A Year in Europe

As we had reminded ourselves when visiting the royal residences that the young and beloved Queen Wilhelmina is the only Presbyterian Queen in the world, so we reminded ourselves when visiting the Chambers of the States General that Holland is the only country in the world which has the good fortune to have a Presbyterian preacher for its Prime Minister. Of course, other countries have Presbyterian laymen for prime ministers, Mr. Balfour of Great Britain, for example, but Holland is the only one that has placed the helm of the state in the hands of a preacher. His name is the Rev. Dr. Abraham Kuyper, and he is one of the ablest and most versatile men in the world. His recent book on The Holy Spirit is the greatest monograph on that subject that has appeared since the work of John Owen. He has rendered a great service to the cause of vital religion in checking the rationalistic views of such men as Professor Kuenen, and strongly reasserting the evangelical doctrines to which Holland has been so deeply indebted in the past for the heroic character of her people, and the glorious position she holds in the history of human freedom. Though the Chambers were not in session when we visited the Binnenhof, we took special pleasure in having even the chair of Dr. Kuyper pointed out to us.

By the way, the cathedrals and other great churches of Holland erected before the Reformation strikingly illustrate how unfit such structures are for Christian worship, according to the simple New Testament model, especially for preaching the gospel. They are adapted only to the spectacular ceremonies of the Roman Catholics and other ritualists. Therefore, any Protestant community which has had the misfortune to inherit a cathedral from the unreformed period has an elephant on its hands. The Dutch people, being mostly Presbyterians, have had this experience, and, finding themselves unable to make the most effective use of these great buildings erected for Romish rites, have allowed them to assume a very unattractive, dreary and barn-like appearance on the inside.

The question may shock our æsthetic friends, but, notwithstanding the incalculable loss to art, would it not have been better for the world if the Protestant countries at the time of the Reformation had macadamized all their cathedrals? And if any one hesitates to answer in the affirmative, let him consider carefully the connection between the modes of worship, and the character of the worshipper, and let him explain to himself clearly why it is that the countries which have adopted the Protestant model, with its steady appeal to the reason, and its earnest insistence upon intelligent apprehension of the truth, are the cleanest, safest, thriftiest and strongest countries in the world, while those which have adopted the Romish model, with its constant appeal to the æsthetic sensibilities, and its millinery, music, processions, incense, and "vain repetitions," are precisely the countries which have suffered the greatest material and moral deterioration, and which were not long ago contemptuously characterized by Lord Salisbury, the late Premier of Great Britain, as "decaying nations."

CHAPTER XXV.

But one does not go far in Leyden without being reminded of the terrible siege to which it was subjected by the Spaniards in 1574. One such reminder is the bronze statue of the gallant Mayor Van der Werf, who defended the city in that siege and would listen to no suggestion of surrender. Another is an inscription on the front of the Stadhuis, which, translated, reads: "When the black famine had brought to the death nearly six thousand persons, then God the Lord repented and gave us bread again as much as we could wish"; and which in the original Dutch is an ingenious chronogram, the capital letters as Roman numerals giving the date, and the one hundred and thirty-one letters used in the original indicating the number of days during which the siege lasted. But, after a short and partial relief, the siege was continued in the form of a blockade for many dreadful months. William of Orange finally cut the dykes and flooded the country, and relieved the famished city by ships.

It was a satisfaction to see it, though there is little to see; this University, like most of those on the continent, having very indifferent buildings and appointments. The men who sometimes "kick" in American colleges and seminaries because the class-rooms and dormitories do not suit them, to say nothing of their board, would get a superabundance of that sort of exercise if they had to attend the average Dutch or German university. In fact, it has been intimated at times that there are men in American colleges and seminaries who belong to that class of people of whom it was suggested that they would grumble even after getting to heaven on the ground that their haloes didn't fit. Fortunately, however, these are very few, the great majority of our American students being not spoiled and fussy children, but manly, sensible, hard working, plain living, high thinking men.

Before leaving Leyden we made a point of visiting the house in which the Rev. John Robinson lived. He was the leader of the first Puritans who were banished from England, and who, like the adherents of every other persecuted faith, found toleration and liberty in Calvinistic Holland. A bronze tablet affixed to the wall of the church on the opposite side of the street contains a bas-relief of the Mayflower, and states that it was at Mr. Robinson's prompting that the Pilgrim Fathers went forth to settle New England in 1620.

