iar sauce--the whole washed down by a pint of--(No--you
can't have the brand--there were only seven bottles left when I paid my
bill)--and besides I am going back--help to ease the cares that beset a
painter's life.

But even this oasis of a garden, hemmed about as if by the froth of
Trouville and the suds of Cabourg; through which floats the gay life
of Paris resplendent in toilets never excelled or _exceeded_
anywhere--cannot keep me from Holland very long. And it is a pity too,
for of late years I have been looked upon as a harmless fixture at the
Inn--so much so that men and women pass and repass my easel, or
look over my shoulder while I work without a break in their
confidences--quite as if I was a deaf, dumb, and blind waiter, or
twin-brother to old Coco the cockatoo, who has surveyed the same scene
from his perch near the roof for the past thirty years.

None of these unconscious ear-droppings am I going to
betray--delightful, startling--_improper_, if you must have it--as some
of them were. Not the most interesting, at all events, for I promised
her I wouldn't--but there is no question as to the diversion obtained by
keeping the latch-string of your ears on the outside.

None of all this ever drips into my auricles in Holland. A country so
small that they build dikes to keep the inhabitants from being spilt
off the edge, is hardly the place for a scandal--certainly not in stolid
Dordrecht or in that fly-speck of a Papendrecht, whose dormer windows
peer over the edge of the dike as if in mortal fear of another
inundation. And yet, small as it is, it is still big enough for me to
approach it--the fly-speck, of course--by half a dozen different routes.
I can come by boat from Rotterdam. Fop Smit owns and runs it--(no kin of
mine, more's the pity)--or by train from Amsterdam; or by carriage from
any number of 'dams, 'drechts, and 'bergs. Or I can tramp it on foot, or
be wheeled in on a dog-wagon. I have tried them all, and know. Being now
a staid old painter and past such foolishness, I take the train.

Toot! Toot!--and I am out on the platform, through the door of the
station and aboard the one-horse tram that wiggles and swings over the
cobble-scoured streets of Dordrecht, and so on to the Bellevue.

Why I stop at the Bellevue (apart from it being one of my Inns) is that
from its windows I cannot only watch the life of the tawny-colored,
boat-crowded Maas, but see every curl of smoke that mounts from the
chi