermen make majestic figures, tall, proud, commanding, fit

-      adversaries of Alva; in a word, exemplifications of the grand manner.

-      Their salutes were sometimes royal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The gaiety of the color; the distinction of the forms; the strange warmth;

-      the completeness of the entity of the town, which seemed to have been

-      constructed at one effort; the content of the inhabitants, especially the

-      visible, unconscious gladness of the women at the return of their

-      mariners; the urbanity of everybody&mdash;all these things helped to

-      produce a comfortable and yet disconcerting sensation that the old,

-      unreformed world was not quite ripe for utter destruction.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      All day until late in the evening smacks ceased not to creep up the canal.

-      The aspect of the basin altered from minute to minute, with disastrous

-      effect on water-colorists. In the dusk we ferreted In a gloomy and

-      spellbound second-hand shop, amid dozens of rococo wall-clocks, and bought

-      a few little things. As we finally boarded the yacht in the dark, we could

-      see a group of sailors in a bosky arbor bending over a table on which was

-      a lamp that harshly lighted their grave faces. They may have thought that

-      they were calculating and apportioning the week&rsquo;s profits; but in reality

-      they were playing at masterpieces by Rembrandt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0081.jpg" alt="0081 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0081.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER V&mdash;SOME TOWNS

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>AARLEM is the

-      capital of a province, and has the airs of a minor metropolis. When we

-      moored in the Donkere Spaarne, all the architecture seemed to be saying to

-      us, with innocent pride, that this was the city of the illustrious Frans

-      Hals, and the only place where Frans Hals could be truly appreciated.

-      Haarlem did not stare at strangers, as did other towns. The shops in the

-      narrow, busy Saturday-night streets were small and slow, and it took us

-      most of an evening, in and out of the heavy rain, to buy three shawls, two

-      pairs of white stockings, and some cigarettes; but the shopmen and

-      shop-women, despite their ignorance of English, American, and French,

-      showed no openmouthed provinciality at our fantastic demands. The

-      impression upon us of the mysterious entity of the town was favorable; we

-      felt at home.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The yacht was just opposite the habitation of a nice middle-class family,

-      and on Sunday morning, through the heavy rain, I could see a boy of

-      sixteen, a girl of fourteen, and a child of five or six, all dressing

-      slowly together in a bedroom that overlooked us, while the father in

-      shirt-sleeves constantly popped to and fro. They were calmly content to

-      see and be seen. Presently father and son, still in shirt-sleeves,

-      appeared on the stoop, each smoking a cigar, and the girl above, arrayed

-      in Sunday white, moved about setting the bedroom in order. It was a

-      pleasant average sight, enhanced by the good architecture of the house,

-      and by a certain metropolitan self-unconsciousness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We went to church later, or rather into a church, and saw beautiful models

-      of ships hung in the nave, and aged men entering, with their hats on and

-      good cigars in their mouths. For the rest, they resembled superintendents

-      of English Sunday-schools or sidesmen of small parishes. In another church

-      we saw a Sunday-school in full session, a parson in a high pulpit

-      exhorting, secretary and minor officials beneath him, and all the boys

-      standing up with shut eyes and all the girls sitting down with shut eyes.

-      We felt that we were perhaps in the most Protestant country in Europe.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the afternoon, when the rain-clouds lifted for a few moments and the

-      museums were closed, we viewed the residential prosperity of Haarlem, of

-      which the chief seat is the Nieuwe Gracht, a broad canal, forbidden to

-      barges, flanked by broad quays beautifully paved in small red brick, and

-      magnificent houses. A feature of the noble architecture here was that the

-      light ornamentation round the front doors was carried up and round the

-      central windows of the first and second stories. A grand street! One

-      properly expected to see elegant women at the windows of these lovely

-      houses,&mdash;some were almost palaces,&mdash;and one was disappointed.

-      Women there were, for at nearly every splendid window, the family was

-      seated, reading, talking, gazing, or drinking tea; but all the women were

-      dowdy; the majority were middle-aged; none was beautiful or elegant. Nor

-      was any of the visible furniture distinguished.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The beauty of Haarlem seems to be limited to architecture, pavements, and

-      the moral comeliness of being neat and clean. The esthetic sense

-      apparently stops there. Charm must be regarded in Haarlem with suspicion,

-      as a quality dangerous and unrespectable. As daylight failed, the groups

-      within gathered closer and closer to the windows, to catch the last yellow

-      drops of it, and their curiosity about the phenomena of the streets grew

-      more frank. We were examined. In return we examined. And a discussion

-      arose as to whether inspection from within justified inquisitiveness from

-      the street. The decision was that it did not; that a person inside a house

-      had the right to quiz without being quizzed. But this merely academic

-      verdict was not allowed to influence our immediate deportment. In many

-      houses of the lesser streets tables were already laid for supper, and one

-      noticed heavy silver napkin-rings and other silver. In one house the

-      shadowy figures of a family were already grouped round a repast, and

-      beyond them, through another white-curtained window at the back of the

-      spacious room, could be discerned a dim courtyard full of green and yellow

-      foliage. This agreeable picture, typifying all the domestic tranquillity

-      and dignity of prosperous Holland, was the last thing we saw before the

-      dark and the rain fell, and the gas-lamps flickered in.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0087.jpg" alt="0087 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0087.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      We entered The Hague through canals pitted by heavy rain, the banks of

-      which showed many suburban residences, undistinguished, but set in the

-      midst of good gardens. And because it was the holiday week,&mdash;the week

-      containing the queen&rsquo;s birthday,&mdash;and we desired quietude, we

-      obtained permission to lie at the private quay of the gasworks. The

-      creators of The Hague gas-works have made only one mistake: they ought to

-      have accomplished their act much earlier, so that Balzac might have

-      described it; for example, in &ldquo;The Alkahest,&rdquo; which has the best

-      imaginative descriptions of Dutch life yet written. The Hague gas-works

-      are like a toy, gigantic; but a toy. Impossible to believe that in this

-      vast, clean, scrubbed, swept expanse, where every bit of coal is

-      scrupulously in place, real gas is made. To believe, you must go into the

-      city and see the gas actually burning. Even the immense traveling-cranes,

-      when at work or otherwise, have the air of life-size playthings. Our quay

-      was bordered with flower-beds. The workmen, however, seemed quite real

-      workmen, realistically dirty, who were not playing at work, nor rising at

-      five-thirty a.m. out of mere joyous ecstasy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Nor did the bargemen who day and night ceaselessly and silently propelled

-      their barges past us into the city by means of poles and sweat, seem to be

-      toying with existence. The procession of these barges never stopped. On

-      the queen&rsquo;s birthday, when our ship was dressed, and the whole town was

-      flagged, it went on, just as the decorated trams and tram-drivers went on.

-      Some of the barges penetrated right through the populous districts, and

-      emerged into the oligarchic quarter of ministries, bureaus, official

-      residences, palaces, parks, art dealers, and shops of expensive lingerie&mdash;the

-      quarter, as in every capital, where the precious traditions of

-      correctness, patriotism, red-tape, order, luxury, and the moral grandeur

-      of devising rules for the nice conduct of others are carefully conserved

-      and nourished. This quarter was very well done, and the bargemen, with

-      their perspiring industry, might have had the good taste to keep out of

-      it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The business center of The Hague, lying between the palaces and the

-      gas-works, is cramped, crowded, and unimpressive. The cafés do not

-      glitter, and everybody knows that the illumination of cafés in a capital

-      is a sure index of a nation&rsquo;s true greatness. Many small cafés, veiled in

-      costly curtains at window and door, showed stray dazzling shafts of bright

-      light, but whether the true greatness of Holland was hidden in these

-      seductive arcana I never knew. Even in the holiday week the principal

-      cafés were emptying soon after ten o&rsquo;clock. On the other hand, the large

-      stores were still open at that hour, and the shop-girls, whose pale faces

-      made an admirable contrast to their black robes, were still serving ladies

-      therein. At intervals, in the afternoons, one saw a chic woman, moving

-      with a consciousness of her own elegance; but she was very exceptional.

-      The rest might have run over for the day from Haarlem, Delft, Utrecht, or

-      Leyden. In the really excellent and well-frequented music-halls there was

-      no elegance either. I have never anywhere seen better music-hall

-      entertainments than in Holland. In certain major capitals of Europe and

-      elsewhere the public is apt to prove its own essential naïveté by allowing

-      itself to be swindled nightly in gorgeous music-halls. The Dutch are more

-      astute, if less elegant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The dying engine of the yacht lost consciousness, for about the twentieth

-      time during this trip, as we were nearing Amsterdam; but a high wind,

-      carrying with it tremendous showers of rain, kindly blew us, under bare

-      poles, up the last half-mile of the North Sea Canal into the private haven

-      of the Royal Dutch Yacht-Club, where we were most amicably received, as,

-      indeed, in all the yacht-club basins of Holland. Baths, telephones, and

-      smoking-rooms were at our disposal without any charge, in addition to the

-      security of the haven, and it was possible to get taxicabs from the

-      somewhat distant city. We demanded a chauffeur who could speak English.

-      They sent us a taxi with two chauffeurs neither of whom could speak any

-      language whatsoever known to philologists. But by the use of maps and a

-      modification of the pictorial writing of the ancient Aztecs, we contrived

-      to be driven almost where we wanted. At the end of the excursion I had

-      made, in my quality of observer, two generalizations: first, that

-      Amsterdam taxis had two drivers for safety; and, second, that taxi-travel

-      in Amsterdam was very exciting and dangerous. But our drivers were so

-      amiable, soft-tongued, and energetic that I tipped them both. I then,

-      somehow, learned the truth: one of the men was driving a taxi for the

-      first time, and the other was teaching him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0094.jpg" alt="0094 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0094.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      After driving and walking about Amsterdam for several days, I decided that

-      it would be completely civilized when it was repaved, and not before. It

-      is the paradise of stomachs and the hell of feet. Happily, owing to its

-      canals and its pavements, it has rather fewer of the rash cyclists who

-      menace life in other Dutch cities. In Holland, outside Amsterdam,

-      everybody uses a cycle. If you are ran down, as you are, it is just as

-      likely to be by an aged and toothless female peasant as by an office boy.

-      Also there are fewer homicidal dogs in Amsterdam than elsewhere, and there

-      is the same general absence of public monuments which makes other Dutch

-      cities so agreeably strange to the English and American traveler. You can

-      scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue of a nonentity in Holland,

-      because there are scarcely any statues.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland. Its

-      architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively immanent

-      in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of it in the

-      mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the

-      inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer. Amsterdam

-      has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever passed through

-      the head of a stock-broker. It is excessively ugly and graceless, but I

-      admire it for being a caprice, and especially for being a stock-broker&rsquo;s

-      caprice. No English stock-broker would have a caprice. Amsterdam has small

-      and dear restaurants of the first order, where a few people with more

-      money than appetite can do themselves very well indeed in hushed privacy.

-      It also has prodigious cafés. Krasnopolshy&rsquo;s&mdash;a town, not a café&mdash;is

-      said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It isn&rsquo;t; but it is

-      large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a million people.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0099.jpg" alt="0099 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0099.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the quality

-      which above all others a great city ought to possess. It pullulates. Vast

-      masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and boil over into its

-      public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the rain, is thronged

-      with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of its shops. The

-      Kalver-Straat will compete handsomely with Bond Street. Go along the

-      length of it, and you will come out of it thoughtful. Make your way thence

-      to the Rembrandt-Plein, where pleasure concentrates, and you will have to

-      conclude that the whole of Amsterdam is there, and all its habitations

-      empty. The mirrored, scintillating cafés, huge and lofty and golden, are

-      crowded with tables and drinkers and waiters, and dominated by rhapsodic

-      orchestras of women in white who do what they can against the hum of ten

-      thousand conversations, the hoarse calls of waiters, and the clatter of

-      crockery. It is a pandemonium with a certain stolidity. The excellent

-      music-halls and circuses are equally crowded, and curiously, so are the

-      suburban resorts on the rim of the city. Among the larger places, perhaps,

-      the Café Américain, on the Leidsche-Plein, was the least feverish, and

-      this was not to be counted in its favor, because the visitor to a city

-      which pullulates is, and should he, happiest in pullulating. The crowd,

-      the din, the elbowing, the glitter for me, in a town like Amsterdam! In a

-      town like Gouda, which none should fail to visit for the incomparable

-      stained-glass in its church, I am content to be as placid and solitary as

-      anybody, and I will follow a dancing bear and a Gipsy girl up and down the

-      streets thereof with as much simplicity as anybody. But Amsterdam is the

-      great, vulgar, inspiring world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER VI&mdash;MUSEUMS

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> DID not go

-      yachting in Holland in order to visit museums; nevertheless, I saw a few.

-      When it is possible to step off a yacht clean into a museum, and heavy

-      rain is falling, the temptation to remain on board is not sufficiently

-      powerful to keep you out of the museum. At Dordrecht there is a municipal

-      museum manned by four officials. They received us with hope, with

-      enthusiasm, with the most touching gratitude. Their interest in us was

-      pathetic. They were all dying of ennui in those large rooms, where the

-      infection hung in clouds almost visible, and we were a specific stimulant.

-      They seized on us as the morphinomaniac seizes on an unexpected find of

-      the drug.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0106.jpg" alt="0106 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0106.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Just as Haarlem is the city of Frans Hals, so Dordrecht is the city of Ary

-      Scheffer. Posterity in the end is a good judge of painters, if not of

-      heroes, but posterity makes mistakes sometimes, and Ary Scheffer is one of

-      its more glaring mistakes. (Josef Israels seems likely to be another.) And

-      posterity is very slow in acknowledging an error. The Dordrecht museum is

-      waiting for such an acknowledgment. When that comes, the museum will be

-      burned down, or turned into a brewery, and the officials will be delivered

-      from their dreadful daily martyrdom of feigning ecstatic admiration for

-      Ary Scheffer. Only at Dordrecht is it possible to comprehend the full

-      baseness, the exquisite unimportance, of Scheffer&rsquo;s talent. The best thing

-      of his in a museum full of him is a free, brilliant copy of a head by

-      Rembrandt done at the age of eleven. It was, I imagine, his last tolerable

-      work. His worst pictures, solemnly hung here, would be justifiably laughed

-      at in a girls&rsquo; schoolroom. But his sentimentality, conventionality, and

-      ugliness arouse less laughter than nausea. By chance a few fine pictures

-      have come into the Dordrecht museum, as into most museums. Jakob Maris and

-      Bosboom are refreshing, but even their strong influence cannot disinfect

-      the place nor keep the officials alive. We left the museum in the nick of

-      time, and saw no other visitors.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Now, the tea-shop into which we next went was far more interesting and

-      esthetically valuable than the museum. The skipper, who knew every shop,

-      buoy, bridge, and shoal in Holland, had indicated this shop to me as a

-      high-class shop for costly teas. It was. I wanted the best tea, and here I

-      got it. The establishment might have survived from the age when Dordrecht

-      was the wealthiest city in Holland. Probably it had so survived. It was

-      full of beautiful utensils in practical daily use. It had an architectural

-      air, and was aware of its own dignity. The head-salesman managed to convey

-      to me that the best tea&mdash;that was, tea that a connoisseur would call

-      <i>tea</i>&mdash;cost two and a half florins a pound. I conveyed to him

-      that I would take two pounds of the same. The head-salesman then displayed

-      to me the tea in its japanned receptacle. He next stood upright and

-      expectant, whereupon an acolyte, in a lovely white apron, silently

-      appeared from the Jan-Steen shadows at the back of the shop, and with

-      solemn gestures held a tun-dish over a paper bag for his superior to pour

-      tea into. Having performed his share in the rite, he disappeared. The

-      parcel was slowly made up, every part of the process being evidently a

-      matter of secular tradition. I tendered a forty-gulden note. Whereon the

-      merchant himself arrived in majesty at the counter from his office, and

-      offered the change with punctilio. He would have been perfect, but for a

-      hole in the elbow of his black alpaca coat. I regretted this hole. We left

-      the shop stimulated, and were glad to admit that Dordrecht had atoned to

-      us for its museum. Ary Scheffer might have made an excellent tea-dealer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The museum at Dordrecht only showed in excess an aspect of displayed art

-      which is in some degree common to all museums. For there is no museum

-      which is not a place of desolation. Indeed, I remember to have seen only

-      one collection of pictures, public or private, in which every item was a

-      cause of joy&mdash;that of Mr. Widener, near Philadelphia. Perhaps the

-      most wonderful thing in the tourist&rsquo;s Holland is the fact that the small

-      museum at Haarlem, with its prodigious renown, does not disappoint. You

-      enter it with disturbing preliminaries, each visitor having to ring a

-      bell, and the <i>locus</i> is antipathetic; but one&rsquo;s pulse is immediately

-      quickened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces of Hals. And

-      Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influential here, and even the mediocre

-      paintings have often an interest of perversity, as to which naturally the

-      guide-books say naught.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up

-      with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant,

-      who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired

-      the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum of the

-      kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by Rembrandt, of

-      which he managed to exaggerate the value.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces

-      than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one&rsquo;s first sight of Rembrandt&rsquo;s

-      &ldquo;Lesson in Anatomy&rdquo; therein would constitute a dramatic event in any

-      yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy

-      one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday of

-      the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared coarsely

-      around, and understood nothing&mdash;nothing. True, they gazed in a

-      hypnotized semicircle at &ldquo;The Lesson in Anatomy,&rdquo; and I can hear amiable

-      persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant and

-      the simple. I don&rsquo;t believe it. I believe that if &ldquo;The Lesson in Anatomy&rdquo;

-       had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of Carolus-Duran, the

-      ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized just the same. And I

-      have known the ignorant and the simple to be overwhelmed with emotion by

-      spurious trickery of the most absurd and offensive kind.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic

-      experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic sense the

-      majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be artistically

-      civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can make any

-      appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy of art, by

-      which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in the midst of a

-      vast, dangerous population&mdash;a few adventurous whites among indigenous

-      hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may have splendid

-      qualities, but they have not that one quality which more than any other

-      vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the manifestations of art

-      which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not very agreeable either. A

-      string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth, came into the Mauritshuis

-      out of the rain, and mildly and politely scorned it. Their attitude was

-      unmistakable. They were not intimidated. Well, I like that. I preferred

-      that, for example, to the cant of ten thousand tourists.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag

-      was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste, as

-      illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact that

-      many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two superb

-      works&mdash;a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau&mdash;could not make up for

-      the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full

-      of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having time to

-      spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is famous, and

-      is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea, but it does not

-      rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a sky full of kites.