As we passed with our guide through what looked like an open-air beef market, he surprised us not a little by telling us that what the people were buying there was not beef, but horse flesh, which is much cheaper, adding that the worn-out dray horses and car horses of the English cities were regularly bought and shipped to Holland to be sold to the poor instead of beef. No doubt the people of Leyden became accustomed to much worse fare than that when, during the great siege of 1574, the Spaniards were trying to starve them into resubmission to Roman Catholicism. But those conditions no longer exist, and the idea of eating horse flesh as a regular thing is not one which commends itself to our feelings.

This place, seventeen miles from Leyden, also had experience of the tender mercies of the papal soldiery when, in 1573, after a gallant defence of seven months, it fell into the hands of the Spaniards, and the entire garrison, the Protestant ministers of the gospel, and two thousand of the townspeople were executed. Haarlem is now, and has been for two hundred and fifty years, famous for its horticulture. It supplies bulbs to every part of the world, and in the spring the nurseries around the city are ablaze with the brilliant blooms of the tulips, hyacinths, crocuses and lilies, whole fields of them in every variety of color, like vast natural flags of the brightest hues, lying on the flat surface of the country, and the whole atmosphere is impregnated with their delicious fragrance.

Two centuries and a half ago, at the time of the "Tulip Mania," there was as wild speculation in bulbs as there has ever been in our day in stocks. Enormous prices were paid for the rarer bulbs. For instance, a single bulb of the species called "Semper Augustus" was sold for five thousand two hundred dollars. This statement will not seem incredible to any of my readers who have had bitter experience with the fictitious values created by the "booms" which cursed and crippled so many of our Southern communities a few years ago. The tulip craze in Holland had the same history: the mania subsided, the prices fell, many of the speculators were ruined, and before long a "Semper Augustus" could be bought for twenty dollars. Even that will seem to most people a pretty high price for a single tulip bulb.

We did not stop at Haarlem, as it was not the right season for the gorgeous display of flowers above referred to, that is, the latter part of April and the beginning of May, but pushed on to Amsterdam, which is only ten miles away. If the reader has taken account of the distances between these populous cities as they have been successively mentioned, and has observed how short they are, he will have received a very strong impression of the smallness of the country.

Amsterdam, the largest city in Holland, with a population of more than half a million, is built upon nearly a hundred islands, separated from one another by a network of canals and connected by means of some three hundred bridges, and is, therefore, sometimes spoken of as "a vulgar Venice," but, with its prodigious vitality, its crowded streets, its busy waters, and its financial eminence, it must be far more like the Venice which was Queen of the Adriatic some centuries ago than the stagnant and melancholy town which bears that name to-day.

The water in the canals is about three feet deep, and below this is a layer of mud of the same thickness. It is said that, in order to prevent malarial exhalations, the water is constantly renewed from an arm of the North Sea Canal and the mud removed by dredging. I hope this process is effective, but there were unmistakable exhalations from the canals when we were there. Whether they were malarial or not I cannot say, but certainly they were unfragrant to a degree. Still, the evil smells of Amsterdam are not to be named in number and vigor with those of Venice.

As in Venice, so here, all the houses are built on piles which are driven fifteen or twenty feet through the loose sand near the surface into the firmer layers below. Hence the jest of Erasmus, that he knew a city whose inhabitants dwelt on the tops of trees like rooks. They are not so secure on their perch, however, as the rooks. For, although the preparations underground are often more costly than the buildings afterwards erected above, yet, such is the difficulty of securing a firm foundation, and such the ravages of the wood worm among the fir-tree piles after they are driven into the sand and built upon, that many of the brick houses which were once erect are now considerably out of the perpendicular, and lean backwards or forwards or sideways, according as the piles have given way at one place or another. In 1822 thirty-four hundred tons of grain were stored in a grain magazine originally built for the East India Company, and, the piles being unable to sustain the weight, the building literally sank down into the mud.

Besides its importance as a mart for the tobacco, sugar, rice, spices, and other produce of the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, West Indies and South America (which, by the way, have a population of thirty-five million, that is, seven times as many as the little mother country), Amsterdam has a number of important industrial establishments, such as ship-yards, sugar and camphor refineries, cobalt-blue and candle factories, machine shops, breweries, and especially diamond-polishing mills, of which last there are no less than seventy, employing in all about ten thousand men. We visited one of these mills and watched the process for a few minutes.

