a few shell
gatherers, but no one else. We drove before us all the way a white
company consisting of a score of gulls, twice as many tern, two oyster
catchers and one curlew. They rose and settled, rose and settled,
always some thirty yards away, until Noordwyk was reached, when we
left them behind. Never was a Japanese screen so realised as by these
birds against the pearl grey sea and yellow sand.

Katwyk is more cheery than Noordwyk; but Noordwyk has a prettier
street--indeed, in its old part there is no prettier street in Holland
in the light of sunset. As Hastings is to Eastbourne, so is Katwyk to
Noordwyk; Scheveningen is Brighton, Yarmouth, and Blackpool in one. A
very pretty lace cap is worn at Noordwyk by villagers and visitors
alike, to hold the hair against the west wind.

From Noordwyk we walked to Noordwyk-Binnen, the real town, parent
of the seaside resort; and there, at a table at the side of the main
street, by an avenue so leafy as to exclude even glints of the sky,
we sipped something Dutch whose name I could not assimilate, and
waited for the tram for Leyden. It was the greenest tunnel I ever saw.

Chapter VII

Leyden

Steam-trams--Holland for the people--Quiet Leyden--The
Meermansburg--Leyden's museums--The call of the
open--Oliver Goldsmith--A view of the Dutch--"Polite
Learning"--"The Traveller"--James Howell--John Evelyn and the
Burgundian Jew--_Colloquia Peripatetica_--St. Peter's and
St. Pancras's--The Kermis--Drinking in Holland--Poffertjes
and Wafelen--America's master.

We travelled to Leyden from The Hague by the steam-tram, through
cheerful domestic surroundings, past little Englishy cottages and
gardens. It was Sunday morning, and the villagers of Voorburg and
Voorschoten and the other little places _en route_ were idle and gay.

In England light railways are a rarity; Holland is covered with
a net-work of them. The little trains rush along the roads all
over the country, while the roadside willows rock in their eddying
wake. To stand on the steam-tram footboard is one very good way to
see Holland. In England of course we can never have such conveniences,
England being a free country in which individual rights come first. But
Holland exists for the State, and such an idea as the depreciation or
ruin of property by running a tram line over it has never suggested
itself. It is true that when the new electric tramway between Amsterdam
and Haarlem was