-      Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left Scheveningen, my

-      secret melancholy was profoundly established within me, and in that there

-      is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it becomes

-      uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0112.jpg" alt="0112 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0112.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town of

-      fine architecture, is that they should both&mdash;the Ryks and the

-      municipal&mdash;be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the

-      age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs, and the

-      result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities. Michelangelo

-      often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects and artists more

-      skilled than he in pleasing city councils and building-committees muddled

-      away opportunities which he would have glorified; but he did obtain part

-      of a job now and then, subject to it being &ldquo;improved&rdquo; by some duffer like

-      Bernini, who of course contrived to leave a large fortune, whereas if

-      Michelangelo had lived to-day he might never have got any job at all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the

-      Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, &ldquo;The Night-Watch&rdquo;

-       of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on the

-      part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you: &ldquo;Hats

-      off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.&rdquo; The truth is

-      that &ldquo;The Night-Watch&rdquo; is neither very lovable nor very beautiful. It is

-      an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering centuries in the eye,

-      and it does so. But how long it will continue to do so is a nice question.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of room,

-      despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me with youth.

-      It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful mistakes, but at

-      any rate it is being made under the guidance of somebody who is not afraid

-      of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced with such a collection, one

-      realizes the shortcomings of London museums and the horror of that steely

-      English official conservatism, at once timid and ruthless, which will

-      never permit itself to discover a foreign artist until the rest of the

-      world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks there are Van Goghs and

-      Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best, but they are there. Also

-      there are some of the most superb water-colors of the age, and good things

-      by a dozen classic moderns who are still totally unrepresented in London.

-      I looked at a celestial picture of women&mdash;the kind of thing that Guys

-      would have done if he could&mdash;painted perhaps fifty years ago, and as

-      modern as the latest Sargent water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T.

-      C.? T. C.? Who on earth could T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas

-      Couture, of course! A great artist! He will appear in the National

-      Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about the middle of the twenty-first century.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then there was Daumier&rsquo;s &ldquo;Christ and His Disciples,&rdquo; a picture that I

-      would have stolen had it been possible and quite safe to do so. It might

-      seen incredible that any artist of the nineteenth century should take the

-      subject from the great artists of the past, and treat it so as to make you

-      think that it had never been treated before. But Daumier did this. It is

-      true that he was a very great artist indeed. Who that has seen it and

-      understood its tender sarcasm can forget that group of the exalted,

-      mystical Christ talking to semi-incredulous, unperceptive disciples in the

-      gloomy and vague evening landscape? I went back to the yacht and its

-      ignoble and decrepit engine, full of the conviction that art still lives.

-      And I thought of Wilson Steer&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Music-Room&rdquo; in the Tate Gallery,

-      London, which magnificent picture is a proof that in London also art still

-      lives.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0117.jpg" alt="0117 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0117.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      PART II&mdash;THE BALTIC

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER VII&mdash;THE YACHT I LOST

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>UR adventures

-      toward the Baltic began almost disastrously, because I put into the

-      planning of them too much wisdom and calculation. We had a month of time

-      at our disposal. Now, a fifty-ton yacht in foreign parts thinks nothing of

-      a month. It is capable of using up a month in mere preliminaries. Hence,

-      with admirable forethought, I determined to send the yacht on in advance.

-      The <i>Velsa</i> was to cross from her home port, Brightlingsea, to the

-      Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many islands, to creep along the

-      coasts of Hanover, Holstein, Schleswig, and Denmark, past the mouths of

-      the Elbe, Weser, and Eider, to the port of Esbjerg, where we were to join

-      her by a fast steamer from Harwich. She was then to mount still farther

-      the Danish coast, as far as Liim Fjord and, by a route combining fjords

-      and canals, cross the top of the Jutland peninsula, and enter the desired

-      Baltic by Randers Fjord. The banal way would have been through the Kiel

-      Canal. Yachts never take the Liim Fjord; but to me this was a fine reason

-      for taking the Liim Fjord. Moreover, English yachts have a habit of

-      getting into trouble with the German Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English

-      yachtsmen are apt to languish in German prisons on charges of espionage. I

-      was uncertain about the comforts provided for spies in German prisons, and

-      I did not wish to acquire certitude.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      So the yacht was despatched. The skipper gave himself the large allowance

-      of a fortnight for the journey to Esbjerg. He had a beautiful new

-      30-horse-power engine, new sails, a new mast. Nothing could stop him

-      except an east wind. It is notorious that in the North Sea the east wind

-      never blows for more than three days together, and that in July it never

-      blows at all. Still, in this July it did start to blow a few days before

-      the yacht&rsquo;s intended departure. And it continued to blow hard. In a week

-      the skipper had only reached Harwich, a bare twenty miles from

-      Brightlingsea. Then the yacht vanished into the North Sea. The wind held

-      in the east. After another week I learned by cable that my ship had

-      reached the Helder, in North Holland. By a wondrous coincidence, my Dutch

-      skipper&rsquo;s wife and family are established at the Helder. The east wind

-      still held. The skipper spent money daily in saddening me by cable. Then

-      he left the Helder, and the day came for us to board the mail-steamer at

-      Harwich for Esbjerg.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0123.jpg" alt="0123 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0123.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her very

-      first trip. She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced Danes, who

-      had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom they chattered

-      in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and incomprehensible.

-      Also she was full of original Danish food, and especially of marvelous and

-      mysterious sandwiches, which, with small quantities of champagne, we ate

-      at intervals in a veranda cafe passably imitated from Atlantic liners.

-      Despite the east wind, which still held, that steamer reached Esbjerg in

-      the twinkling of an eye.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. It was in the

-      dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an unknown

-      foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it as great

-      ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant. There was a vast

-      fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid imperceptibly past the

-      mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the multitudinous masts for

-      the mast of the <i>Velsa</i>. Her long Dutch streamer was ever

-      unmistakable. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What the

-      mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have done in

-      more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the distance

-      was simply nothing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes,

-      though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on the

-      quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound to be

-      on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great ship,

-      because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have

-      accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. The <i>Velsa</i> was

-      definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of the

-      Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled us

-      out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of purgatory.

-      He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he consented to be our

-      friend, no serious harm could happen to our universe. And the hotel was

-      excellent, the food was excellent, the cigars were excellent. And the

-      three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting demurely about the long corridor

-      at their nightly tasks, fair, clad in prints, foreign, separated

-      romantically from us by the palisades of language&mdash;the three modest

-      chambermaids were all young and beautiful, with astounding complexions.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than

-      east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless, I

-      more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the extreme

-      end of the jetty&mdash;about a mile each way each time&mdash;in the hope

-      of descrying the <i>Velsa&rsquo;s</i> long, red streamer in the offing. It was

-      Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly

-      modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though

-      extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of the

-      same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger,

-      especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful or

-      even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong, gusty

-      breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we not

-      gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the

-      standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other

-      place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday

-      summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a degree

-      really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at all they

-      wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been a southern

-      zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but we retained

-      them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound compensations.

-      There were two types of beautiful women, one with straight lips, and the

-      other with the upper lip like the traditional bow. The latter, of course,

-      was the more generously formed, acquiescent and yet pouting, more blonde

-      than the blonde. Both types had the effect of making the foreigner feel

-      that to be a foreigner and a stranger in Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all

-      the daily frequentations and intimacies of the social organism, was a

-      mistake.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0130.jpg" alt="0130 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0130.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      In the afternoon we hired an automobile, ostensibly to inspect the

-      peninsula, but in fact partly to see whether similar women prevailed

-      throughout the peninsula, and partly to give the yacht a chance of

-      creeping in during our absence. In our hearts we knew that so long as we

-      stood looking for it it would never arrive. In a few moments, as it

-      seemed, we had crossed the peninsula to Veile, a sympathetic

-      watering-place on its own fjord, and were gazing at the desired Baltic,

-      whereon our yacht ought to have been floating, but was not. It seemed a

-      heavenly sea, as blue as the Mediterranean.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had driven fast along rather bad and dusty roads, and had passed about

-      ten thousand one-story farmsteads, brick-built, splendidly thatched, and

-      each bearing its date on the walls in large iron figures. These

-      farmsteads, all much alike, showed that some great change, probably for

-      the better, must have transformed Danish agriculture about thirty or forty

-      years ago. But though farmers were driving abroad in two-horse vehicles,

-      and though certain old men strolled to and fro, smoking magnificent pipes

-      at least a foot and a half long, the weight of which had to be supported

-      with the hand, there was little evidence of opulence or even of ease.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The passage of the automobile caused real alarm among male cyclists and

-      other wayfarers, who, in the most absurd, girlish manner, would even leap

-      across ditches to escape the risks of it. The women, curiously, showed

-      much more valor. The dogs were of a reckless audacity. From every

-      farmyard, at the sound of our coming, a fierce dog would rush out to

-      attack us, with no conception of our speed. Impossible to avoid these

-      torpedoes! We killed one instantaneously, and ran over another, which

-      somersaulted, and, aghast, then balanced itself on three legs. Scores of

-      dogs were saved by scores of miracles. Occasionally we came across a wise

-      dog that must have had previous altercations with automobiles, and learned

-      the lesson. By dusk we had thoroughly familiarized ourselves with the flat

-      Danish landscape, whose bare earth is of a rich gray purple; and as we

-      approached Esbjerg again, after a tour of 120 miles, we felt that we knew

-      Jutland by heart, and that the yacht could not fail to be waiting for us

-      in some cranny of the port, ready to take us to other shores. But the

-      yacht had not come.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then the head waiter grew to be our uncle, our father, our consoler. It is

-      true that he told us stories of ships that had set forth and never been

-      heard of again; but his moral influence was invaluable. He soothed us, fed

-      us, diverted us, interpreted us, and despatched cables for us. We called

-      him &ldquo;Ober,&rdquo; a name unsuitable to his diminutive form, his few years, and

-      his chubby face. Yet he was a true Ober. He expressed himself in four

-      languages, and could accomplish everything. In response to all our

-      requests, he would murmur in his exquisitely soft voice, &ldquo;Oh, yes! oh,

-      yes!&rdquo; He devised our daily excursions. He sent us to Ribe, the one ancient

-      town that we saw on the peninsula, in the cathedral of which was a young

-      girl who had stepped out of a picture by Memling, and who sold post-cards

-      with the gestures of a virgin saint and the astuteness of a dealer. He

-      sent us to the island of Fano, where the northeaster blows straight from

-      Greenland across a ten-mile bathing-beach peopled by fragile women who

-      saunter in muslin in front of vast hotels beneath a canopy of flags that

-      stand out horizontally in the terrible breeze. He provided us with

-      water-bottles and with plates (for palettes ), so that we could descend to

-      the multicolored port, and there, half sheltered from the wind by a pile

-      of fish-boxes and from the showers by an umbrella, produce wet

-      water-colors of fishing-smacks continually in motion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Day followed day. We had lived at Esbjerg all our lives. The yacht was

-      lost at sea. The yacht had never existed. The wife of the skipper, or,

-      rather, his widow, had twice cabled that she had no news. But the Ober

-      continued to bear our misfortunes with the most astounding gallantry. And

-      then there came a cable from the skipper, dated from the island of

-      Wangeroog.... Wan-geroog! Wangeroog! What a name for an impossible island!

-      What a name for an island at which to be weatherbound! We knew it not.

-      Baedeker knew it not. Even the Ober had not heard of it. We found it at

-      last on a map more than a hundred miles to the south. And I had been

-      walking down to the jetty thrice a day to gaze forth for the <i>Velsa&rsquo;s

-      wein!</i>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0136.jpg" alt="0136 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0136.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The skipper in his cable asked us to meet him at Friedrichstadt, on the

-      Eider, in Holstein, Germany. The trains were very slow and awkward. The

-      Ober said:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why do you not take an automobile? Much quicker.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; but the German customs?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Everything shall be arranged,&rdquo; said the Ober.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I said:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see myself among the German bureaucracy in a hired car.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The Ober said calmly:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I will go with you.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All the way?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I will go with you all the way. I will arrange everything. I speak German

-      very well. Nothing will go wrong.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Such a head waiter deserved encouragement. I encouraged him. He put on his

-      best clothes, and came, smoking cigars He took us faultlessly through the

-      German customs at the frontier. He superintended our first meal at a small

-      German hotel. I asked him to join us at table. He bowed and accepted. When

-      the meal was over, he rose and bowed again. It was a good meal. He took us

-      through three tire-bursts amid the horrid wastes of Schleswig-Holstein. He

-      escorted us into Friedrichstadt, and secured rooms for us at the hotel.

-      Then he said he must return. No! no! We could not let him abandon us in

-      the harsh monotony of that excessively tedious provincial town. But he

-      murmured that he must depart. The yacht might not arrive for days yet. I

-      shuddered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At any rate,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;before you leave, inquire where the haven is, and

-      take me to it, so that I may know how to find it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      He complied. It was a small haven; a steamer and several ships were in it.

-      Behind one ship I saw a mast and a red pennant somewhat in the style of

-      the <i>Velsa</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;my yacht has a mast rather like that.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I looked again. Utterly impossible that the <i>Velsa</i> could have

-      arrived so quickly; but it was the <i>Velsa</i>. Joy! Almost tears of joy!

-      I led the Ober on board. He said solemnly:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is very beautiful.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      So it was.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But our things were at the hotel. We had our rooms engaged at the hotel.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Ober said:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I will arrange everything.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      In a quarter of an hour our baggage was on board, and there was no hotel

-      hill. And then the Ober really did depart, with sorrow. Never shall I look

-      on his like again. The next day we voyaged up the Eider, a featureless

-      stream whose life has been destroyed by the Kiel Canal, to its junction

-      with the Kiel Canal, eighty-six dull, placid kilometers. But no matter the

-      dullness; we were afloat and in motion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We spent about seventy-two hours in the German Empire, and emerged from

-      it, at Kiel, by the canal, with a certain relief; for the yacht had

-      several times groaned in the formidable clutch of the Fatherland&rsquo;s

-      bureaucracy. She had been stopped by telephone at Friedrichstadt for

-      having passed the custom-house at the mouth of the Eider, the said

-      custom-house not being distinguished, as it ought to have been, by the

-      regulation flag. Again we were stopped by telephone at Rendsburg, on the

-      canal, for having dared to ascend the Eider without a pilot. Here the

-      skipper absolutely declined to pay the pilot-fees, and our papers were

-      confiscated, and we were informed that the panjandrum of the harbor would

-      call on us. However, he did not call on us; he returned our papers, and

-      let us go, thus supporting the skipper&rsquo;s hotly held theory that by the law

-      of nations yachts on rivers are free.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We were obliged to take a pilot for the canal. He was a nice,

-      companionable man, unhealthy, and gently sardonic. He told us that the

-      canal would be remunerative if war-ships paid dues. &ldquo;Only they don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he

-      added. Confronted with the proposition that the canal was very ugly

-      indeed, he repudiated it. He went up and down the canal forever and ever,

-      and saw nothing but the ships on it and the navigation signals. He said

-      that he had been piloting for twelve years, and had not yet had the same

-      ship twice. And there were 150 pilots on the canal!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We put him ashore and into the arms of his wife at Kiel, in heavy rain and

-      the customary northeaster, and we pushed forward into the comparative

-      freedom of Kiel Fjord, making for Friedrichsort, which looked attractive

-      on the chart. But Friedrichsort was too naval for us; it made us feel like

-      spies. We crossed hastily to Moltenort, a little pleasure town. Even here

-      we had not walked a mile on land before we were involved in forts and

-      menacing sign-boards. We retreated. The whole fjord was covered with

-      battle-ships, destroyers, submarines, Hydro-aëroplanes curved in the

-      atmosphere, or skimmed the froth off the waves. The air was noisy with the

-      whizzing of varied screws. It was enormous, terrific, intimidating,

-      especially when at dusk search-lights began to dart among the lights of

-      the innumerable fjord passenger-steamers. We knew that we were deeply

-      involved in the tremendous German system. Still, our blue ensign flew

-      proudly, unchallenged.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0141.jpg" alt="0141 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0141.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The population of Moltenort was not seductive, though a few young men here

-      and there seemed efficient, smart, and decent. The women and girls left us

-      utterly unmoved. The major part of the visitors were content to sit

-      vacantly on the promenade at a spot where a powerful drain, discharging

-      into the fjord, announced itself flagrantly to the sense. These quiet,

-      tired, submissive persons struck us as being the raw slavish material of

-      the magnificent imperial system, and entirely unconnected with the

-      wondrous brains that organized it and kept it going. The next morning we

-      departed very early, but huge targets were being towed out in advance of

-      us, and we effected our final escape into the free Baltic only by braving

-      a fleet of battleships that fired into the checkered sky. Sometimes their

-      shells glinted high up in the sun, and seemed to be curving along the top

-      edge of an imaginary rainbow. We slowly left them astern, with, as I say,

-      a certain relief. Little, unmilitary Denmark lay ahead.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER VIII&mdash;BALTIC COMMUNITIES

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>T Vordingborg, a

-      small town at the extreme south of Sjaelland, the largest and easternmost

-      of the Danish islands, we felt ourselves to be really for the first time

-      in pure and simple Denmark (Esbjerg had a certain international quality).