The art of polishing diamonds was introduced here in the sixteenth century by Portuguese Jews, who, driven from their former homes by papal persecution, found in Protestant Holland an asylum, and, like the oppressed adherents of other creeds, secured the full religious toleration which they craved. They have ever since constituted an important part of the population of Amsterdam, and now number about thirty-five thousand. One of the interesting episodes of our visit was a drive through the poorer Jewish Quarter, with its swarms of untidy men, women and children. In this quarter and of this stock Spinoza, the philosopher, was born; and in this quarter, though not of this stock, Rembrandt, the painter, lived for fifteen years, in a house marked by a tablet, which those who are specially interested in art always wish to see.

Utrecht, twenty-two miles from Amsterdam, is an attractive city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. It interested us chiefly as the centre of the Jansenists, the redoubtable Roman Catholic adversaries of the Jesuits, and as the peaceful home of ex-President Kruger since his withdrawal from the stormy experiences of his life in South Africa. This venerable man, so remarkable on account of his public career, is of special interest to any one connected with Union Seminary in Virginia, because it was under the ministry of a former student of our Seminary, the late Dr. Daniel Lindley, who went as a missionary to South Africa more than sixty years ago, that Mr. Kruger was brought into the church. He lives in great comfort on the famous Malieban, which, with its triple row of lime trees, is one of the loveliest residential districts in Europe.

It seems odd that in a country where there is so much water, there should be so little that is fit to drink, and that in a country where land is so valuable the people should use any part of it for fuel, and yet, not only does one constantly see dog-carts containing barrels of fresh water and loads of peat passing hither and thither in the towns, but at cellar doors in the side streets sign-boards are seen announcing "water and fire to sell," and at these places the poorer classes buy the boiling water or red-hot turf that they need to make their tea or coffee. Foot-warmers are very generally used by the Dutch women, and in some of the churches we saw immense numbers of these little fireboxes.

This reminds me to say, for the benefit of any of my readers who may be planning a trip to Europe, that two things are more conducive to comfort and health than a good hot-water bottle when one is travelling in Northern or Central Europe, for these lands are much colder than ours in spring, summer and autumn, and arrangements for heating the hotels either do not exist or are utterly ineffective. American tourists who do not observe this precaution are likely to need physic, and, by the way, the universal sign for drug stores in Holland is not the mortar and pestle, but "the gaper," that is, a painted Turk's head showing his tongue.

In Amsterdam and other Dutch cities many of the houses, which are made of brick with light colored painting and have a very substantial and neat appearance, are narrow and high, standing with ornamented gable ends to the street, and have beams projecting from the gables with fixtures for hoisting goods to the top stories, which are used for store-rooms. These are not business houses, but dwelling houses of people well to do, and the windows and woodwork from top to bottom are scrupulously clean and bright.

Broeck, in the north of Holland, is said to be the original Spotless Town. We did not visit this place, but it is thus described by a writer in Public Opinion who has done so:

"The palings of the fences of Broeck are sky-blue. The streets are paved with shining bricks of many colors. The houses are rose-colored, black, gray, purple, light blue or pale green. The doors are painted and gilded. For hours you may not see a soul in the streets or at the windows. The streets and houses, bridges, windows and barns show a neatness and a brilliancy that are absolutely painful.

"At every step a new effect is disclosed, a new scene is beheld, as if painted upon the drop-curtain of a stage. Everything is minute, compact, painted, spotless and clean. In the houses of Broeck for cleaning purposes you will find big brooms, little brooms, tooth-brushes, aqua fortis, whiting for the window panes, rouge for the forks and spoons, coal dust for the copper, emery for the iron utensils, brick powder for the floors, and even small splinters of wood with which to pick out the tiny bits of straw in the cracks between the bricks. Here are some of the rules of this wonderful town:

"Citizens must leave their shoes at the door when entering a house.

"Before or after sunset no one is allowed to smoke excepting with a pipe having a cover, so that the ashes will not be scattered upon the street.

"Any one crossing the village on horseback must get out of the saddle and lead the horse.

"A cuspidor shall be kept by the front door of each house.

"It is forbidden to cross the village in a carriage, or to drive animals through the streets."

Thus, it appears that "Spotless Town" is not merely an ideal existing in the imagination of the man who writes the very clever verses placarded in our street-cars and elsewhere in praise of the cleansing properties of Sapolio, but a reality; and there are numerous places in Holland which in point of cleanliness would put to shame any of our American towns.

