gardening new and old--A horticultural pilgrimage--The Haarlem
dunes--Gardens without secrets--Zaandvoort--_Through
Noord-Holland_ and its charms--The church of
St. Bavo--Whitewash _v_. Mystery--The true father of the
Reformation--Printing paves the way--The Hout--Laocooen and his
sons--The siege of Haarlem--Dutch fortitude--The real Dutch
courage--The implacable Alva--Broken promises--A tonic for
Philip--The women of Haarlem--A pledge to mothers--The great
organ--Three curious inhabitants--The Teyler Museum--Frans
Hals--A king of abundance--Regent pieces--The secondary
pictures in the Museum--Dirck Hals--Van der Helst--Adrian
Brouwer--Nicolas Berchem--Ruisdael--The lost mastery--Echoes
of the past.

Haarlem being the capital of the tulip country, the time to visit
it is the spring. To travel from Leyden to Haarlem by rail in April
is to pass through floods of colour, reaching their finest quality
about Hillegom. The beds are too formal, too exactly parallel, to be
beautiful, except as sheets of scarlet or yellow; for careless beauty
one must look to the heaps of blossoms piled up in the corners (later
to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful,
and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the
flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts.

Tulip Sunday, which represents the height of the season (corresponding
to Chestnut Sunday at Bushey Park) is about the third Sunday in
April. One should be in Holland then. It is no country for hot weather:
it has no shade, the trains become unbearable, and the canals are
very unpleasant. But in spring it is always fresh.

Tulip cultivation is now a steady humdrum business, very different
from the early days of the fashion for the flower, in the seventeenth
century, when speculators lost their heads over bulbs as thoroughly as
over South-Sea stock in the great Bubble period. Thousands of florins
were given for a single bulb. The bulb, however, did not always change
hands, often serving merely as a gambling basis; it even may not have
existed at all. Among genuine connoisseurs genuine sales would of
course be made, and it is recorded that a "Semper Augustus" bulb was
once bought for 13,000 florins. At last the Government interfered;
gambling was put down; and "Semper Augustus" fell to fifty florins.

It was to Haarlem, it will be remembered, that the fair Frisian
tr