-      We had sailed through the Langelands Belt, skirting the monotonous

-      agricultural coasts of all sorts of islands, great and small, until one

-      evening we reached this city, which looked imposing on the map. When we

-      had followed the skipper ashore on his marketing expedition, and trodden

-      all the stony streets of little Vordingborg, we seemed to know what

-      essential Denmark, dozing in the midst of the Baltic, truly was.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Except a huge and antique fort, there was no visible historical basis to

-      this town. The main thoroughfare showed none of the dignity of tradition.

-      It was a bourgeois thoroughfare, and comfortable bourgeoises were placidly

-      shopping therein&mdash;the same little bourgeoises that one sees all over

-      the world. A fairly large hotel; sundry tobacconists; a bookseller who

-      also sold wall-papers; a sausage-shop, with a girl actuating an efficient

-      sausage-slicing machine, and in the window an electric fan whirring close

-      to a gigantic sausage. In the market, on a vague open space, a few carts,

-      with their shafts on the ground; a few stalls; a few women; a butcher

-      whipping off a hungry dog; three cheeses on a stand; baskets of fruit and

-      vegetables on the Danish ground; our skipper chattering by signs and

-      monosyllables in the middle. That was Vordingborg.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0146.jpg" alt="0146 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0146.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      In the churchyard there were only two graves. The church had no more

-      architectural interest than a modern church in a London suburb, though it

-      was older. We went within. The numbers of the hymns at the last service

-      were still forlornly stuck up on the indicator. The altar and screen were

-      ingenuously decorated in the style of a high-class booth at a fair. Three

-      women in huge disfiguring aprons were cleaning the interior. Their cloaks

-      and a white umbrella lay on the stone floor. They never even glanced at

-      us. We left the church, and then skirting market-gardens and climbing over

-      the ramparts of the fort, we descended to the mournful little railway

-      station, and as we watched a little train amble plaintively in and out of

-      that terminus, we thought of the numbers of the hymns sung at the last

-      service in the church, and the immense devastating ennui of provincial

-      existence in remote places enveloped us like a dank fog. We set sail, and

-      quitted Vordingborg forever, lest we might harden our hearts and be unjust

-      to Vordingborg, which, after all, at bottom, must be very like a million

-      other townlets on earth.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Compared with some of the ports we made, Vordingborg was a metropolis and

-      a center of art. When we had threaded through the Ulfsund and the Stege

-      Strand and the intricacies of the Rogestrommen, we found shelter in a

-      village harbor of the name of Faxo. Faxo had nothing&mdash;nothing but a

-      thousand trucks of marl, a girl looking out of a window, and a locked

-      railway station. We walked inland into a forest, and encountered the

-      railway track in the middle of the forest, and we walked back to Faxo, and

-      it was the same Faxo, except that a splendid brig previously at anchor in

-      the outer roads was slipping away in the twilight, and leaving us alone in

-      Faxo.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Spotsbjerg, on the north of the island of Sjælland, a small, untidy

-      fishing village with a harbor as big as a swimming-bath, there was not

-      even a visible church; we looked vainly for any church. But there was a

-      telephone, and on the quay there was a young and pretty girl leaning

-      motionless on her father&rsquo;s, or her grandfather&rsquo;s, tarpaulin shoulder. Full

-      of the thought that she would one day be old and plain, we fled from

-      Spotsbjerg, and traveled an incredible distance during the whole of a

-      bright Sunday, in order to refresh our mundane instincts at the capital of

-      the Jutland peninsula, Aarhus.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0151.jpg" alt="0151 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0151.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      And on approaching Aarhus, we ran into a regatta, and the <i>Velsa</i> had

-      less of the air of an aristocrat among the industrial classes than in such

-      ports as Spotsbjerg and Faxo. Further, a reporter came to obtain a &ldquo;story&rdquo;

-       about the strange Dutch yacht with the English ensign. It was almost equal

-      to being anchored off the Battery, New York.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Aarhus the pulse of the world was beating rather loud. In the windows

-      of the booksellers&rsquo; shops were photographs of the director of the

-      municipal theater surrounded by his troupe of stars. And he exactly

-      resembled his important brethren in the West End of London. I myself was

-      among the authors performed in the municipal theater, and I had a strange,

-      comic sensation of being world-renowned. Crowds surged in the streets of

-      Aarhus and in its cafés and tram-cars, and at least one of its taxicabs

-      was driven by a woman. It had a really admirable hotel, the Royal, with

-      first-class cooking, and a concert every night in its winter garden, where

-      the ruling classes met for inexpensive amusement, and succeeded in amusing

-      themselves with a dignity, a simplicity, and a politeness that could not

-      possibly be achieved in any provincial town in England, were it five times

-      the size of Aarhus. And why?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Withal, Aarhus, I have to confess, was not much of a place for elegance.

-      Its women failed, and the appearance of the women is the true test of a

-      civilization. So far in our Danish experience the women of Esbjerg stood

-      unrivaled. The ladies of Aarhus, even the leading ladies gathered together

-      in the Royal Hotel, lacked style and beauty. Many of them had had the

-      sense to retain the national short sleeve against the ruling of fashion,

-      but they did not arrive at any effect of individuality. They were neither

-      one thing nor the other. Their faces showed kindness, efficiency,

-      constancy, perhaps all the virtues; but they could not capture the

-      stranger&rsquo;s interest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was more style at Helsingôr (Elsinore), a town much smaller than

-      Aarhus, but probably enlivened by naval and military influences, by its

-      close proximity to Sweden, with train-ferry communication therewith, and

-      by its connection with Hamlet and Shakspere. The night ferries keep the

-      town unduly awake, but they energize it. Till a late hour the station and

-      the quay are busy with dim figures of chattering youth in pale costumes,

-      and the departure of the glittering train-laden ferry to a foreign country

-      two miles off is a romantic spectacle. The churches of Helsingôr have an

-      architectural interest, and its fruit shops display exotic fruits at high

-      prices. Officers flit to and fro on bicycles. Generals get out of a closed

-      cab at the railway station, and they bear a furled standard, and vanish

-      importantly with it into the arcana of the station. The newspapers of many

-      countries are for sale at the kiosk. The harbor-master is a great man, and

-      a suave.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The pride of Helsingor is the Kronborg Castle, within sight of the town

-      and most grandiosely overlooking sea and land. Feudal castles are often

-      well placed, but one seldom sees a renaissance building of such heroic

-      proportions in such a dramatically conceived situation. The castle is of

-      course used chiefly as a barracks. On entering the enormous precincts, we

-      saw through a window a private sitting on a chair on a table, in fatigue

-      uniform, playing mildly a flageolet, and by his side on the table another

-      private in fatigue uniform, with a boot in one hand, doing nothing

-      whatever. And from these two figures, from the whitewashed bareness of the

-      chamber, and from the flageolet, was exhaled all the monstrous melancholy

-      of barrack-life, the same throughout the world. Part of the castle is set

-      aside as a museum, wherein, under the direction of a guide, one is

-      permitted to see a collection of pictures the surpassing ugliness of which

-      nearly renders them interesting. The guide points through a window in the

-      wall ten feet thick to a little plot of turf. &ldquo;Where Hamlet walked.&rdquo; No

-      historical authority is offered to the visitor for this statement. The

-      guide then leads one through a series of large rooms, empty save for an

-      occasional arm-chair, to the true heart of the Kronborg, where he

-      displayed to us a seated statue of Mr. Hall Caine, tinted an extreme

-      unpleasant bluish-white. An inscription told that it had been presented to

-      Kronborg by a committee of Englishmen a few years earlier to mark some

-      anniversary. The guide said it was a statue of Shakspere. I could not

-      believe him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0157.jpg" alt="0157 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0157.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER IX&mdash;A day&rsquo;s SAIL

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>LTHOUGH there is a

-      lively pleasure in discovering even the dullest and smallest towns and

-      villages, the finest experience offered by the Baltic is the savor of the

-      Baltic itself in a long day&rsquo;s sail. I mean a day of fourteen hours at

-      least, from six in the morning till eight at night, through varied

-      seascapes and landscapes and varied weather. As soon as the yacht leaves

-      harbor in the bracing chill of sunrise she becomes a distinct entity,

-      independent, self-reliant. The half-dozen men on her, cut off from the

-      world, are closely knitted into a new companionship, the sense of which is

-      expressed not in words, but by the subtleties of tone and mien; and if

-      only one amoung them falls short of absolute loyalty and good-will toward

-      the rest, the republic is a failure, and the air of ocean poisoned. The

-      dictum of an older and far more practised yachtsman than myself used

-      always to be, &ldquo;I &rsquo;ll have no man aboard my ship who can&rsquo;t smile all

-      the time.&rdquo; It is a good saying. And it could be applied to my yacht in the

-      Baltic. We had days at sea in the Baltic which were ideal and thrilling

-      from one end to the other.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0161.jpg" alt="0161 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0161.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      To make a final study of the chart in the cabin while waiting for

-      breakfast is a thrilling act. You choose a name on the chart, and decide:

-      &ldquo;We will go to that name.&rdquo; It is a name. It is not yet a town or a

-      village. It is just what you imagine it to be until you first sight it,

-      when it instantly falsifies every fancy. The course is settled. The ship

-      is on that course. The landmarks will suffice for an hour or two, but the

-      sea-marks must be deciphered on the chart, which is an English chart, and

-      hence inferior in fullness and clearness to either French or Dutch charts.

-      Strange, this, for a nation preëminently maritime! To compensate, the

-      English &ldquo;Sailing Directions&rdquo;&mdash;for example, the &ldquo;Pilot&rsquo;s Guide to the

-      Baltic&rdquo;&mdash;are so admirably written that it is a pleasure to read them.

-      Lucid, succinct, elegant, they might serve as models to a novelist. And

-      they are anonymous.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      To pick up the first buoy is thrilling. We are all equally ignorant of

-      these waters; the skipper himself has not previously sailed them, and we

-      are all, save the cook, engulfed below amid swaying saucepans, on the

-      lookout for that buoy. It ought to be visible at a certain hour, but it is

-      not. The skipper points with his hand and says the buoy must be about

-      there, but it is not. He looks through my glasses, and I look through his;

-      no result. Then the deck-hand, without glasses, cries grinning that he has

-      located her. After a quarter of an hour I can see the thing myself. That a

-      buoy? It is naught but a pole with a slightly swollen head. Absurd to call

-      it a buoy! Nevertheless, we are relieved, and in a superior manner we

-      reconcile ourselves to the Baltic idiosyncrasy of employing broom-handles

-      for buoys. The reason for this dangerous idiosyncrasy neither the skipper

-      nor anybody else could divine. Presently we have the broom close abeam, a

-      bobbing stick all alone in the immense wilderness of water. There it is on

-      the chart, and there it is in the water, a romantic miracle. We assuage

-      its solitude for a few minutes, and then abandon it to loneliness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We resume the study of the chart; for although we are quite sure of our

-      course, the skipper can never be sure enough. My attention is drawn to a

-      foot-note that explains the ice-signals of the Baltic. And the skipper

-      sets to telling tales of terror about the ice, in the Zuyder Zee and other

-      seas. He tells how the ice forms under the ship surreptitiously, coming up

-      from the bottom like treacle. You say, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s freezing to-night,&rdquo; and the

-      next morning the ship can&rsquo;t move; and you may die of starvation, for

-      though the ice will hold the ship, it won&rsquo;t hold you. The skipper knew men

-      who could remember ice in the Zuyder Zee in June. He himself had once

-      oscillated for a whole week between two ports on the Zuyder Zee, visible

-      to each other, pushed hither and thither by the ice, and unable to get

-      anywhere at all. But ice was less terrible than it used to he, owing to

-      the increased strength and efficiency of ice-breakers. And climate was

-      less rigorous. Thus the skipper would reassure us for a moment, only to

-      intimidate us afresh. For it seems that the ice has a way of climbing; it

-      will climb up over everything, and inclose a ship. Indeed, he was most

-      impressive on the subject of ice. He said that the twin horrors of the sea

-      were ice and fog. But of fog he told no tales, being occupied with the

-      forward valve of the engine. We perceived that yachtsmen who go out when

-      it happens to suit them, between May and September only, can never achieve

-      intimacy with the entire individuality of the sea.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The weather has now cleared for a while. The sun is hot, the saloon

-      skylight warm to the touch. You throw off a jersey. The tumbling water is

-      a scale of deep blues, splendid against the brass of the bollard and the

-      reddishness of the spars. The engine is running without a &ldquo;knock&rdquo;; the

-      sails are nicely filled; the patent log is twirling aft. A small rainbow

-      shines steadily in the foam thrown up from the bows, and a great rainbow

-      stretches across all heaven, with its own ghost parallel to it. Among the

-      large, soft clouds rags of dark cloud are uneasily floating. On the flat

-      shores of near islands the same cereals ripen as ripen at home. And this

-      is thrilling. Distant islands are miraged. Even a distant battleship seems

-      to be lifted clean out of the water by the so-called mirage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And then a trading-schooner, small, but much larger than us, relentlessly

-      overhauls us. She laughs at the efforts of our engine to aid our sails,

-      and forges ahead, all slanting, with her dinghy slung up tight aft, over

-      her rudder. And then it is the still small voice of the stomach that

-      speaks. Hunger and repletion follow each other very swiftly on such days.

-      The after-breakfast cigar is scarcely finished before a genuine curiosity

-      as to the menu of lunch comes to birth within. We glance into the saloon.

-      Yes, the white cloth is laid, but we cannot eat cloth. The cook and the

-      chronometer are conspiring together against us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the afternoon the weather is thick and squally. And we are creeping

-      between sad and forlorn veiled islands that seem to exude all the

-      melancholy of the seas. There is plenty of water, but only in a deceiving

-      horizontal sense. The channel is almost as narrow and as tortuous as a

-      Devonshire lane. English charts are criminally preposterous, and so are

-      Danish brooms. Hardly can one distinguish between a starboard and a port

-      broom. Is the life of a yacht to depend on such negligent devices? The

-      skipper is worried. And the spectacle of a ship aground in mid-sea does

-      not tranquilize. Sometimes the hail wipes out for a few seconds the whole

-      prospect. The eyes of everybody are strained with looking for distant

-      brooms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0168.jpg" alt="0168 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0168.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Then we are free of the archipelago, and also the sky clears. The sun,

-      turning orange, is behind us, and the wind in our teeth. Ahead is a

-      schooner, beating. And she is the schooner of the morning. Our engine now

-      has the better of her. As we overtake her, she runs away on one tack, and

-      comes back on the next. She bears down on our stern, huge, black,

-      glittering. A man and a boy are all her crew. This man and this boy are

-      entitled to be called mariners, as distinguished from yachtsmen. We can

-      see their faces plainly as they gaze down at us from their high deck. And

-      you may see just the same faces on the liners that carry emigrants from

-      Denmark to the West, and the same limbs sprawling on the decks of the

-      Esbjerg steamers, as the same hands scrawl Danish characters on picture

-      postal cards to the inhabitants of these very islands.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sea is now purple, and the schooner a little black blot on the red

-      panorama of the sunset; and ahead, amid faint yellow and green fields, is

-      a white speck, together with sundry red specks and blue specks. The name

-      on the chart! And then the haven is descried, and a ring of masts with

-      fluttering rags. And then the lighthouse and the roofs detach themselves,

-      and the actual mouth of the haven appears. Twilight falls; the engine is

-      moderated; the deck-hand stands by with a pole. Very slowly we slide in,

-      and the multitudinous bright tints of the fishing-smacks are startlingly

-      gay even in the dusk. The skipper glances rapidly about him, and yells out

-      in Dutch to a fisherman, who replies in Danish. The skipper shakes his

-      head, at a loss, and gives an order to the deck-hand. The deck-hand claws

-      with a pole at a yellow smack. We have ceased to be independent. The name

-      on the chart is a name no longer. It is a living burg, a poor little

-      place, good enough to sleep in, and no more. But another stage on the

-      journey to that magic capital Copenhagen.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_PART3" id="link2H_PART3"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      PART III COPENHAGEN

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER X&mdash;THE DANISH CAPITAL

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>CROSS the great

-      expanse of Kjoge Bay, Copenhagen first became visible as a group of

-      factory chimneys under a firmament of smoke. We approached it rapidly upon

-      smooth water, and ran into the narrowing bottle-neck of Kallebo, with the

-      main island of Sjælland to the west and the appendant island of Amager to

-      the east. Copenhagen stands on both, straddling over a wide connecting

-      bridge which carries double lines of electric trams and all the traffic of

-      a metropolis. When a yacht, even a small one, wishes to enter the harbor,

-      this bridge is cut in two and lifted into the air, and the traffic

-      impatiently champs its bit while waiting for the yacht.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0174.jpg" alt="0174 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0174.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Apparently they understand yachts at Copenhagen, as they do in Holland. At

-      the outer harrier of the harbor we were not even requested to stop. A

-      cheerful and beneficent functionary cried out for our name, our captain&rsquo;s

-      name, our tonnage, and our immediate origin, and, his curiosity being

-      sated, waved us onward. The great bridge bisected itself for us with

-      singular promptitude. Nevertheless, the gold-buttoned man in charge

-      thereof from his high perch signaled to us that our burgee was too small.