Some one has said that the Dutch love of cleanliness amounts almost to a monomania, and that the washing, scrubbing and polishing to which every house is subjected once every week is rather subversive of comfort. And it would appear from the regulations above cited that the matter is sometimes pushed to extremes. But my experience as a traveller in some parts of my own country, as well as in some parts of other lands, has made me very tolerant of such a mania as that, and, when amid the filth of Venice or Naples, for instance, my mind has reverted to these clean Dutch towns, it has caused me to sigh—"O si sic omnes!"

I cannot resist the temptation to append to these letters about little, quaint, clean, energetic, heroic, learned, unpretentious Holland some extracts from an article of Mr. Edward Bok's which I have read since my return to America. He refers to the fact that twenty thousand more American travellers are said to have visited the Netherlands during the past summer than in any previous year, and to the fact that there is a rapidly increasing demand for books on the history of the Dutch people, as shown by the reports of the librarians in American towns, and he regards these as specimens of a group of facts which, taken together, indicate clearly that the reading world of America is beginning to appreciate the real extent of the strong Dutch influences which underlie American institutions and have shaped American life. He says that for years we have written in our histories and taught in our schools that this nation is a transplanted England; that the institutions which have made this country distinctively great were derived from England. But he denies that England is entitled to this honor, and declares that the true mother land of America is not England, but Holland:

"Take, for instance, what may be truly designated as the four vital institutions upon which America not only rests, but which have caused it to be regarded as the most distinctive nation in the world. I mean our public-school system of free education; our freedom of religious worship; our freedom of the press; and our freedom of suffrage as represented by the secret ballot. Not one of these came from England, since not one of them existed there when they were established in America; in fact, only one of them existed in England earlier than fifty years after they existed in America, and the other three did not exist in England until nearly one hundred years after their establishment in America. Each and all of these four institutions came to America directly from Holland. Take the two documents upon which the whole fabric of the establishment and maintenance of America rests—the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution of the United States—and one, the Declaration, is based almost entirely upon the Declaration of Independence of the United Republic of the Netherlands; while all through the Constitution its salient points are based upon, and some literally copied from, the Dutch Constitution. So strong is this Netherland influence upon our American form of government that the Senate of the United States, as a body, derives most of the peculiarities of its organization from the Netherlands States General, a similar body, and its predecessor by nearly a century of years, while even in the American flag we find the colors and the five-pointed star chosen from the Dutch.

"The common modern practice of the State allowing a prisoner the free services of a lawyer for his defence, and the office of a district attorney for each county, are so familiar to us that we regard them as American inventions. Both institutions have been credited to England, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is impossible to find in England even to-day any official corresponding to our district attorney. Both of these institutions existed in Holland three centuries before they were brought to America.

"The equal distribution of property among the children of a person dying intestate—that is, without a will—was brought to America direct from Holland by the Puritans. It never existed in England.

"The record of all deeds and mortgages in a public office, a custom which affects every man and woman who owns or buys property, came to America direct from Holland. It never came from England, since it does not exist there even at the present day.

"The township system, by which each town has local self-government, with its natural sequence of local self-government in county and State, came from Holland.

"The practice of making prisoners work, and turning prisons into workhouses, and, in fact, our whole modern American management of free prisons which has caused the admiration of the entire world, was brought from Holland to America by William Penn.

"Group these astonishing facts together, if you will, and see their tremendous import: The Federal Constitution; the Declaration of Independence; the whole organization of the Senate; our State Constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town, county and State systems of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages; the giving of every criminal a just chance for his life; a public prosecutor of crime in every county; our free prison workhouse system—to say nothing of kindred important and vital elements in our national life. When each and all of these can be traced directly to one nation, or to the influence of that nation, and that nation not England, is it any wonder, asks one enlightened historian, that some modern scholars, who, looking beneath the mere surface resemblance of language, seek an explanation of the manifest difference between the people of England and the people of the United States assumed by them to be of the same blood, and influenced by the same (?) institutions?

