her than Armand-Sylvestrian,
not vicious but merely vulgar.

Chapter XVIII

Arnheim to Bergen-op-Zoom

Arnheim the Joyous--A wood walk--Tesselschade Visscher
and the Chambers of Rhetoric--Epigrams--Poet friends--The
nightingale--An Arnheim adventure--Ten years at one book--Dutch
and Latin--Dutch and French--A French story--Dutch
and English--_The English Schole-Master_--Master
and scholar--A nervous catechism--Avoiding the
birch--A riot of courtesy--A bill of lading--Dutch
proverbs--The Rhine and its mouths--Nymwegen--Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu again--Painted shutters--The
Valkhof--Hertogenbosch--Brothers at Bommel--The hero of
Breda--Two beautiful tombs--Bergen-op-Zoom--Messrs. Grimston
and Red-head--Tholen--The Dutch feminine countenance.

At Arnheim we come to a totally new Holland. The Maliebaan and the
park at Utrecht, with their spacious residences, had prepared us a
little for Arnheim's wooded retirement; but not completely. Rotterdam
is given to shipping; The Hague makes laws and fashions; Leyden
and Utrecht teach; Amsterdam makes money. It is at Arnheim that the
retired merchant and the returned colonist set up their home. It is
the richest residential city in the country. Arnheim the Joyous was
its old name. Arnheim the Comfortable it might now be styled.

It is the least Dutch of Dutch towns: the Rhine brings a bosky beauty
to it, German in character and untamed by Dutch restraining hands. The
Dutch Switzerland the country hereabout is called. Arnheim recalls
Richmond too, for it has a Richmond Hill--a terrace-road above a
shaggy precipice overlooking the river.

I walked in the early morning to Klarenbeck, up and down in a vast
wood, and at a point of vantage called the Steenen Tafel looked down
on the Rhine valley. Nothing could be less like the Holland of the
earlier days of my wanderings--nothing, that is, that was around me,
but with the farther bank of the river the flatness instantly begins
and continues as far as one can see in the north.

It was a very beautiful morning in May, and as I rested now and
then among the resinous pines I was conscious of being traitorous to
England in wandering here at all. No one ought to be out of England
in April and May. At one point I met a squirrel--just such a nimble
short-tempered squirrel as those which scold and hide in the top
branches of the fir trees near my own home in Kent--and my sense of
guilt