-      We therefore, having nothing else handy to placate him, ran up a blue

-      ensign to the masthead; but it looked so excessively odd there, so acutely

-      contrary to the English etiquette of yachts, that we at once hauled it

-      down again. No further complaint was made.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We were now in the haven, and over the funnels of many ships we could see

-      the city. It was all copper domes and roofs; and we saw that it was a

-      proud city, and a city where exposed copper turns to a beautiful green

-      instead of to black, as in London. Splendid copper domes are the chief

-      symptom of Copenhagen. After all the monotonous, tiny provincialism of the

-      peninsula and of the islands, it was sensational to find a vast capital at

-      the far end of the farthest island. We thought we were coming to the end

-      of the world, and we came to a complete and dazzling city that surpassed,

-      for example, Brussels in its imposingness. We turned westward out of the

-      main channel into the heart of the town, and in a moment were tied up to a

-      smack, and the red-and-green bourse was leaning over us; the rattle and

-      ringing and stamping of horses, lorries, tram-cars, and taxi-cabs deafened

-      us on three sides; and a bridge trembling with traffic barred our way.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Towers and spires rose beyond the bridge; crowds stood to gaze at us;

-      steamers and warehouses filled the prospect to the north; and under our

-      bows the petrol-engined gondolas of Copenhagen, each holding a dozen

-      passengers or so, continually shot. We were in the midst of a terrific

-      din, but we cared not. We had arrived, and we had arrived in a grand town;

-      we knew that at the first glance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0179.jpg" alt="0179 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0179.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      In something less than half an hour one of us had gone forth and returned

-      with grave tidings: &ldquo;This is a most exciting city. I&rsquo;ve already seen lots

-      of beautiful women, some with lovely tow-colored hair.&rdquo; The charm of

-      distant Esbjerg was at last renewed. I went forth myself, into a very

-      clean, fresh-looking city, with simple and lively inhabitants. In a trice

-      I had gazed at the Thorvaldsen Museum (which I had no intention of

-      entering, Thorvaldsen being for me on about the same artistic plane as the

-      inexcusable Ary Scheffer of Dordrecht), the Christianborg Palace, which

-      had an austere and kingly air, the very modern and admirable town hall,

-      the old railway station, which has been transformed into the largest

-      kinema in the world, the floating fish shops and fish restaurants (made

-      out of old smacks and schooners), the narrow, thronged shopping streets,

-      the celebrated Tivoli establishment, and the yacht-like steamers that from

-      a quay, which might almost be called the gate to Sweden, in the very

-      middle of the town, are constantly setting sail for Scandinavia. From

-      Copenhagen you go to Sweden as thoughtlessly as in New York you go from

-      Forty-second to Sixty-ninth Street, or in London from the Bank to Chelsea,

-      and with less discipline. If the steamer has cast off, and the captain

-      sees you hurrying up the street, he stops his engines and waits for you,

-      and you are dragged on board by a sailer; whereupon the liner departs,

-      unless the captain happens to see somebody else hurrying up the street.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An hour in the thoroughfares of Copenhagen was enough to convince my feet

-      that it was not a city specially designed for pedestrians. I limped back

-      to the yacht, and sent the skipper to hire a carriage. He knew no more of

-      the city than I did, less indeed; he could no more than I speak a single

-      word of Danish; but I felt sure that he would return with an equipage.

-      What I desired was an equipage with a driver who could speak either

-      English, French, or Dutch. He did return with an equipage, and it was

-      overpowering. Rather like a second-hand state carriage, it was drawn by

-      two large gray horses, perhaps out of a circus, and driven by a liveried

-      being who was alleged to speak French. I shuddered at the probable cost of

-      this prodigious conveyance, but pretended I did not care. The ligure named

-      was just seven dollars a day. We monopolized the carriage during our

-      sojourn, and the days were long; but the coachman never complained.

-      Possibly because he had no language in which to complain. We learned in a

-      moment that his ability to speak French was entirely mythical. Then some

-      one said that a misunderstanding had occurred at the livery-stables, and

-      that German was the foreign language he spoke, But he did not speak German

-      either, nor anything else. He was just another of those strange creatures

-      met in the course of travel who are born, who mature, and who die without

-      speaking or comprehending any language whatever.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From the height of his spacious and sedate vehicle we gazed down upon the

-      rushing population of Copenhagen&mdash;beautiful women, with lovely

-      tow-colored hair, and simple, nice-gestured men. The driver only made one

-      mistake, but it was a bad one. We wanted tea, and we asked him to go to a

-      teagarden, any tea-garden. He smiled, and went. He took us up an

-      interminable boulevard, with a special strip for cyclists. Thousands upon

-      thousands of cyclists, all fair, passed and repassed us. He went on and

-      on. One of the horses fell lame, but it made no difference. We could not

-      stop him. And repetitions of the word for tea in French and German had no

-      effect save to make him smile. We constantly descried what seemed in the

-      distance to be tea-gardens, but they were not tea-gardens. We saw an

-      incomprehensible colony of doll&rsquo;s houses&mdash;well-kept suburban huts

-      exteriorly resembling houses&mdash;in a doll&rsquo;s garden. We could not

-      conceive the nature of this phenomenon, but it was not a tea-garden.

-      Presently the carriage was stopped by a man demanding money. He wore no

-      uniform, but conveyed to us that he was an official of the town of

-      Hillerup, and that strange carriages had to pay forty-eight ore in order

-      to traverse Hillerup.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It seemed a lot of money; but as it only amounted to sixpence, we paid.

-      The man may have been a highwayman. We looked at the map for Hillerup, and

-      found it miles away from Copenhagen.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We were now in serious need of tea, and helpless. The driver drove on. He

-      conducted us through half a dozen seaside resorts on the quite unjustly

-      celebrated &ldquo;Danish Riviera&rdquo;; he came actually to the end of the tram-line,

-      and then he curved inland into a forest (more to pay). We were now angry

-      and still helpless. The forest had no end, and the roads in it no

-      direction. Desperate, we signaled to him to turn back. He would not. He

-      informed us on his lingers that he would be arriving in twenty minutes or

-      so. When he did arrive, we solved the mystery. He had confused the word

-      for tea with the word for deer, and had brought us to a well-known country

-      resort called the Deer Park. A few miserable tourists were in fact

-      drinking cold, bad tea on a windy terrace overlooking a distant horizon,

-      far beyond which lay Copenhagen. We swallowed the tea, the driver

-      swallowed beer, and we started hack. We had no overcoats, and the Baltic

-      evening was cold. Trams overtook us flying at a tremendous pace into

-      Copenhagen, and we were behind a lame horse. In the dusk we reached once

-      more the desirable city, whose women never seemed more fair to us than

-      they did then. This adventure taught us that the yachtsman must be

-      prepared for any adventure, even the wildest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XI&mdash;CAFÉS AND RESTAURANTS

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE most

-      interesting thing, to the complete stranger, in a large foreign city that

-      does not live on its own past is not the museums, but the restaurants and

-      cafés, even in the dead season. We were told that August was the dead

-      season in Copenhagen, and that all the world was at the seaside resorts.

-      We had, however, visited a number of Danish seaside resorts, and they were

-      without exception far more dead than Copenhagen. In particular Marienlyst,

-      reputed to be the haunt of fashion and elegance, proved to be a very sad,

-      deserted strand. Copenhagen was not dead.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restaurant, signalized to us by

-      authority as the finest in Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold

-      place, full of waiters who had learned English in America, of

-      hors-d&rsquo;ouvre, and of music. The hand was much better than the food, but it

-      has to be said that we arrived at half-past seven, when Danish dinner is

-      over and Danish supper not begun. Still, many middle-class people were

-      unceremoniously and expensively eating&mdash;in the main hors-d&rsquo;ouvre. The

-      metropolitanism of Copenhagen was at once apparent in this great

-      restaurant. The people had little style, but they had the assurance and

-      the incuriousness of metropolitans, and they were accustomed to throwing

-      money about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the idiosyncrasies of

-      waiters, and to being in the swim. Wivels might show itself on Fifth

-      Avenue or in the Strand without blushing. And its food had the wholesale,

-      crude quality of the food offered in these renowned streets to persons in

-      the swim.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Next we went to the Hôtel d&rsquo;Angleterre, which was just the restaurant of

-      the standardized international hotel. Once within its walls, and you might

-      as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harrogate, Rome, Algiers, Brussels, as

-      at Copenhagen. The same menu, the same cooking, the same waiters, the same

-      furniture, the same toothpicks, and the same detestable, self-restrained

-      English travelers, with their excruciating Englishness. The café on the

-      ground floor of this hotel, overlooking a large and busy circular <i>place</i>,

-      with the opera and other necessaries of metropolitan life close by, was

-      more amusing than the restaurant. It was a genuine resort in the

-      afternoon. The existence of Copenhagen rolled to and fro in front of its

-      canopied terrace, and one might sit next to an English yachting party of

-      astounding correctness and complacency (from one of those conceited

-      three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white, and jeweled in many holes, like a

-      watch), or to a couple of Danish commercials, or to a dandy and his love.

-      Here we one night singled out for observation a very characteristic Danish

-      young man and young woman with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive

-      voices, and the soothing gestures of the North. It was an agreeable sight;

-      but when we had carried our observation somewhat further, we discovered

-      that they were an English pair on their honeymoon.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0186.jpg" alt="0186 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0186.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      In a day or two, feeling more expert in things Danish, we wanted a truly

-      Danish restaurant, unspoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the

-      Wiener Café, appanage of the Hotel King of Denmark. A long, narrow room,

-      anciently and curiously furnished, with mid-Victorian engravings on the

-      somber walls. The waiters had the austerity of priests presiding at a

-      rite. Their silent countenances said impassively: &ldquo;This is the most select

-      resort in our great and historic country. It has been frequented by the

-      flower of Danish aristocracy, art, and letters for a thousand years. It

-      has not changed. It never will. No upstart cosmopolitanism can enter here.

-      Submit yourselves. Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the niceties of

-      our ceremonial, for we have consented to receive you.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      In brief, it was rather like an English bank, or a historic hotel in an

-      English cathedral town, though its food was better, I admit. The menu was

-      in strict Danish. We understood naught of it, but it had the air of a

-      saga. At the close of the repast, the waiter told us that, for the <i>prix

-      fixe</i>, we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said, &ldquo;Will you let

-      me have a look at the cake, and then I &lsquo;ll decide.&rdquo; He replied that he

-      could not; that the cake could not be produced unless it was definitively

-      ordered. The strange thing was that he persisted in this attitude. Cake

-      never had been shown on approval at the Wiener Café of the Hotel King of

-      Denmark, and it never would he. I bowed the head before an august

-      tradition, and ordered cheese. The Wiener Café ought to open a branch in

-      London; it was the most English affair I have ever encountered out of

-      England.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely English. That very night we chose

-      the restaurant of the Hotel&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;for dinner. The

-      room was darkly gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly shown to

-      an empty table, and a menu was dung at us. The head waiter and three

-      inefficient under waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for

-      fifteen minutes; they had their habitués to serve. At the end of fifteen

-      minutes we softly and apologetically rose and departed, without causing

-      any apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat boy, whom we basely

-      omitted to tip.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0191.jpg" alt="0191 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0191.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets, searching hungrily for a

-      restaurant that seemed receptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck

-      guided us into the Café de l&rsquo;Industrie, near the Tivoli. The managers of

-      this industrious café had that peculiar air, both independent and

-      amicable, which sits so well on the directors of an organism that is

-      firmly established in the good-will of the flourishing mass. No

-      selectness, no tradition, no formality, no fashion, no preposterous

-      manners about the Café de l&rsquo;Industrie, but an aspect of solid, rather

-      vulgar, all-embracing, all-forgiving prosperity. It was not cheap, neither

-      was it dear. It was gaudy, but not too gaudy. The waiters were men of the

-      world, experienced in human nature, occupied, hasty, both curt and

-      expansive, not servile, not autocratic. Their faces said: &ldquo;Look here, I

-      know the difficulties of running a popular restaurant, and you know them,

-      too. This is not heaven, especially on a Sunday night; but we do our best,

-      and you get value for your money.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The customers were samples of all Copenhagen. They had money to spend, but

-      not too much. There were limits to their recklessness in the pursuit of

-      joy. They were fairly noisy, quite without affectation, fundamentally

-      decent, the average Danish. Elegance was rarer than beauty, and

-      spirituality than common sense, in that restaurant. We ate moderately in

-      the din and clash of hors d&rsquo;ouvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music,

-      and thanked our destiny that we had had the superlative courage to leave

-      the Hotel &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, with its extreme correctitude.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Finally, among our excursions &lsquo;n restaurants, must be mentioned a crazy

-      hour in the restaurant of the Hotel &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, supreme

-      example of what the enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accomplish

-      when it sets about to imitate the German <i>art nouveau</i>. The &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;

-      is a grand hotel in which everything, with the most marvelous and

-      terrifying ingenuity, has been designed in defiance of artistic tradition.

-      A fork at the &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; resembles no other fork on

-      earth, and obviously the designer&rsquo;s first and last thought was to be

-      unique. It did not matter to him what kind of fork he produced so long as

-      it was different from any previous fork in human history. The same with

-      the table-cloth, the flower-vase, the mustard-pot, the chair, the carpet,

-      the dado, the frieze, the tessellated pavement, the stair-rail, the

-      wash-basin, the bedstead, the quilt, the very door-knobs. The proprietors

-      of the place had ordered a new hotel in the extreme sense, and their order

-      had been fulfilled. It was a prodigious undertaking, and must certainly

-      have been costly. It was impressive proof of real initiative. It

-      intimidated the beholder, who had the illusion of being on another planet.

-      Its ultimate effect was to outrival all other collections of ugliness. I

-      doubt whether in Berlin itself such ingenious and complete ugliness could

-      be equaled in the same cubic space. My idea is that the creators of the

-      Hotel &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; may lawfully boast of standing alone on

-      a pinnacle.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was an inspiration on the part of the creators, when the hotel was

-      finished to the last salt-spoon, to order a number of large and

-      particularly bad copies of old masters, in inexpensive gilt frames, and to

-      hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls. The resulting effect of

-      grotesquery is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;

-      justly ranks as one of the leading European hotels. It is a mercy that the

-      architect and the other designers were forbidden to meddle with the

-      cooking, which sins not by any originality.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The summary and summit of the restaurants and cafes of Copenhagen is the

-      Tivoli. New York has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can only

-      say with regret that the Tivoli is what Earl&rsquo;s Court ought to be, and is

-      not. The Tivoli comprises, within the compass of a garden in the midst of

-      the city, restaurants, cafés, theater, concert-hall, outdoor theater,

-      bands, pantomime, vaudeville, dancing-halls, and very numerous side-shows

-      on both land and water. The strangest combinations of pleasure are

-      possible at the Tivoli. You can, for instance, as we did, eat a French

-      dinner while watching a performance of monkeys on a tightrope. The

-      opportunities for weirdness in felicity are endless. We happened to arrive

-      at Copenhagen just in time for the fêtes celebrating the seventieth

-      anniversary of the Tivoli, which is as ancient as it is modern. On the

-      great night the Tivoli reveled until morning. It must be the pride of the

-      populace of Copenhagen, and one of the city&rsquo;s dominating institutions. It

-      cannot be ignored. It probably uses more electric light than any other ten

-      institutions put together. And however keenly you may resent its

-      commonplace attraction, that attraction will one day magnetize you to

-      enter its gates&mdash;at the usual fee.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand people at once in the Tivoli,

-      not a bad total for one resort in a town of only half a million

-      inhabitants. And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to the foreign

-      observer, not merely for the pervading beauty and grace cf the women,

-      which was remarkable, but also for the evident fact that as a race the

-      Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety, dignity, and simplicity.

-      Their demeanor was a lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to discover how

-      to enjoy themselves freely without being either ridiculous or vulgar or

-      brutish. The twenty thousand represented in chief the unassuming

-      middle-class of Copenhagen.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0197.jpg" alt="0197 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0197.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, &ldquo;nuts,&rdquo; rascals, obelisks,

-      and mere artisans among the lot, but the solid bulk was the middle-class,

-      getting value for its money in an agreeable and unexceptionable manner.

-      The memory of those thousands wandering lightly clad in the cold Northern

-      night, under domes and festoons and pillars of electric light, amid the

-      altercations of conflicting orchestras, or dancing in vast, stuffy

-      inclosures, or drinking and laughing and eating hors-d&rsquo;ouvre under rustling

-      trees, or submitting gracefully to Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose

-      glazed aisles were two restaurants, or floating on icy lakes, or just

-      beatifically sitting on al-fresco seats in couples&mdash;this memory

-      remains important in the yachtsman&rsquo;s experiences of the Baltic.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XII&mdash;ARISTOCRACY AND ART

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE harbor-master

-      would not allow us to remain for more than three days in our original

-      berth, which served us very well as a sort of grand stand for viewing the

-      life of Copenhagen. His theory was that we were in the way of honest

-      laboring folk, and that we ought to be up in the &ldquo;sound,&rdquo; on the

-      northeastern edge of the city, where the yachts lie. We contested his

-      theory, but we went, because it is unwise to quarrel with a bureaucracy of

-      whose language you are ignorant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sound did not suit us. The anchorage was opposite a coaling station,

-      and also opposite a shipbuilding yard, and from the west came a strong

-      odor out of a manufactory of something unpleasant. We could have tolerated

-      the dust, the noise, and the smell, but what we could not tolerate was the

-      heavy rolling, for the north wind was blowing and the anchorage exposed to

-      it. Indeed, the Royal Danish Yacht Club might have chosen more comfortable

-      quarters for itself. We therefore unostentatiously weighed anchor again,

-      and reëntered the town, and hid ourselves among many businesslike tugs in

-      a little creek called the New Haven, whose extremity was conveniently

-      close to the Café d&rsquo;Angleterre. We hoped that the prowling harbor-master

-      would not catch sight of us, and he did not.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0204.jpg" alt="0204 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0204.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The aristocratic and governing quarter of the town lay about us, including

-      the Bregade, a street full of antiquaries, marble churches, and baroque

-      houses, and the Amalienborg Palace, which is really four separate similar

-      palaces (in an octagonal <i>place</i>) thrown into one. Here all the

-      prospects and vistas were dignified, magnificent, and proudly exclusive.