"Nor is it strange that so strong a Dutch influence should have entered into the establishment and making of America, when one considers the immense debt which the world owes to Holland. For it may be said without fear of contradiction that in nearly every art which uplifts and adorns human life, in nearly every aspect of human endeavor, Holland has not only added to the moral resources of mankind and contributed more to the fabric of civilization, but has also actually led the way. It was the first nation to master the soil and teach agriculture to the world. It has taught the world the art of gardening. It taught commerce and merchandise to the entire world when it ranked as the only great commercial nation on the globe. It taught the broadest lines of finance to the world by the establishment, in 1609, of its great Bank of Amsterdam, with one hundred and eighty millions of dollars deposits, preceding the establishment of the Bank of England by nearly one hundred years. The founding of its great University of Leyden, in 1575, marked an epoch in the world's history of education, and made the Netherlands the centre of learning of Europe. Here was founded international law through Grotius, one of Holland's greatest sons. Here Boerhaave, a Dutchman, revolutionized medicine by his wonderful discoveries until Holland's medical school became the seat of authority for all Europe. From this centre, too, came that great lesson in the publishing of books in the shape of the famous Elzevir books. It was the first nation to place the reader and the spelling-book in the hands of the child, irrespective of station or means. As musicians, for nearly two hundred years the Netherlands stood supreme, and furnished all the courts of Europe with vocal and instrumental music. It was the Dutch who founded, in Naples, the first musical conservatory in the world, and another in Venice, and it was to their influence and example that the renowned school of Rome owed its existence.

"The starting of all these masterful influences would alone make a nation great. But these were only a part of Holland's wonderful contributions to the world's enlightenment. It went on and introduced to the world the manufacture of woollen cloth that marked an epoch in history, and followed this up by developing the manufacture of silk, linen, tapestry and lace until it made its city of Flanders the manufacturing centre of the world. It devised and presented through the Van Eyck brothers the wonderful discovery of oil painting, and revolutionized the world of art, and gave, in the person of one of these brothers, Jan Van Eyck, the originator of the painted portrait. Then came the invention of wood-engraving by a Dutchman, followed quickly by the printing of books from blocks; the substitution of movable type for the solid block of wood, and we have the printing-press—the invention of which Germany may never concede to Holland, and yet the germ of which lay in the block books to which Holland lays unquestioned claim. But Holland need never squabble over a single invention. A nation that, in addition to what has been cited above, has likewise invented the telescope, the microscope, the thermometer, the method of measuring degrees of latitude and longitude, the pendulum clock, thereby putting before the world the beginning of anything which we can call accuracy in time, and discovered the capillary circulation of the blood, need not stop to split straws.

There is a wonderful charm in reading the history of a people who have done so much toward the enlightenment of the world, and not alone in one field of thought or activity, but in every field of human endeavor. The people of no nation make so bold and strong an impression on the mind as one after another of their achievements pass before one, and especially when it is considered that all these contributions to humankind were done with one hand while the other was busy in saving every foot of land from the rushing waters. But the people always remained cool, balanced and solid. That same patient but deep, perfervid spirit which built the dykes and saved the land with one hand, and opened those same dykes, built by the very life-blood of the people, with the other, and flooded the land against encroaching enemies—that same spirit built up a nation unrivalled in history as a financial, commercial, maritime, art, learning, medical and political centre, from which have radiated the strongest influences for the upbuilding of great empires—not only in the new Western world of America, but also in the far East of the Indies, and in the strong colonial establishment of South Africa. Her glory may be of the past, but he is indeed a rash prophet who would predict the future of any nation, however small, on the face of the globe of to-day. Of some things the American traveller is to-day constantly convinced: that there is less intellectual veneer in Holland than in any other country in Europe; that there is more solid and abiding culture of the very highest kind, and that the modern Dutch family represents a repose of mind, a simplicity of living, and a contented happiness with life in general that we, as a nation, might well envy."

CHAPTER XXVI.

The Cologne Cathedral is the finest Gothic structure in the world. We had a perfect view of the majestic exterior from the windows of our hotel, but, of course, devoted most of our time to the still more impressive interior. It is no part of my purpose to descant upon these things which are described in all the books of travel. The city possesses other objects of interest besides its matchless cathedral, and some of them we visited, in spite of the weather. It was cold and wet, and we did not prolong our stay. But no conditions of weather could have deterred us from taking the steamer for our trip up the Rhine, rather than the railroad. It was late in the season. The summer tourists had long since returned to their homes in England and America. We had the boat pretty much to ourselves. We could hardly have fallen upon a worse day for the first half of our trip. It was not only cold, but foggy, and we could get only tantalizing glimpses of the shores now and then when the mist thinned a little. So it continued nearly all the way to Coblentz, where we landed and spent the night. We comforted ourselves, however, with the reflection that the finest scenery was farther up, and with the hope that we should have a better day for that part of the trip. And we had. The mist was rolling away rapidly when we rose next morning, and it soon disappeared, leaving us a fine autumn day. After listening to the exhilarating music of a military band which was serenading a young general near our hotel and after taking a look at the noble statue of William I., and at the massive fortifications of Ehrenbreitstein, the German Gibraltar, on the other side of the river, we took the boat in better spirits, addressed ourselves with more zest than before to the volume of Legends of the Rhine, and thus began a delightful and memorable day.

