es. Among the
pictures, for the most part very poor, is a dashing Carolus Duran
and a very beautiful little Daubigny.

Affiliated to the museum is one of the best collections of Delft
china in Holland--a wonderful banquet of blue. This alone makes it
necessary to visit Leeuwarden.

All about Leeuwarden the boys have jumping poles for the ditches,
and you may see dozens at a time, after school, leaping backwards and
forwards over the streams, like frogs. Children abound in Friesland:
the towns are filled with boys and girls; but one sees few babies. In
Holland the very old and the very young are alike invisible.

One of the first things that I noticed at Leeuwarden was the presence
of a new bird. Hitherto I had seen only the familiar birds that we
know at home, except for a stork here and there and more herons than
one catches sight of in England save in the neighbourhood of one of
our infrequent heronries. But at Leeuwarden you find, sweeping and
plaining over the canals, the beautiful tern, otherwise known as the
sea swallow, white and powerful and delicately graceful, and possessed
of a double portion of the melancholy of birds of the sea. Of the
bittern, which is said to boom continually over the Friesland meres,
I caught no glimpse and heard no sound.

From Leeuwarden I rode one Sunday morning by the steam-tram to
St. Jacobie Parochie, a little village in the extreme north-west,
where I proposed to take a walk upon the great dyke. It was a chilly
morning, and I was glad to be inside the compartment as we rattled
along the road. The only other occupant was a young minister in a
white tie, puffing comfortably at his cigar, which in the manner of
so many Dutchmen he seemed to eat as he smoked. For a while we were
raced--and for a few yards beaten--by two jolly boys in a barrow
drawn by a pair of gallant dogs who foamed past us _ventre a terre_
with six inches of flapping tongue.

The introduction into England of dogs as beasts of draught would
I suppose never be tolerated. A score of humanitarian societies
would spring into being to prevent it: possibly with some reason,
for one has little faith in the considerateness of the average
English costermonger or barrow-pusher. And yet the dog-workers of
the Netherlands seem to be cheerful beasts, wearing their yoke very
easily. I have never seen one, either in Holland or Belgium, obviously
distressed or badly treated. Why the English dog should so often be a
complete