-      The eighteenth century had nobly survived, when the populace was honestly

-      regarded as a horde created by divine providence in order that the ruling

-      classes might practise upon it the art of ruling. There was no Tivoli when

-      those beautiful pavements were made, and as you stand on those pavements

-      and gaze around at the royal grandiosity, speckless and complete, you can

-      almost imagine that even the French Revolution has not yet occurred. The

-      tiny, colored sentry at the vast, gray gates is still living in the

-      eighteenth century. The architecture is not very distinguished, but it has

-      style. It shames the &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; Hotel. The Frederiks

-      Church, whose copper dome overtops the other copper domes, is a fair

-      example of the quarter. Without being in the least a masterpiece, it

-      imposes by its sincerity and its sense of its own importance. And the

-      interior is kept as scrupulously as a boudoir. The impeccability of the

-      marble flooring is wondrous, and each of the crimson cushions in the

-      polished pews is like a lady&rsquo;s pillow. Nothing rude can invade this

-      marmoreal fane.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Rosenborg Palace, not far off, is open to the public, so that all may

-      judge what was the life of sovereigns in a small country, and what

-      probably still is. The royal villas outside Florence are very ugly, but

-      there is a light grace about their furnishing which lifts them far above

-      the heavy, stuffy, tasteless mediocrity of such homes as the Rosenborg.

-      Badly planned, dark, unhygienic, crammed with the miscellaneous ugliness

-      of generations of royal buying, the Rosenborg is rather a sad sight to

-      people of taste; and the few very lovely tilings that have slipped in here

-      and there by inadvertence only intensify its mournfulness. The phantoms of

-      stupid courtiers seem to pervade, strictly according to etiquette, its

-      gloomy salons. And yet occasionally, in the disposition of an arm-chair or

-      a screen, one realizes that it must, after all, have been a home,

-      inhabited by human beings worthy of sympathy. It is the most bourgeois

-      home I ever entered. In a glass case, with certain uniforms, were hung the

-      modern overcoat (a little frayed) and the hat of a late monarch. They

-      touched the heart of the sardonic visitor, their exposure was so naive.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Even more depressing than this mausoleum of nineteenth-century maimers was

-      the museum of art. As a colossal negation of art, this institution ranks

-      with the museum of Lausanne. It is an enormous and ugly building, full of

-      enormous ugliness in painting and sculpture. It contained a fine Rembrandt&mdash;&ldquo;Christ

-      at Emmaus&rdquo;&mdash;and one good modern picture, a plowing scene by

-      Wilhelmson. We carefully searched the immense rooms for another good

-      modern picture, and found it not. Even the specimens of Gauguin, Van Gogh,

-      and Bonnard were mediocre.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sculpture was simply indescribable. The eye roamed like a bird over

-      the waters of the deluge, and saw absolutely nothing upon which to alight

-      with safety. Utter desolation reigned. The directors of this museum had

-      never, save in the case of Wilhelmson, been guilty of an inadvertence.

-      Their instinct against beauty in any form was unerring. Imagine the stony

-      desert of rooms and corridors and giant staircases on a wet Sunday

-      morning, echoing to the footsteps of the simple holiday crowd engaged

-      patriotically in the admiration of Danish art; imagine ingenuous,

-      mackintoshed figures against the vast flanks of stiff and terrific marble

-      Venuses and other gods; imagine the whispering in front of anecdotes in

-      paint; imagine the Inferno of an artist&mdash;and you have the art museum,

-      the abode and lurking-place of everlasting tedium.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Quite different is the Glyptothek, a museum whose existence is due to

-      private enterprise and munificence. It is housed in an ugly and

-      ill-planned building, but the contents are beautiful, very well arranged,

-      and admirably exposed. The Glyptothek has an entrancing small picture by

-      Tiepolo, of Antony and Cleopatra meeting, which I was informed must be a

-      study for a larger picture in Venice It alone should raise the museum to a

-      shrine of pilgrimage, and it is not even mentioned in Baedeker! But the

-      Glyptothek triumphs chiefly by its sculpture. Apart from its classical

-      side, it has a superb collection of Meuniers, which impressed, without

-      greatly pleasing, me; a roomful of Rodin busts which are so honest and

-      lifelike and jolly that when you look at them you want to laugh&mdash;you

-      must laugh from joy. And the Carpeaux busts of beautiful women&mdash;what

-      a profound and tranquil satisfaction n gazing at them!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0209.jpg" alt="0209 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0209.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Some of the rooms at the Glyptothek are magical in their effect on the

-      sensibility. They would make you forget wife and children, yachts, income

-      tax, and even the Monroe Doctrine. Living Danish women were apposite

-      enough to wander about the sculpture rooms for our delectation, making

-      delicious contrasts against the background of marble groups.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XIII&mdash;THE RETURN

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E left Copenhagen

-      with regrets, for the entity of the town was very romantic and attractive.

-      Even the humble New Haven, where we sheltered from the eye of the

-      harbor-master, had its charm for us. It was the real sailors&rsquo; quarter,

-      thoroughly ungentlemanly and downright. The shops on each side of the

-      creek were below the level of the street and even of the water, and every

-      one of them was either a café, with mysterious music heating behind glazed

-      doors, or an emporium of some sort for sailors. Revelries began in the

-      afternoon. You might see a nice neat Danish wife guiding an obstreperously

-      intoxicated Danish sailor down the steps leading to a cigar shop. Not a

-      pleasant situation for a nice wife! But, then, you reflected that he was a

-      sailor, and that he had doubtless been sober and agreeable a short while

-      before, and would soon be sober and agreeable again; and that perhaps

-      there were great compensations in his character. At night Bacchus and Pan

-      were the true gods of that quarter, and the worship of them was loud and

-      yet harmonious.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We prepared reluctantly to depart; the engine also. The engine would not

-      depart, and it was a new engine. Two hours were spent in wheedling and

-      conciliating its magneto. After that the boat traveled faster than it had

-      ever traveled. We passed out of Copenhagen into the sound, leaving a noble

-      array of yachts behind, and so up the sound. Soon Copenhagen was naught

-      but a bouquet of copper domes, and its beautiful women became legendary

-      with us, and our memory heightened their beauty. And then the engine

-      developed a &ldquo;knock.&rdquo; Now, in a small internal-combustion engine a &ldquo;knock&rdquo;

-       may be due to bad petrol or to a misplacement of the magneto or to a

-      hundred other schisms in the secret economy of the affair. We slowed to

-      half-speed and sought eagerly the origin of the &ldquo;knock,&rdquo; which, however,

-      remained inexplicable. We were engloomed; we were in despair.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had just decided to stop the engine when it stopped of itself, with a

-      fearful crash of broken metal One side of the casing was shattered. The

-      skipper&rsquo;s smile was tragical. The manliness of all of us trembled under

-      the severity of the ordeal which fate had administered. To open out the

-      engine-box and glance at the wreck in the depths thereof was

-      heart-rending. We could not closely examine the chaos of steel and brass

-      because it was too hot, but we knew that the irremediable had occurred in

-      the bowels of the <i>Velsa</i>. We made sail, and crawled back to the

-      sound, and mournfully anchored with our unseen woe among the other yachts.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The engine was duly inspected bit by bit; and it appeared that only the

-      bearing of the forward piston was broken, certainly owing to careless

-      mounting of the engine in the shops. It was an enormous catastrophe, but

-      perhaps not irremediable.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Indeed, within a short time the skipper was calculating that he could get

-      a new bearing made in Copenhagen in twenty-four hours. Anyhow, we had to

-      reconcile ourselves to a second visit to Copenhagen. And Copenhagen, a few

-      hours earlier so sweet a name in our ears, was now hateful to us, a kind

-      of purgatory to which we were condemned for the sins of others.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0216.jpg" alt="0216 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0216.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The making and fitting of the new bearing occupied just seventy hours.

-      During this interminable period we enjoyed the scenery of the sound and

-      grew acquainted with its diverse phenomena. The weather, if wet, was calm,

-      and the surface of the water smooth; but every steamer that passed would

-      set up a roll that flung hooks, if not crockery, about the saloon. And the

-      procession of steamers in both directions was constant from five a. m. to

-      midnight. They came from and went to every part of the archipelago and of

-      Sweden and of northern Germany. We gradually understood that at Copenhagen

-      railways are a trifle, and the sea a matter of the highest importance.

-      Nearly all traffic is seaborne.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We discovered, too, that the immediate shore of the sound, and of the

-      yacht-basin scooped out of it, was a sort of toy seaside resort for the

-      city. Part of the building in which the Royal Danish Yacht Club is housed

-      was used as a public restaurant, with a fine terrace that commanded the

-      yacht-club landing-stage and all the traffic of the sound. Moreover, it

-      was a good restaurant, except that the waiters seemed to be always eating

-      some titbit on the sly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Here we sat and watched the business and pleasure of the sound. The czar&rsquo;s

-      yacht came to anchor, huge and old-fashioned and ungraceful, with a

-      blue-and-white standard large enough to make a suit of sails for a

-      schooner&mdash;the biggest yacht afloat, I think, but not a pleasing

-      object, though better than the antique ship of the Danish king. The

-      unwieldy ceremoniousness of Russian courts seemed to surround this pompous

-      vessel, and the solitary tragedy of imperial existence was made manifest

-      in her. Ah, the savage and hollow futility of saluting guns! The two

-      English royal yachts, both of which we saw in the neighborhood, were in

-      every way strikingly superior to the Russian.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Impossible to tire of the spectacle offered by that restaurant terrace. At

-      night the steamers would slip down out of Copenhagen one after the other

-      to the ends of the Baltic, and each was a moving parterre of electricity

-      on the darkness. And then we would walk along the nocturnal shore and find

-      it peopled with couples and larger groups, whose bicycles were often

-      stacked in groups, too. And the little yachts in the little yacht-basin

-      were each an illuminated household! A woman would emerge from a cabin and

-      ask a question of a man on the dark bank, and he would flash a

-      lantern-light in her face like a missile, and &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she would cry. And

-      farther on the great hulk which is the home of the Copenhagen Amateur

-      Sailing Club would be lit with festoons of lamps, and from within it would

-      come the sounds of song and the laughter of two sexes. And then we would

-      yell, &ldquo;<i>Velsa</i>, ahoy!&rdquo; and keep on yelling until all the lightly clad

-      couples were drawn out of the chilly night like moths by the strange

-      English signaling. And at last the <i>Velsa</i> would wake up, and the

-      dinghy would detach itself from her side, and we would go aboard. But not

-      until two o&rsquo;clock or so would the hilarity and music of the Amateur

-      Sailing Club cease, and merge into a frantic whistling for taxicabs from

-      the stand beyond the restaurant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then a few hours&rsquo; slumber, broken by nightmares of the impossibility of

-      ever quitting Copenhagen, and we would get up and gaze at the sadness of

-      the dismantled engine, and over the water at the yachts dozing and rocking

-      in the dawn. And on a near yacht, out of the maw of a forecastle-hatch

-      left open for air, a half-dressed sailor would appear, and yawn, and

-      stretch his arms, and then begin to use a bucket on the yacht&rsquo;s deck.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0221.jpg" alt="0221 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0221.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The day was born. A green tug would hurry northward, splashing; and the

-      first of the morning steamers would arrive from some mystical distant

-      island, a vessel, like most of the rest, of about six hundred tons, red

-      and black funnels, the captain looking down at us from the bridge; a nice

-      handful of passengers, including a few young women in bright hats;

-      everything damp and fresh, and everybody expectant and braced for

-      Copenhagen. A cheerful, ordinary sight! And then our skipper would emerge,

-      and the cook with my morning apple on a white plate. And the skipper would

-      say, &ldquo;We ought to be able to make a start to-day, sir.&rdquo; And on the third

-      day we did make a start, the engine having been miraculously recreated;

-      and we left Copenhagen, hating it no more.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_PART4" id="link2H_PART4"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      PART IV&mdash;ON THE FRENCH AND FLEMISH COAST

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XIV&mdash;FOLKESTONE TO BOULOGNE

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E waited for the

-      weather a day and a night at Folkestone, which, though one of the gateways

-      of England, is a poor and primitive place to lie in. Most of the time we

-      were on the mud, and to get up into England we had to climb a craggy

-      precipice called the quay-wall. Nevertheless, the harbor (so styled) is

-      picturesque, and in the less respectable part of the town, between the big

-      hotels and band-stands and the mail-steamers; there are agreeable

-      second-hand book shops, in one of which I bought an early edition of

-      Gray&rsquo;s poems bound in ancient vellum.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The newspapers were very pessimistic about the weather, and smacks

-      occasionally crept in for shelter, with wild reports of what was going on

-      in the channel. At four o&rsquo;clock in the morning, however, we started,

-      adventurous, for the far coasts of Brittany, via Boulogne. The channel was

-      a gray and desolate sight, weary and uneasy after the gale. And I also was

-      weary and uneasy, for it is impossible for a civilized person of regular

-      habits to arise at four a. m. without both physical and psychical

-      suffering, and the pleasure derived from the experience, though real, is

-      perverse. The last gleams of the Gris-Nez and the Varne lights were

-      visible across the heaving waste, feebly illuminating the intense

-      melancholy of the dawn. There was nothing to do except steer and keep your

-      eyes open, because a favorable and moderate southwest wind rendered the

-      engine unnecessary. The ship, and the dinghy after her, pitched and rolled

-      over the heavy swell. The skipper said naught. I said naught. The lights

-      expired. The dark gray of the sea turned to steel. The breeze was icy.

-      Vitality was at its lowest. Brittany seemed exceedingly remote, even

-      unattainable. Great, vital questions presented themselves to the enfeebled

-      mind, cutting at the very root of all conduct and all ambitions. What was

-      the use of yachting? What was the use of anything? Why struggle? Why

-      exist? The universe was too vast, and the soul homeless therein.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And then the cook, imperfectly attired, came aft, bearing a brass tray,

-      and on the tray an electro-teapot, sugar-basin, and milk-jug, and a white

-      cup and saucer with a spoon. Magic paraphernalia! Exquisite and potent

-      draft, far surpassing champagne drunk amid the bright glances of beauty!

-      Only the finest China tea is employed aboard the <i>Velsa</i>. I drank,

-      and was healed; and I gave also to the shipper. Earth was transformed. We

-      began to talk. The wind freshened. The ship, heeling over, spurted. It was

-      a grand life. We descried the French coast. The hours flew. Before

-      breakfast-time we were becalmed, in sunshine, between the piers at

-      Boulogne, and had to go in on the engine. At 8:15 we ran her on the mud,

-      on a rising tide, next to a pilot-boat, the <i>Jean et Marie</i>,

-      inhabited by three jolly French sailors. We carried a warp to the Quai

-      Chanzy, and another to a buoy, and considered ourselves fairly in France.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0228.jpg" alt="0228 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0228.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The officials of the French republic on the quay had been driven by the

-      spectacle of our peculiar Dutch lines and rig to adopt strange, emotional

-      attitudes; and as soon as we were afloat, the French republic came aboard

-      in a dinghy manned by two acolytes. The skipper usually receives the

-      representatives of foreign powers, but as the skipper speaks no French,

-      and as this was the first time I had entered France in this style, I

-      thought I would be my own ambassador. I received the French republic in my

-      saloon; we were ravishingly polite to each other; we murmured sweet

-      compliments to each other. He gave me a clean bill of health, and went off

-      with four francs and one half-penny. There is no nation like the French. A

-      French milliner will make a hat out of a piece of felt and nothing; and a

-      French official will make a diplomatic episode out of nothing at all,

-      putting into five minutes of futility all the Gallic civilization of

-      centuries.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Boulogne Harbor is a very bustling spot, and as its area is narrowly

-      limited, and its entrance difficult, the amount of signaling that goes on

-      is extraordinary. A single ship will fill the entrance; hence a flag flies

-      to warn the surrounding seas when the entrance is occupied or about to be

-      occupied. The state of the tide is also indicated, and the expert can read

-      from hieroglyphics slung in the air the exact depth of water at a

-      particular moment between the piers. In addition, of course, there is the

-      weather signaling. We had scarcely been in port a couple of hours before

-      the weather signaling shocked us; nay, we took it as an affront to

-      ourselves. The south cone went up. We had come in at the tail-end of one

-      south gale, and now another was predicted! How could small people like us

-      hope to work our way down to Brittany in the teeth of the gale! And I had

-      an appointment in the harbor of Carantec, a tiny village near Morlaix, in

-      a week&rsquo;s time! The thing was monstrous. But the south cone was hoisted,

-      and it remained hoisted. And the cone is never displayed except for a real

-      gale,&mdash;not a yachtsman&rsquo;s gale, but a sailor&rsquo;s gale, which is serious.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A tender went forth to meet a Dutch American liner in the roads. We

-      followed her along the jetty. At the end of the jetty the gale was already

-      blowing; and rain-squalls were all round the horizon. Soon we were in the

-      midst of a squall ourselves. The rain hid everything for a minute. It

-      cleared. The vast stretch of sands glistened wet, with the variegated

-      bathing-tents, from which even then beautiful creatures were bathing in a

-      shallow surf. Beyond was the casino, and all the complex roofs of

-      Boulogne, and to the north a road climbing up to the cliff-top, and the

-      illimitable dunes that are a feature of this part of the country. Above

-      all floated thunder-clouds, white in steely blue. The skipper did not like

-      those thunder-clouds; he said they were the most dangerous of all clouds,

-      &ldquo;because anything might come out of them.&rdquo; He spoke as if they already

-      contained in their bosoms every conceivable sort of weather, which they

-      would let loose according to their caprice.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The rain resumed heavily. The wind compelled us to hold tight to the rail

-      of the pier. A poster announced that in the casino behind the rain,

-      Suppé&rsquo;s &ldquo;Boccaccio&rdquo; was to be performed that night, and Massenet&rsquo;s &ldquo;Thaïs&rdquo;