The chief advantage of making this celebrated trip at this season is that one thus gets the opportunity to see the vintage of the Rhine Valley as it can be seen at no other season.

Though, as a matter of fact, I believe that most of the Rhine grapes that we saw were white. The steep slopes of the hills among which the great river winds are covered with vineyards, the vines in rows as regular as ranks of Indian corn, and laden with millions of luscious bunches. The vintagers, men, women and children, in picturesque costumes and with huge baskets on their backs, were busy everywhere stripping the fruit from the yellow vines. The soil is kept in place by stone terraces. Above the line of the vineyards jut out the huge rocks of the mountains, their gray bastions alternating with forests robed in green, brown, red and yellow, and standing out boldly against the pure blue sky.

It is only by strong self-restraint that I can pass without special notice such a rock as Rhinestein, such a town as Bingen, and such a monument as that to "Germania" on the Niederwald, but it must be done.

November 15, 1902.

Wiesbaden, the most charming of German watering-places, is a clean and handsome city, with broad and well paved streets, many attractive shops and pleasant residences, excellent hotels, extensive and lovely parks, a sumptuous opera house, a less costly but very spacious music hall (where, by the way, we had the pleasure of hearing Frau Shuman-Heink sing), and a few large and costly churches, but with no adequate arrangements, so far as I could see, for the churching of its large population. The place owes its importance primarily to the Boiling Salt Springs, which here gush from the earth, and which have made this the great resort for rheumatics and the victims of various other ailments. It is also the home of one of the most celebrated oculists in Europe, whose patients come to him from every part of the world. The chief attraction for those who are fond of outdoor life is the glorious forests which stretch from Wiesbaden back through the valleys and over the Taunus Mountains. One of our young people has just been writing to the folks at home about an eighteen-mile walk through these woods, guided only by the blazed trees, and speaks with pardonable enthusiasm of "the blue-gray trunks outlined against the terra cotta carpet of fallen leaves, the sunlight glancing through the trees, and the gently waving branches against the azure sky. There is no undergrowth as in our forests at home, but there are here and there gray rocks, large and small, covered with fresh green moss, or with gray, pink and yellow lichen. There were rustic benches all along, but the forest was quite deserted except for an occasional woodman with a fire and piles of neatly chopped wood, or some little boys drawing carts filled with bundles of sticks for winter use."

November 20, 1902.

We spent three weeks at wholesome Wiesbaden, counting a day that we gave to Mayence, on the other side of the Rhine, for the purpose of seeing the memorials of Gutenberg, the inventor of printing. Then we took the train for Worms. The chief "lion" here is, of course, the magnificent Luther monument, a thing which no visitor to this part of the world should fail to see. Recrossing the Rhine, we ran up to Heidelberg, and devoted a day to the fine old castle and the famous university—a stinging cold day it was, too. Nor did winter relax his grip at Strasburg, for there we had snow. One of the youngsters celebrated his birthday there by watching the noon performances of the world-renowned clock in the old Cathedral, our whole party going with him, the adults watching the wonderful mechanism with scarcely less interest than the children. The striking of that clock and the movements of its various figures and fixtures at twelve o'clock every day invariably draws a large crowd of people. We saw the storks' nests on the chimneys, too, but of course the storks themselves were down in the warm sunshine of Africa at that season.

November 23, 1902.

Switzerland caps the climax of scenic interest in Europe—lakes, waterfalls, mountains, glaciers—language and pictures are alike unavailing to convey an adequate impression of this sublime scenery. My first views of it were in midsummer. On the 31st of July, 1896, at the top of the Wengern Alp, seven thousand feet above the sea, reached by rail all the way, my travelling companions and I had coasted on sleds over the snow like boys, wearing our heavy overcoats the while. Above us rose the Jungfrau, six thousand feet higher, piercing the clouds. As we watched, the clouds parted, and the white Jungfrau, wearing the dazzling Silberhorn on her bosom, burst upon our view. Never shall we see anything more beautiful till our eyes rest upon the pinnacles of the celestial city. We were standing at the time on the Eiger Glacier, an immense mass of pale green ice covered with a snowy crust. Longfellow somewhere (in "Hyperion," I think) likens the shape of one of the glaciers to a glove, lying with the palm downwards. "It is a gauntlet of ice, which centuries ago Winter, the king of these mountains, threw down in defiance to the Sun, and year by year the Sun strives in vain to lift it from the ground on the point of his glittering spear." Aye, in vain. Winter is king. But the Sun now and then wrenches somewhat from his grasp. And even while we gazed speechless at the unearthly splendor of the Jungfrau and the Silberhorn we heard an avalanche fall with a crash like the end of the world. That night we sat before a roaring fire and wrote home about it.

That was my experience in midsummer. Now we were to see not only the great mountain tops, but the whole country, in the undisputed grasp of Winter. When we reached Lucerne, not only the high Alps, but all the mountains and hills, far as the eye could reach, were covered with snow. When we visited Thorwaldsen's celebrated Lion of Lucerne we found workmen with scaffolding and ladders against the cliff, carefully boxing it in with boards to prevent it from being injured by the freezing of water trickling down upon it during the winter now at hand. But we were in time, just in time, to see it, and we all agreed that few monuments in Europe are so impressive. The great figure, twenty-eight feet in length, I believe, carved in the living rock, represents the king of beasts lying slain, pierced by an arrow, with broken spear and shield beneath, and over that shield, which bears the lilies of France, the huge paws are thrown, as if guarding it still in death. It commemorates the devotion of the Swiss guard who, in 1792, were appointed to keep the palace at Versailles, and receiving no orders to retire, preferred to die at their post rather than betray their trust. The glacier gardens near by, with their ingenious and realistic illustration of the action of the falling water in grinding the boulders in the glacier pots, interested us greatly. We paid some attention to the shops also, and the old cathedral, and the quaint old bridges. But we did not tarry long at Lucerne. It was too cold. We took the steamer down the lake, though, cold as it was, for we had no idea of missing entirely the magnificent scenery which gives this body of water easy preëminence among the Swiss lakes. We spent the night, bitter cold, at Fluelen, then took the fastest train we could get for Milan, only to meet there another disappointment in the matter of the weather.

November 26, 1902.

We had seen the ice floating in great blocks down the Neckar at Heidelberg, and had felt the stinging winds on the hills above the old castle; we had stamped our feet on the stone floors of the cathedral at Strasburg to renew the circulation in our benumbed extremities while waiting for the crowing of the rooster and the marching of the puppets, and the striking of the bells on the famous clock; we had seen vast fields of snow covering the Alps in every direction as we passed through Switzerland, and had shivered in the searching cold as we steamed down Lake Lucerne, unable to tear ourselves from the glorious beauty that lay open to our view on every hand from the steamer's decks; we had caught the wintry glitter of gigantic icicles against the cliffs on either side as our train climbed the wild St. Gothard pass—and, in short, we had had a surfeit of cold weather, and for days and weeks we had been sighing for Sunny Italy. Imagine our disappointment, then, when we emerged from the Alps and entered the land of balmy climate and blue skies (as most of us had always ignorantly thought it to be even in winter) to find the whole world still white around us, to run along the side of Lake Lugano and Lake Como in a whirling snow-storm, and to arrive at Milan in a fog so thick that it looked like it could be cut into blocks, so opaque that at times we could not see the mighty Cathedral from our hotel, though but little more than a block away, and so persistent that it did not lift during the whole of our stay. Add to these conditions the slush in the streets and the penetrating quality of the damp, cold air, and our desire to push on at once to the farther south in search of more genial skies will not seem unnatural. And we might have done so, notwithstanding the attraction of the Cathedral and of Leonardo's picture of the "Last Supper" (which, however, we expected to see on our return to Northern Italy in the spring), had it not been for our anxiety to get a sight of the Iron Crown of Lombardy at Monza, a few miles north of Milan. And see it we did, in spite of the weather, as I shall tell you more fully in a later letter. We ate our Thanksgiving dinner at Milan, visited again and again the white marble Cathedral, whose delicate stone lace work was touched into marvellous and weird beauty by the snow clinging to its pinnacles and projections and statues, saw Leonardo's picture, and the other principal sights, and then took the train for Venice.

CHAPTER XXVII.