-       the next night. And opera seemed a very artificial and unnecessary form of

-      activity as we stood out there in the reality of the storm. The Atlantic

-      liner had now bid good-by to the tender, and was hugely moving. She found

-      sea-room, and then turned with the solemnity of her bigness, and headed

-      straight into the gale, pitching like a toy. The rain soon veiled her, and

-      she was gone. I could not picture the <i>Velsa</i> in such a situation, at

-      any rate with the owner on board. We went back, rather pensive, to the

-      Quai Chanzy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0234.jpg" alt="0234 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0234.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The men in the pilot-boat alongside the <i>Velsa</i> were not in the least

-      reassuring as to the chances of the <i>Velsa</i> ever getting to Brittany;

-      but they were uplifted because the weather was too rough for them to go

-      out. When the cone is on view, the pilot-service is accomplished by a

-      powerful steam-vessel. Our friends, in their apparently happy idleness,

-      sculled forth in a dinghy about fifty yards from where we lay, and almost

-      immediately rejoined us with three eels that they had caught. I bought the

-      three eels for two shillings, and the cook cooked them perfectly, and I

-      ate one of them with ecstasy a few hours later; but eels are excessively

-      antipathetic to the digestive organs, and may jaundice the true bright

-      color of the world for days.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The transaction of the eels, strengthened our intimacy with the pilot&rsquo;s

-      crew, who imparted to us many secrets; as, for example, that they were the

-      selfsame men who act as porters at the quay for the transfer of luggage

-      when the cross-channel steamers arrive and depart. On one day they are the

-      pilot&rsquo;s crew, and on the next they are porters to carry your handbags

-      through the customs. This was a blow to me, because on the innumerable

-      occasions when I had employed those porters I had always regarded them as

-      unfortunate beings who could earn money only during about an hour each

-      day, victims of the unjust social system, etc., and who were therefore

-      specially deserving of compassion and tips. I now divined that their

-      activities were multiple, and no doubt dovetailed together like a Chinese

-      puzzle, and all reasonably remunerative. The which was very French and

-      admirable. Herein was a valuable lesson to me, and a clear saving in

-      future of that precious commodity, compassion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In a day or two the horrid fact emerged that we were imprisoned in

-      Boulogne. The south cone did not budge. Neither could we. The tide ebbed;

-      the tide flowed; we sank softly into the mud; we floated again. A sailor

-      cut our warp because it was in his way, and therefore incurred our anger

-      and the comminations of the harbor-master. But we were not released. An

-      aeroplane meeting was announced, and postponed. We witnessed the

-      preparations for the ceremonial opening of a grand new dock. We went to

-      the casino and listened to Russian music, which in other circumstances

-      would have enchanted us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But none of these high matters could hold our attention. Even when the

-      cook criticized our water-colors with faint praise, and stated calmly that

-      he, too, was a water-colorist, and brought proofs of his genius cut of the

-      forecastle, even then we were not truly interested. We thirsted to depart,

-      and could not. Our sole solace was to walk round and round the basini in

-      the rain-squalls, and observe their tremendous vitality, which, indeed,

-      never ceased, day or night save at low water, when most craft were

-      aground.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At such periods of tranquillity the trucks of the fishing-smacks were

-      nearly level with the quay, and we noticed that every masthead was

-      elaborately finished with gilded sculpture&mdash;a cross, a star, or a

-      small figure of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or an angel. The names, too, of

-      these smacks were significant: <i>Resurrection, Jesus-Marie</i>, and so

-      on. The ornamentation of the deck-houses and companions of these vessels

-      showed a great deal of fantasy and brilliant color, though little taste.

-      And the general effect was not only gay, but agreeable, demonstrating, as

-      it did, that the boats were beloved. English fishing-boats are beloved by

-      their owners, but English affection does not disclose itself in the same

-      way, if it discloses itself at all. On the third afternoon we assisted at

-      the departure of an important boat for the herring fisheries. It had a

-      crew of seventeen men, all dressed in brown, young and old, and an

-      enormous quantity of gear. It bore the air of a noble cooperative

-      enterprise, and went off on the tide, disdainfully passing the

-      still-hoisted cone.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Perhaps it was this event that gave us to think. If a herring-boat could

-      face the gale, why not we? Our ship was very seaworthy, and the coast was

-      dotted with sheltering ports. Only it was impossible to go south, since we

-      could not have made headway. Then why not boldly cancel the rendezvous in

-      Brittany, and run northward before the gale? The skipper saluted the idea

-      with enthusiasm. He spoke of Ostend. He said that if the wind held we

-      could easily run to Ostend in a day. He did not care for Ostend, but it

-      would be a change. I, however, did care for Ostend. And so it was decided

-      that, unless the wind went right round in the night, we would clear out of

-      Boulogne at the earliest tidal hour the next morning. The joy of

-      expectancy filled the ship, and I went into the town to buy some of the

-      beautiful meat-pies that are offered in its shops.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0239.jpg" alt="0239 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0239.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XV&mdash;TO BELGIUM

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>T 6 a. M. we, too,

-      were passing disdainfully the still-hoisted cone. Rain descended in

-      sheets, in blankets, and in curtains, and when we did not happen to be in

-      the rain, we could see rain-squalls of the most theatrical appearance in

-      every quarter of the horizon. The gale had somewhat moderated, but not the

-      sea; the wind, behind us, was against the tide, and considerably

-      quarreling therewith. Now we were inclosed in walls of water, and now we

-      were balanced on the summit of a mountain of water, and had a momentary

-      view of many leagues of tempest. I personally had never been out in such

-      weather in anything smaller than a mail-steamer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Here I must deal with a distressing subject, which it would be pleasanter

-      to ignore, but which my training in realism will not allow me to ignore. A

-      certain shameful crime is often committed on yachts, merchantmen, and even

-      men-of-war. It is notorious that Nelson committed this crime again and

-      again, and that other admirals have copied his iniquity. Sailors, and

-      particularly amateur sailors, would sooner be accused of any wickedness

-      rather than this. Charge them with cheating at cards, ruining innocent

-      women, defrauding the Government, and they will not blench; but charge

-      them with this offense, and they will blush, they will recriminate, and

-      they will lie disgracefully against all evidence; they cannot sit still

-      under the mere suspicion of it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we slipped out of the harbor that morning the secret preoccupation of

-      the owner and his friend was that circumstances might tempt them to

-      perpetrate the sin of sins. Well, I am able to say that they withstood the

-      awful temptation; but only just! If out of bravado they had attempted to

-      eat their meals in the saloon, the crime would assuredly have been

-      committed, but they had the sense to order the meals to be served in the

-      cockpit, in the rain, in the blast, in the cold. No matter the conditions!

-      They were saved from turpitude, and they ate heartily thrice during the

-      day. And possibly nobody was more astonished than themselves at their

-      success in virtue. I have known a yachtsman, an expert, a member of an

-      exceedingly crack club, suddenly shift his course shoreward in

-      circumstances not devoid of danger.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What are you about?&rdquo; was the affrighted question. He replied:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to beach her. If I don&rsquo;t, I shall be sick, and I won&rsquo;t be sick

-      aboard this yacht.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Such is the astounding influence of convention, which has transformed into

-      a crime a misfortune over which the victim has no control whatever. We did

-      not beach the <i>Velsa</i>, nor were our appetites impaired. We were

-      lucky, and merely lucky; and yet we felt as proud as though we had, by our

-      own skill and fortitude, done something to be proud of. This is human

-      nature.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we rounded Cape Gris-Nez, amid one of the most majestic natural scenes

-      I have ever witnessed, not a gale, but about half of a gale, was blowing.

-      The wind continued to moderate. Off Calais the tide was slack, and between

-      Calais and Dunkirk we had it under our feet, and were able to dispense

-      with the engine and still do six and a half knots an hour. Thenceforward

-      the weather grew calm with extraordinary rapidity, while the barometer

-      continuously fell. At four o&rsquo;clock the wind had entirely expired, and we

-      restarted the engine, and crawled past Westend and Nieuport, resorts very

-      ugly in themselves, but seemingly beautiful from the sea. By the time we

-      sighted the whiteness of the kursaal at Ostend the water was as flat as an

-      Inland lake.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0246.jpg" alt="0246 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0246.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The sea took on the most delicate purple tints, and the pallor of the

-      architecture of Belgian hotels became ethereal. While we were yet a mile

-      and a half from the harbor-mouth, flies with stings wandered out from the

-      city to meet us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We passed between the pierheads at Ostend at 6:10 p. m., and the skipper

-      was free to speak again. When he had done manouvering in the basin, he

-      leaned over the engine-hatch and said to me:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I &lsquo;ve had a bit o&rsquo; luck this week.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;With the engine?&rdquo; I suggested, for the engine had been behaving itself

-      lately.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, sir. My wife presented me with a little boy last Tuesday. I had the

-      letter last night. I&rsquo;ve been expecting it.&rdquo; But he had said nothing to me

-      before. He blushed, adding, &ldquo;I should like you to do me a very great

-      favor, sir&mdash;give me two days off soon, so that I can go to the

-      baptism.&rdquo; Strange, somehow, that a man should have to ask a favor to be

-      present at the baptism of his own son! The skipper now has two sons. Both,

-      I was immediately given to understand, are destined for the sea. He has

-      six brothers-in-law, and they all follow the sea. On a voyage he will

-      never willingly leave the wheel, even if he is not steering. He will rush

-      down to the forecastle for his dinner, swallow it in two minutes and a

-      half, and rush back. I said to him once:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I believe you must be fond of this wheel.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I am, sir,&rdquo; he said, and grinned.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We lay nearly opposite the railway station, and our rudder was within a

-      foot of the street. Next to us lay the <i>Velsa&rsquo;s</i> sister (occasion for

-      the historic remark that &ldquo;the world is very small&rdquo;), a yacht well known to

-      the skipper, of exactly the same lines as the <i>Velsa</i>, nearly the

-      same size, and built within four miles of her in the same year! The next

-      morning, which was a Sunday, the sisters were equally drenched in

-      tremendous downpours of rain, but made no complaint to each other. I had

-      the awning rigged, which enabled us, at any rate, to keep the saloon

-      skylights open.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The rain had no effect on the traditional noisiness of Ostend. Like sundry

-      other cities, Ostend has two individualities, two souls. All that fronts

-      the sea and claims kinship with the kursaal is grandiose, cosmopolitan,

-      insincere, taciturn, blatant, and sterile. It calls itself the finest

-      sea-promenade in Europe, and it may he, but it is as factitious as a

-      meringue. All that faces the docks and canals is Belgian, more than

-      Belgian&mdash;Flemish, picturesque, irregular, strident, simple,

-      unaffected, and swarming with children. Narrow streets are full of little

-      cafés that are full of little men and fat women. All the little streets

-      are cobbled, and everything in them produces the maximum quantity of

-      sound. Even the postmen carry horns, and all the dogs drawing little carts

-      hark loudly. Add to this the din of the tram-cars and the whistling of

-      railway engines.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On this Sunday morning there was a band festival of some kind, upon which

-      the pitiless rain had no effect whatever. Band after band swung past our

-      rudder, blaring its uttermost. We had some marketing to do, as the cook

-      declared that he could market neither in French nor Flemish, and we waited

-      impatiently under umbrellas for the procession of bands to finish. It

-      would not finish, and we therefore had to join it. All the way up the Rue

-      de la Chapelle we could not hear ourselves speak in the brazen uproar; and

-      all the brass instruments and all the dark uniforms of the puffy

-      instrumentalists were glittering and melting in the rain. Occasionally at

-      the end of the street, over the sea, lightning feebly flickered against a

-      dark cloud. At last I could turn off into a butcher&rsquo;s shop, where under

-      the eyes of a score of shopping matrons I purchased a lovely piece of beef

-      for the nominal price of three francs seventy-five centimes, and bore it

-      off with pride into the rain.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we got back to the yacht with well-baptized beef and vegetal des and

-      tarts, we met the deck-hand, who was going alone into the interesting and

-      romantic city. Asked what he was about, he replied:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to buy a curio, sir; that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo; He knew the city. He had been

-      to Ostend before in a cargo-steamer, and he considered it neither

-      interesting nor romantic. He pointed over the canal toward the country.

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a pretty walk over there,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but there&rsquo;s nothing here,&rdquo;

-       pointing to the town. I had been coming to Ostend for twenty years, and

-      enjoying it like a child, but the deck-hand, with one soft-voiced

-      sentence, took it off the map.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the afternoon, winding about among the soaked cosmopolitanism of the

-      promenade, I was ready to agree with him. Nothing will destroy fashionable

-      affectations more surely than a wet Sunday, and the promenade seemed to

-      rank first in the forlorn tragedies of the world. I returned yet again to

-      the yacht, and was met by the skipper with a disturbed face.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t get any fresh water, sir. Horse is n&rsquo;t allowed to work on

-      Sundays. <i>Everything&rsquo;s changed in Belgium.</i>&rdquo; The skipper was too

-      Dutch to be fond of Flanders. His mightiest passion was rising in him&mdash;the

-      passion to go somewhere else.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;we &lsquo;ll manage with mineral water, and then we &lsquo;ll

-      move on to Bruges.&rdquo; In rain it is, after all, better to be moving than to

-      be standing still.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But to leave Ostend was not easy, because the railway bridge would not

-      swing for us, nor would it yield, for over an hour, to the song of our

-      siren. Further, the bridge-man deeply insulted the skipper. He said that

-      he was not supposed to swing for <i>canal-boats</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Canal-boat!&rdquo; the skipper cried. &ldquo;By what canal do you think I brought

-      this ship across the North Sea?&rdquo; He was coldly sarcastic, and his sarcasm

-      forced the bridge open. We passed through, set our sails, and were

-      presently heeling over and washing a wave of water up the banks of the

-      canal. I steered, and, as we overtook an enormous barge, I shaved it as

-      close as I could for the fun of the thing. Whereupon the skipper became

-      excited, and said that for a yacht to touch a barge was fatal, because the

-      barges were no stronger than cigar-boxes, having sides only an inch thick,

-      and would crumble at a touch; and the whole barge-population of Belgium

-      and Holland, but especially Belgium, was in a conspiracy to extract

-      damages out of yachts on the slightest pretext. It seemed to me that the

-      skipper&rsquo;s alarm was exaggerated. I understood it a few days later, when he

-      related to me that he had once quite innocently assisted at the cracking

-      of a cigar-box, for which his employer had had to pay five thousand

-      francs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0251.jpg" alt="0251 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0251.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The barge which I had failed to sink had two insignificant square-sails

-      set, like pocket-handkerchiefs, but was depending for most of its motion

-      on a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-rope in good order.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and simultaneously the

-      weather improved and brightened. It was a strange summer, was that summer!

-      The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleasantly through the water,

-      and we had to start the engine, which is much less amusing than the sails.

-      And the towers of Bruges would not appear on the horizon of the monotonous

-      tree-lined canal, upon whose banks every little village resembles every

-      other little village. We had to invent something to pass the time, and we

-      were unwise enough to measure the speed of the engine on this smooth water

-      in this unusual calm. A speed trial is nearly always an error of tact, for

-      the reason that it shatters beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful

-      illusion that under favorable conditions the engine would drive the yacht

-      at the rate of twelve kilometers an hour. The canal-bank had small posts

-      at every hundred meters and large posts at every thousand. The first test

-      gave seven and a half kilometers an hour. It was unthinkable. The

-      distances must be wrong. My excellent watch must have become capricious.

-      The next test gave eight kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to

-      the engine, and we rose to nine, only to fall again to eight. Allowing

-      even that the dinghy took a kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of

-      the test was very humiliating. We crawled. We scarcely moved.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would go ashore and walk

-      along the bank against the yacht until we could see Bruges. I swore it,

-      and I kept the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred meters; and

-      by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted the memorable belfry of Bruges in

-      the distance, I had decided that the engine was perhaps a better engine

-      than I had fancied. I returned on board, and had to seek my berth in a

-      collapse. Nevertheless the <i>Velsa</i> had been a most pleasing object as

-      seen from the bank.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XVI&mdash;BRUGES

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E moored at the

-      Quai Spinola, with one of the most picturesque views in Bruges in front of

-      us, an irresistible temptation to the watercolorist, even in wet weather.

-      I had originally visited Bruges about twenty years earlier. It was the

-      first historical and consistently beautiful city I had ever seen, and even

-      now it did not appear to have sunk much in my esteem. It is incomparably

-      superior to Ghent, which is a far more important place, but in which I

-      have never been fortunate.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0258.jpg" alt="0258 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0258.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a different and a finer

-      attribute. I have had terrible, devastating adventures in the restaurants

-      of Ghent, and the one first-class monument there is the medieval castle of

-      the counts of Flanders, an endless field for sociological speculation, but

-      transcendency ugly and depressing. Ghent is a modern town in an old suit

-      of clothes, and its inhabitants are more formidably Belgian than those of

-      any other large city of Flanders. I speak not of the smaller industrial

-      places, where Belgianism is ferocious and terrible.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished, we went straight to Notre

-      Dame, where there was just enough light left for us to gaze upon

-      Michelangelo&rsquo;s &ldquo;Virgin and Child,&rdquo; a major work. Then to the streets and

-      lesser canals. I found changes in the Bruges of my youth. Kinematographs,

-      amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be expected, for no show-city

-      in Europe has been able to keep them out. Do they not enliven and illumine

-      the ground floors of some of the grandest renaissance palaces in Florence?

-      But there were changes more startling than the advent kinematographs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced the ordinary burners in the

-      street-lamps of the town! In another fifty years the corporation of Bruges

-      will be using electricity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats were running on the canals,

-      and at the improvised landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges &ldquo;The

-      Venice of the North.&rdquo; I admit that my feelings were hurt&mdash;not by the

-      motor-boats, but by the signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the North,

-      than Venice is the Bruges of the South.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to descend upon us and penetrate

-      us, as the motorboats ceased to run and the kinematographs grew more

-      brilliant in the deepening night. We had to dine, and all the restaurants

-      of the town were open to us. Impossible to keep away from the Grande Place

-      and the belfry, still incessantly chattering about the time of day.

-      Impossible not to look with an excusable sentimentality at the Hôtel du

-      Panier d&rsquo;Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with the fattest

-      landlord in the world, and thousands of mosquitos ready among its

-      bed-hangings to assist the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep. The Panier

-      d&rsquo;Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-loving tourist who

-      could carry all his luggage and was firmly resolved not to spend more than

-      seven francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d&rsquo;Or one was sure to

-      encounter other travelers who took both art and life seriously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      No, we would not dine at the Panier d&rsquo;Or, because we would not disturb our

-      memories. We glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior, and we

-      slipped into the café restaurant next door, and were served by a postulant

-      boy waiter who had everything to learn about food and human nature, but

-      who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost saturated with the exquisite

-      melancholy of the Grande Place, we were too enchanted to move. We drank

-      coffee and other things, and lingered until all the white cloths were

-      removed from the tables; and the long, high room became a café simply. A

-      few middle-aged male habitués wandered in separately,&mdash;four in all,&mdash;and

-      each sat apart and smoked and drank beer. The mournfulness was sweet and

-      overwhelming. It was like chloroform. The reflection that each of these

-      sad, aging men had a home and an <i>intimité</i> somewhere in the

-      spacious, transformed, shabby interiors of Bruges, that each was a living

-      soul with aspirations and regrets, this reflection was excruciating in its

-      blend of forlornness and comedy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A few more habitués entered, and then a Frenchman and a young Frenchwomen

-      appeared on a dais at the back of the café and opened a piano. They were

-      in correct drawing-room costume, with none of the eccentricities of the <i>cafe-chantant</i>,

-      and they produced no effect whatever on the faces or in the gestures of

-      the habitués, They performed. He sang; she sang; he played; she played.

-      Just the common songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls, vulgar, but

-      more inane than vulgar, The young woman was agreeable, with the large, red

-      mouth which is the index of a comfortable, generous, and good-natured

-      disposition They sang and played a long time. Nobody budged; nobody

-      smiled. Certainly we did not; in a contest of phlegm Englishmen can, it is

-      acknowledged, hold their own. Most of the habitués doggedly read

-      newspapers, but at intervals there was a momentary dull applause. The

-      economic basis of the entertainment was not apparent to us. The prices of

-      food and drink were very moderate, and no collection was made by or on

-      behalf of the artists.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed, because

-      we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed. Yes,

-      incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in Bruges.

-      And in the café adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls in white

-      were performing gaily to a similar audience of habitués. We glimpsed them

-      through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph a bell was

-      ringing loudly and continuously to invite habitués, and no habitués were

-      responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of the belfry

-      flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of these and of

-      the habitués gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps, after all,

-      Bruges had not changed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0263.jpg" alt="0263 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0263.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the

-      Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of

-      large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited by

-      the historical past and also no doubt by habitués. And after much

-      wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was

-      supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street,

-      beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold it and

-      peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of tourists.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the belfry

-      suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the clockwork

-      chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells, a bravura

-      piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing, as different from

-      that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a barrel-organ. All the magic

-      of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine force. Bruges was no more a

-      hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers and amateur painters and

-      poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their attendant chaplains. It was

-      the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed before I had ever even seen

-      the place&mdash;just that.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0267.jpg" alt="0267 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0267.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded

-      up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again,

-      reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed under

-      the shadows of rococo churches, the façades and interiors of which are

-      alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according to the

-      instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the maze upon a

-      long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was set in a frame

-      of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by high towers, and

-      by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the lake floated the

-      <i>Velsa</i>, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be real, and yet

-      real. It was the most magical thing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We could scarcely believe that there was our yacht right in the midst of

-      the town. This was the same vessel that only a little earlier had rounded

-      Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage whatever. Proof enough of

-      the advantage of the barge-build, with a light draft, and heavy lee-boards

-      for use with a beam wind when close-hauled. Some yachtsmen, and expert

-      yachtsmen, too, are strongly against the barge. But no ordinary yacht of

-      the <i>Velsas</i> size could have scraped into that lake by the Quai

-      Spinola and provided us with that unique sensation. The <i>Velsa</i> might

-      have been designed specially for the background of Bruges. She fitted it

-      with exquisite perfection.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And the shaft of light slanting up from her forecastle hatch rendered her

-      more domestic than the very houses around, which were without exception

-      dark and blind, and might have been abandoned. We went gingerly aboard

-      across the narrow, yielding gangway, and before turning in gazed again at

-      the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit that a little way off the

-      kinematograph was tintinnabulating for custom, and a Parisian couple

-      singing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked girls coarsely dancing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_PART5" id="link2H_PART5"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      PART V&mdash;EAST ANGLIAN ESTUARIES

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XVII EAST ANGLIA

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>FTER the exoticism

-      of foreign parts, this chapter is very English. But no island could be

-      more surpassingly strange, romantic, and baffling than this island. I had

-      a doubt about the propriety of using the phrase &ldquo;East Anglia&rdquo; in the

-      title. I asked, therefore, three educated people whether the northern part

-      of Essex could be termed East Anglia, according to current usage. One said

-      he did n&rsquo;t know. The next said that East Anglia began only north of the

-      Stour. The third said that East Anglia extended southward as far as

-      anybody considered that it ought to extend southward. He was a true

-      Englishman. I agreed with him. England was not made, but born. It has

-      grown up to a certain extent, and its pleasure is to be full of anomalies,

-      like a human being. It has to be seen to be believed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Thus, my income tax is assessed in one town, twelve miles distant. After

-      assessment, particulars of it are forwarded to another town in another

-      county, and the formal demand for payment is made from there; but the

-      actual payment has to be made in a third town, about twenty miles from

-      either of the other two. What renders England wondrous is not such

-      phenomena, but the fact that Englishmen see nothing singular in such

-      phenomena.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      East Anglia, including North Essex, is as English as any part of England,

-      and more English than most. Angles took possession of it very early in

-      history, and many of their descendants, full of the original Anglian

-      ideas, still powerfully exist in the counties. And probably no place is

-      more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal yachting center on the east

-      coast, and the home port of the <i>Velsa</i>. Theoretically and

-      officially, Harwich is the home port of the <i>Velsa</i>, but not in

-      practice: we are in England, and it would never do for the theory to

-      accord with the fact. Brightlingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea,

-      except at railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea. There is some

-      excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town, has found 193 different

-      spellings of the name.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was &ldquo;a member of the Cinque

-      Ports.&rdquo; Not <i>one</i> of the Cinque Ports, of which characteristically

-      there were seven, but a member. A &ldquo;member&rdquo; was subordinate, and

-      Brightlingsea was subordinate to Sandwich, Heaven knows why. But it shared

-      in the responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to provide fifty-seven

-      ships for the king&rsquo;s service every year. In return it shared in the

-      privilege of carrying a canopy over the king at the coronation, and in a

-      few useful exemptions. After it had been a member of the Cinque for many

-      decades and perhaps even centuries, it began to doubt whether, after all,

-      it was a member, and demanded a charter in proof. This was in 1442. The

-      charter was granted, and it leads off with these words: &ldquo;To all the

-      faithful in Christ, to whom these present letters shall come, the Mayors

-      and Bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting.&rdquo; By

-      this time ships had already grown rather large. They carried four masts,

-      of which the aftermost went by the magnificent title of the &ldquo;bonaventure

-      mizen&rdquo;; in addition they had a mast with a square sail at the extremity of

-      the bow-sprit. They also carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of

-      navigation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Later, smuggling was an important industry at Brightlingsea, and to

-      suppress it laws were passed making it illegal to construct fast rowing-

-      or sailing-boats. In the same English, and human, way, it was suggested at

-      the beginning of the twentieth century that since fast motor-cars kicked

-      up dust on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable of traveling

-      fast should be made illegal. There are no four-masted ships now at

-      Brightlingsea; no bowsprit carries a mast; no ship puts to sea with an

-      astrolabe; the &ldquo;bonaventure mizen&rdquo; is no more; smuggling is unfashionable;

-      fast craft are encouraged.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Nevertheless, on a summer&rsquo;s morning I have left the <i>Velsa</i> in the

-      dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyih Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten

-      minutes have been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a border of

-      pale grass at the top, and the gray English sky overhead, and the whole

-      visible world was exactly as it must have been when the original Angles

-      first rowed up that creek. At low water the entire Christian era is

-      reduced to nothing, in many a creek of the Colne, the Black water, and the

-      Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been done; the pristine reigns

-      as perfectly as in the African jungle. And the charm of the scene is

-      indescribable. But to appreciate it one must know what to look for. I was

-      telling an Essex friend of mine about the dreadful flatness of

-      Schleswig-Holstein. He protested. &ldquo;But aren&rsquo;t you educated up to flats?&rdquo;

-       he asked. I said I was. He persisted. &ldquo;But are you educated up to mud, the

-      lovely colors on a mud-flat?&rdquo; He was a true connoisseur of Essex. The man

-      who is incapable of being ravished by a thin, shallow tidal stream running

-      between two wide, shimmering mud banks that curve through a strictly

-      horizontal marsh, without a tree, without a shrub, without a bird, save an

-      eccentric sea-gull, ought not to go yachting in Essex estuaries.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0278.jpg" alt="0278 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0278.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oyster-fishing, and it

-      catches more sprats than any other port in the island, namely, about

-      fifteen hundred tons of them per annum. But its most spectacular industry

-      has to do with yachting, It began to be a yachting resort only yesterday;

-      that is to say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It has, however, steadily

-      progressed, until now, despite every natural disadvantage and every

-      negligence, it can count a hundred and twenty yachts and some eight

-      hundred men employed therewith. A yacht cannot get into Brightlingsea at

-      all from the high sea without feeling her way among sand-banks,&mdash;in

-      old days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the inhabitants made a

-      profitable specialty of salving wrecks,&mdash;and when a yacht has

-      successfully come down Brightlingsea Reach, which is really the estuary of

-      the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of Brightlingsea Creek, her

-      difficulties will multiply.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the first place, she will always discover that the mouth of the creek

-      is obstructed by barges at anchor. She may easily run aground at the

-      mouth, and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably will, mistake

-      the channel, and pile herself up on a bank known as the Cinders, or the

-      Cindery. Farther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot there is

-      no sufficiency of water except at about a yard and a half from the shore,

-      which has the appearance of being flat. Escaping all these perils, she

-      will almost certainly run into something, or something will run into her,

-      or she may entangle herself in the oyster preserves. Yachts, barges,

-      smacks, and floating objects without a name are anchored anywhere and

-      anyhow. There is no order, and no rule, except that a smack always deems a

-      yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops her anchor somewhere, and

-      asks for the harbormaster. No harbor-master exists or ever has existed or

-      ever will. Historical tradition&mdash;sacred! All craft do as they like,

-      and the craft with the thinnest sides must look to its sides.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Also, the creek has no charm whatever of landscape or seascape. You can

-      see nothing from it except the little red streets of Brightlingsea and the

-      yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some secret which is

-      uncomprehended beyond England, it prospers as a center of yachting. Yachts

-      go to it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but from choice.

-      Yachts seem to like it. Of course it is a wonderful place, because any

-      place where a hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be a wonderful

-      place. The interest of its creek is inexhaustible, once you can reconcile

-      yourself to its primitive Anglianism, which, after all, really harmonizes

-      rather well with the mud-flats of the county.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the weather eastward is

-      dangerously formidable, you can turn your back on the North Sea and go for

-      an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the Colne is always exciting

-      because you never know when you may be able to return. Even the <i>Velsa</i>,

-      which can float on puddles, has gone aground in the middle of the fair and

-      wide Colne. A few miles up are the twin villages of Wivenhoe and Rowhedge,

-      facing each other across the river, both inordinately picturesque, and

-      both given up to the industry of yachting. At Wivenhoe large yachts and

-      even ships are built, and in winter there is always a choice selection of

-      world-famous yachts on the mud, costly and huge gewgaws, with their brass

-      stripped off them, painfully forlorn, stranded in a purgatory between the

-      paradise of last summer and the paradise of the summer to come.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If you are adventurous, you keep on winding along the curved reaches, and

-      as soon as the last yacht is out of sight, you are thrown hack once more

-      into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing but a thin, shallow stream,

-      two wide mud hanks, and a border of grass at the top of them. This is your

-      world, which you share with a sea-gull or a crow for several miles; and

-      then suddenly you arrive at a concourse of great barges against a quay,

-      and you wonder by w hat magic they got there, and above the quay rise the

-      towers and steeples of a city that was already ancient when William the

-      Conqueror came to England in the interests of civilization to take up the

-      white man&rsquo;s burden,&mdash;Colchester, where more oysters are eaten on a

-      certain night of the year at a single feast than at any other feast on

-      earth. Such is the boast.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But such contrasts as the foregoing do not compare in violence with the

-      contrasts offered by the River Stour, a few miles farther north on the map

-      of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its mouth, where, in confluence

-      with the River Orwell (which truly <i>is</i> in East Anglia) it forms a

-      goodish small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town, is a fairly

-      important naval port, and also &ldquo;a gate of the empire,&rdquo; where steamers go

-      forth for Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. We came into

-      Harwich Harbor on the tide one magnificent Sunday afternoon, with the sea

-      a bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and the entrance to the

-      Stour was guarded by two huge battle-ships, the <i>Blake</i> and the <i>Blenheim</i>,

-      each apparently larger than the whole of the town of Harwich. Up the

-      Stour, in addition to all the Continental steamers, was moored a fleet of

-      forty or fifty men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in a quadruple line. It

-      was necessary for the <i>Velsa</i> to review this fleet of astoundingly

-      ugly and smart black monsters, and she did so, to the high satisfaction of

-      the fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of Sunday afternoon was

-      thirsting for a distraction, even the mildest. On every sinister ship&mdash;the

-      <i>Basilisk</i>, the <i>Harpy</i>, etc., apposite names!&mdash;the young

-      bluejackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were trying bravely to

-      amuse themselves. The sound of the jews&rsquo;-harp and of the concertina was

-      heard, and melancholy songs of love. Little circles of men squatted here

-      and there on the machinery-encumbered decks playing at some game. A few

-      students were reading; some athletes were sparring; many others

-      skylarking. None was too busy to stare at our strange lines. Launches and

-      longboats were flitting about full of young men, going on leave to the

-      ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or sadly returning therefrom. Every sound

-      and noise was clearly distinguishable in the stillness of the hot

-      afternoon. And the impression given by the fleet as a whole was that of a

-      vast masculine town, for not a woman could be descried anywhere. It was

-      striking and mournful. When we had got to the end of the fleet I had a

-      wild idea:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let us go up the Stour.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and

-      pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever had

-      been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a

-      ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded.

-      Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had

-      quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were back

-      in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills, that was

-      all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small headlands,

-      and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated that a

-      channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys nobody

-      could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no buoys,

-      and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide, deceptive

-      waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put about, we

-      dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant fleet, in

-      another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of the forgotten town of

-      Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached mysteriously out of one of

-      those bights, and it was maimed by two men with the air of conspirators.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;D&rsquo; ye want a pilot?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We hardened ourselves.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why in thunder is n&rsquo;t this river buoyed?&rdquo; I demanded of the skipper.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The skipper answered that the intention obviously was to avoid taking the

-      bread out of the mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No catastrophe.

-      The town of Mistley approached us. Then we had to pause again, reversing

-      the propeller. We were in a network of shallows. Far to port could be seen

-      a small red buoy; it was almost on the bank. Impossible that it could

-      indicate the true channel. We went straight ahead and chanced it. The next

-      instant we were hard on the mud in midstream, and the propeller was making

-      a terrific pother astern. We could only wait for the tide to float us off.

-      The rowboat appeared again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &lsquo;D&rsquo; ye want a pilot?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      And it disappeared.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we floated, the skipper said to me in a peculiar challenging tone:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We &lsquo;ll go on,&rdquo; I said. I could say no less.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0288.jpg" alt="0288 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0288.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure enough, the true channel

-      was there, right under the south bank. And we came safely to the town of

-      Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even a torpedo-boat and

-      seldom indeed a yacht, certainly never a <i>Velsa</i>. And yet the smoke

-      of the harbor of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique quay. The

-      town of Mistley rose from its secular slumber to enjoy a unique sensation

-      that afternoon.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Shall we go on to Manningtree, sir?&rdquo; said the skipper, adding with a

-      grin, &ldquo;There&rsquo;s only about half an hour left of the flood, and if we get

-      aground again&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      It was another challenge.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Manningtree is a town even more recondite than Mistley, and it marks the

-      very end of the navigable waters of the Stour. It lay hidden round the

-      next corner. We thought we could detect the channel, curving out again now

-      into midstream. We followed the lure, opened out Manningtree the desired&mdash;and

-      went on the mud with a most perceptible bump. Out, quick, with the dinghy!

-      Cover her stern-sheets with a protecting cloth, and lower an anchor

-      therein and about fifty fathoms of chain, and row away! We manned the

-      windlass, and dragged the <i>Velsa</i> off the mud.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Shall we go on, sir?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, not a hero. &ldquo;We &lsquo;ll give up Manningtree this trip.&rdquo;

-       Obstinacy in adventure might have meant twelve hours in the mud. The crew

-      breathed relief. We returned, with great care, to civilization. We knew

-      now why the Stour is a desolate stream. Thus to this day I have never

-      reached Manningtree except in an automobile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And there are still stranger waters than the Stour; for example, Hamford

-      Water, where explosives are manufactured on lonely marshes, where

-      immemorial wharves decay, and wild ducks and owls intermingle, and

-      public-houses with no public linger on from century to century, and where

-      the saltings are greener than anywhere else on the coast, and the east

-      wind more east, and the mud more vivid. And the <i>Velsa</i> has been

-      there, too.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XVIII&mdash;IN SUFFOLK

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Orwell is

-      reputed to have the finest estuary in East Anglia. It is a broad stream,

-      and immediately Shotley Barracks and the engines of destruction have been

-      left behind, it begins to be humane and reassuring. Thanks to the

-      surprising modernity of the town of Ipswich, which has discovered that

-      there are interests more important than those of local pilots, it is

-      thoroughly well buoyed, so that the stranger and the amateur cannot fail

-      to keep in the channel. It insinuates itself into Suffolk in soft and

-      civilized curves, and displays no wildness of any kind and, except at one

-      point, very little mud. When you are navigating the Orwell, you know

-      positively that you are in England. On each side of you modest but

-      gracefully wooded hills slope down with caution to the bank, and you have

-      glimpses of magnificent mansions set in the midst of vast, undulating

-      parks, crisscrossed with perfectly graveled paths that gleam in the

-      sunshine. Everything here is private and sacred, and at the gates of the

-      park lodge-keepers guard not only the paradisiacal acres, but the original

-      ideas that brought the estate into existence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Feudalism, benevolent and obstinate, flourishes with calm confidence in

-      itself; and even on your yacht&rsquo;s deck you can feel it, and you are awed.

-      For feudalism has been, and still is, a marvelous cohesive force. And it

-      is a solemn thought that within a mile of you may be a hushed drawingroom

-      at whose doors the notion of democracy has been knocking quite in vain for

-      a hundred years. Presently you will hear the sweet and solemn chimes of a

-      tower-clock, sound which seems to spread peace and somnolence over half a

-      county. And as you listen, you cannot but be convinced that the feudal

-      world is august and beautiful, and that it cannot be improved, and that to

-      overthrow it would be a vandalism. That is the estuary of the Orwell and

-      its influence. Your pleasure in it will be unalloyed unless you are so

-      ill-advised as to pull off in the dinghy, and try to land in one of the

-      lovely demesnes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      About half-way up the estuary, just after passing several big

-      three-masters moored in midstream and unloading into lighters, you come to

-      Pinmill, renowned among yachtsmen and among painters. Its haven is formed

-      out of the angle of a bend in the river, and the narrowness of the channel

-      at this point brings all the traffic spectacularly close to the yachts at

-      anchor. Here are all manner of yachts, and you are fairly certain to see a

-      friend, and pay or receive a visit of state. And also very probably, if

-      you are on board the Velsa some painter on another yacht will feel bound

-      to put your strange craft into a sketch. And the skipper, who has little

-      partiality for these river scenes, will take the opportunity to go

-      somewhere else on a bicycle. You, too, must go ashore, because Pinmill is

-      an exhibition-village, entirely picturesque, paintable, and English. It is

-      liable to send the foreigner into raptures, and Americans have been known

-      to assert that they could exist there in happiness forever and ever.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I believe that some person or persons in authority offer prizes to the

-      peasantry for the prettiest cottage gardens in Pinmill. It is well; but I

-      should like to see in every picturesque and paint-able English village a

-      placard stating the number of happy peasants who sleep more than three in

-      a room, and the number of adult able-bodied males who earn less than

-      threepence an hour. All aspects of the admirable feudal system ought to be

-      made equally apparent. The chimes of the castle-clock speak loud, and need

-      no advertisement; cottage gardens also insist on the traveler&rsquo;s attention,

-      but certain other phenomena are apt to escape it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0297.jpg" alt="0297 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0297.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      The charm of Pinmill is such that you usually decide to remain there over

-      night. In one respect this is a mistake, for the company of yachts is such

-      that your early morning Swedish exercises on deck attract an audience,

-      which produces self-consciousness in the exerciser.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Ipswich closes the estuary of the Orwell, and Ipswich is a genuine town

-      that combines industrialism with the historic sense. No American can

-      afford not to visit it, because its chief hotel has a notorious connection

-      with Mr. Pickwick, and was reproduced entire a lifelike-size at a world&rsquo;s

-      fair in the United States. Aware of this important fact, the second-hand

-      furniture and curio-dealers of the town have adopted suitable measures.

-      When they have finished collecting, Americans should go to the docks&mdash;as

-      interesting as anything in Ipswich&mdash;and see the old custom-house,

-      with its arch, and the gloriously romantic French and Scandinavian

-      three-masters that usually lie for long weeks in the principal basin.

-      Times change. Less than eighty years ago the docks of Ipswich were larger

-      than those of London. And there are men alive and fighting in Ipswich

-      to-day who are determined that as a port Ipswich shall resume something of

-      her ancient position in the world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary, northward, is the estuary

-      of the River Deben. One evening, feeling the need of a little ocean air

-      after the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down there from to the

-      North Sea, and finding ourselves off Woodbridgehaven, which is at the

-      mouth of the Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined to risk the

-      entrance. According to all printed advice, the entrance ought not to be

-      risked without local aid. There is a bank at the mouth, with a patch that

-      dries at low water, and within there is another bank. The shoals shift

-      pretty frequently, and, worst of all, the tide runs at the rate of six

-      knots and more. Still, the weather was calm, and the flood only two hours

-      old. We followed the sailing directions, and got in without trouble just

-      as night fell. The rip of the tide was very marked, and the coast-guard

-      who boarded us with a coast-guard&rsquo;s usual curiosity looked at us as though

-      we were either heroes or rash fools, probably the latter.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We dropped anchor for the night, and the next morning explored the

-      estuary, with the tide rising. We soon decided that the perils of this

-      famous river had been exaggerated. There were plenty of beacons,&mdash;which,

-      by the way, are continually being shifted as the shoals shift,&mdash;and

-      moreover the channel defined itself quite simply, for the reason that the

-      rest of the winding river-bed was dry. We arrived proudly at Woodbridge,

-      drawing all the maritime part of the town to look at us, and we ourselves

-      looked at Woodbridge in a fitting manner, for it is sacred to the memory

-      not of Omar Khayyam, but to much the same person, Edward Fitzgerald, who

-      well knew the idiosyncrasies of the Deben. Then it was necessary for us to

-      return, as only for about two hours at each tide is there sufficient water

-      for a yacht to lie at Woodbridge.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The exit from the Deben was a different affair from the incoming. Instead

-      of a clearly defined channel, we saw before us a wide sea. The beacons or

-      perches were still poking up their heads, of course, but they were of no

-      use, since they had nothing to indicate whether they were starboard or

-      port beacons. It is such details that harmonize well with the Old-World

-      air of English estuaries&mdash;with the swans, for instance, those

-      eighteenth-century birds that abound on the Deben. We had to take our

-      choice of port or starboard. Heaven guided us. We reached the entrance.

-      The tide was at half-ebb and running like a race; the weather was

-      unreliable. It was folly to proceed. We proceeded. We had got in alone; we

-      would get out alone. We shot past the coast-guard, who bawled after us. We

-      put the two beacons in a line astern, obedient to the sailing directions;

-      but we could not keep them in a line. The tide swirled us away, making

-      naught of the engine. We gave a tremendous bump. Yes, we were assuredly on

-      the bank for at least ten hours, if not forever; if it came on to blow, we

-      might well be wrecked. But no. The ancient <i>Velsa</i> seemed to rebound

-      elastically off the traitorous sand, and we were afloat again, In two

-      minutes more we were safe. What the coastguard said is not known to this

-      day. We felt secretly ashamed of our foolishness, but we were sustained by

-      the satisfaction of having deprived more local pilots of their fees.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Still, we were a sobered crew, and at the next river-mouth northward&mdash;Orford

-      Haven&mdash;we yielded to a base common sense, and signaled for a pilot.

-      The river Ore is more dangerous to enter, and far more peculiar even than

-      the Deben. The desolate spot, where it runs into the sea is well called

-      Shinglestreet, for it is a wilderness of shingles. The tide runs very fast

-      indeed; the bar shifts after every gale, and not more than four feet of

-      water is guaranteed on it. Last and worst, the bottom is hard. It was

-      probably the hardness of the bottom that finally induced us to stoop to a

-      pilot. To run aground on sand is bad, but to run aground on anything of a

-      rocky nature may be fatal. Our signal was simply ignored. Not the

-      slightest symptom anywhere of a pilot. We were creeping in, and we

-      continued to creep in. The skipper sent the deck-hand forward with the

-      pole. He called out seven feet, eight feet, seven feet; but these were

-      Dutch feet, of eleven inches each, because the pole is a Dutch pole. The

-      water was ominous, full of curling crests and unpleasant hollows, as the

-      wind fought the current. The deckhand called out seven, six, five and a

-      half. We could almost feel the ship bump... and then we were over the bar.

-      Needless to say that a pilot immediately hove in sight. We waved him off,

-      though he was an old man with a grievance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We approached the narrows. We had conquered the worst difficulties by the

-      sole help of the skipper&rsquo;s instinct for a channel, for the beacons were

-      incomprehensible to us; and we imagined that we could get through the

-      narrows into the river proper. But we were mistaken. We had a fair wind,

-      and we set all sails, and the engine was working well; but there was more

-      than a six-knot tide rushing out through those narrows, and we could not

-      get through. We hung in them for about half an hour. Then, imitating the

-      example of a fisherman who had followed us, we just ran her nose into the

-      shingle, with the sails still set, and jumped ashore with a rope. The

-      opportunity to paint a water-color of the <i>Velsa</i> under full sail was

-      not to be lost. Also we bought fish and we borrowed knowledge from the

-      fisherman. He informed us that we had not entered by the channel at all;

-      that we were never anywhere near it. He said that the channel had four

-      feet at that hour. Thus we learned that local wisdom is not always

-      omniscience.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After a delay of two hours, we went up the Ore on the slack. The Ore is a

-      very dull river, but it has the pleasing singularity of refusing to quit

-      the ocean. For mile after mile it runs exactly parallel with the North

-      Sea, separated from it only by a narrow strip of shingle. Under another

-      name it all but rejoins the ocean at Aldeburgh where at length it curves

-      inland. On its banks is Orford, a town more dead than any dead city of the

-      Zuyder Zee, and quite as picturesque and as full of character. The

-      deadness of Orford may be estimated from the fact that it can support a

-      kinematograph only three nights a week. It has electric light, but no

-      railway, and the chief attractions are the lofty castle, a fine church, an

-      antique quay, and a large supply of splendid lobsters. It knows not the

-      tourist, and has the air of a natural self-preserving museum.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0308.jpg" alt="0308 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0308.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XIX&mdash;THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>IME was when I

-      agreed with the popular, and the guide-book, verdict that the Orwell is

-      the finest estuary in these parts; but now that I know it better, I

-      unhesitatingly give the palm to the Blackwater. It is a nobler stream, a

-      true arm of the sea; its moods are more various, its banks wilder, and its

-      atmospheric effects much grander. The defect of it is that it does not

-      gracefully curve. The season for cruising on the Blackwater is September,

-      when the village regattas take place, and the sunrises over leagues of

-      marsh are made wonderful by strange mists.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Last September the <i>Velsa</i> came early into Mersea Quarters for Mersea

-      Regatta. The Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek that is

-      sheltered between the mainland and Mersea Island&mdash;which is an island

-      only during certain hours of the day. Crowds of small yachts have their

-      home in the Quarters, and the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley

-      of craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through five-tonners to

-      fishing-smacks, trading-barges converted into barge-yachts, real

-      barge-yachts like ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred tons or

-      so, fully &ldquo;dressed,&rdquo; and carrying ladies in bright-colored jerseys, to

-      preside over all. The principal events occur in the estuary, but the

-      intimate and amusing events, together with all the river gossip and

-      scandal, are reserved for the seclusion of the Quarters, where a long lane

-      of boats watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for the tide to

-      cover the illimitable mud, and listen to the excessively primitive band

-      which has stationed itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We managed to get on the mud, but we did that on purpose, to save the

-      trouble of anchoring. Many yachts and even smacks do it not on purpose,

-      and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A genuine yachtsman paid us a

-      visit&mdash;one of those men who live solely for yachting, who sail their

-      own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to dress like a sailor

-      before the mast or like a longshore loafer&mdash;and told us a tale of an

-      amateur who had bought a yacht that had Inhabited Mersea Quarters all her

-      life. When the amateur returned from his first cruise in her, he lost his

-      nerve at the entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a fisherman at anchor

-      in a dinghy, &ldquo;Which is the channel?&rdquo; The fisherman, seeing a yacht whose

-      lines had been familiar to him for twenty years, imagined that he was

-      being made fun of. He drawled out, &ldquo;<i>You</i> know.&rdquo; In response to

-      appeals more and more excited he continued to drawl out, &ldquo;<i>You</i>

-      know.&rdquo; At length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon he drawlingly

-      advised: &ldquo;Let the old wench alone. Let her alone. <i>She</i> &rsquo;ll

-      find her way in all right.&rdquo; Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal

-      stories, because the time has to be passed somehow while the water rises.

-      There was a tale of a smuggler on the mud-flats, pursued in the dead of

-      night by a coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler turned round to

-      face the coast-guardsman. &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; said he to the coast-guardsman with

-      warning persuasiveness, &ldquo;you&rsquo;d better not come any further. <i>You do see

-      such &lsquo;wonderful queer things in the newspapers nowadays</i>.&rdquo; The

-      coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of this dark

-      st-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, &ldquo;you&rsquo;d better not come any

-      further. <i>You do see such &lsquo;wonderful queer things in the newspapers

-      nowadays</i>.&rdquo; The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of

-      this dark saying, accepted the advice, and went home.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin to go off, and presently

-      the regatta is in full activity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with

-      white, and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter within the lane

-      of boats in the Quarters is terrific. In these affairs, at a given moment

-      in the afternoon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy events are

-      finished, and before the yachts and smacks competing in the long races

-      have come back. During this pause we escaped out of the Quarters, and

-      proceeded up the river, past Brad-well Creek, where Thames barges lie, and

-      past Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide was still slack.

-      We could not reach Maldon, which is the Mecca of the Blackwater, and we

-      anchored a few miles below that municipal survival, in the wildest part of

-      the river, and watched the sun disappear over vast, flat expanses of water

-      as smooth as oil, with low banks whose distances were enormously enhanced

-      by the customary optical delusions of English weather. Close to us was

-      Osea Island, where an establishment for the reformation of drunkards adds

-      to the weird scene an artistic touch of the sinister. From the private

-      jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in process of being reformed gazed at

-      us steadily in the deepening gloom. Then an attendant came down the jetty

-      and lighted its solitary red eye, which joined its stare to that of the

-      inebriates.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0313.jpg" alt="0313 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0313.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <p>

-      Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the

-      pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it, is

-      superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not have

-      been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway service has

-      left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of yachtsmen who are

-      content to see a town decay if only the spectacle affords esthetic

-      pleasure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the Chelmsford

-      Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and lock-house steeped

-      in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond the lock was a basin in

-      which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian schooners discharging timber

-      and all the romance of the North. The prospect was so alluring that we

-      decided to voyage on the canal, at any rate as far as the next lock, and

-      we asked the lock-keeper how far off the next lock was. He said curtly:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ye can&rsquo;t go up to the next lock.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because there&rsquo;s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was any

-      more.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a

-      county town, having a depth of only two feet.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He sharply defended his canal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he ended caustically, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s been going on now for a hundred or a

-      hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day or

-      two.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we

-      apologized..

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Later&mdash;it was a Sunday of glorious weather&mdash;we rowed in the

-      dinghy through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of

-      Maldon was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were

-      flitting about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open

-      sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being Sunday

-      and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place was

-      naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but there

-      was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to be bored, the

-      ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its church-topped hill.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Amid the waterways of the town were spacious timber-yards; and

-      eighteenth-century wharves with wharfinger&rsquo;s residence all complete, as in

-      the antique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces; plenty of

-      barges; and one steamer. We thought of Sneek, the restless and

-      indefatigable. I have not yet visited in the <i>Velsa</i> any Continental

-      port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian

-      estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was

-      at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie in

-      wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind.

-      Assuredly a Thames barge&mdash;said to be the largest craft in the world

-      sailed by a man and a boy&mdash;in full course on the Blackwater is a

-      noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of

-      enterprise in transport.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly down the river in company

-      with a fleet of fishing-smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The

-      distances seemed enormous. The faintest southeast breeze stirred the

-      atmosphere, but not the mirror of the water. All the tints of the pearl

-      were mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect anywhere that was not

-      flawlessly beautiful, enchanted with expectation of the day. The

-      unmeasured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they must have steamed two

-      thousand years ago, and herons stood sentry on them as they must have

-      stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure glittering white, a

-      sea-gull! The whole picture was ideal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At seven o&rsquo;clock we had reached Goldhanger Creek, beset with curving

-      water-weeds. And the creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the

-      mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth. A boat sailed in, scarcely

-      moving, scarcely rippling the water, and it was in charge of two old

-      white-haired fishermen. They greeted me.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is this creek long?&rdquo; I asked. A pause. They both gazed at the creek with

-      the beautiful name, into which they were sailing, as though they had never

-      seen it before.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Aye, it&rsquo;s long.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How long is it? Is it a mile?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Aye, it&rsquo;s a mile.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is there anything up there?&rdquo; Another pause. The boat was drawing away

-      from me.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Aye, there&rsquo;s oysters up there.&rdquo; The boat and the men withdrew

-      imperceptibly into the silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below,

-      at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress for another village

-      regatta; and an ineffable melancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme

-      beauty of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and this our last

-      cruise, of the season.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0320.jpg" alt="0320 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0320.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <h3>

-      THE END

-    </h3>

-    <div style="height: 6em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

-End of Project Gutenberg's From The Log of The "Velsa", by Arnold Bennett

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