f a chain
of puddles where one can launch chip boats all day long and never make
a return trip! But enough. A full recital would set all young America
rushing in a body toward the Zuider Zee.

Dutch cities seem at first sight to be a bewildering jungle of houses,
bridges, churches, and ships, sprouting into masts, steeples, and
trees. In some cities vessels are hitched like horses to their owners'
doorposts and receive their freight from the upper windows. Mothers
scream to Lodewyk and Kassy not to swing on the garden gate for fear
they may be drowned! Water roads are more frequent there than common
roads and railways; water fences in the form of lazy green ditches
enclose pleasure-ground, farm, and garden.

Sometimes fine green hedges are seen, but wooden fences such as we
have in America are rarely met with in Holland. As for stone fences, a
Dutchman would lift his hands with astonishment at the very idea. There
is no stone there, except for those great masses of rock that have been
brought from other lands to strengthen and protect the coast. All the
small stones or pebbles, if there ever were any, seem to be imprisoned
in pavements or quite melted away. Boys with strong, quick arms may
grow from pinafores to full beards without ever finding one to start the
water rings or set the rabbits flying. The water roads are nothing less
than canals intersecting the country in every direction. These are of
all sizes, from the great North Holland Ship Canal, which is the wonder
of the world, to those which a boy can leap. Water omnibuses, called
trekschuiten, *{Canal boats. Some of the first named are over thirty
feet long. They look like green houses lodged on barges and are drawn by
horses walking along the bank of the canal. The trekschuiten are divided
into two compartments, first and second class, and when not too crowded,
the passengers make themselves quite at home in them; the men smoke, the
women knit or sew, while children play upon the small outer deck. Many
of the canal boats have white, yellow, or chocolate-colored sails.
This last color is caused by a tanning preparation which is put on
to preserve them.} constantly ply up and down these roads for the
conveyance of passengers; and water drays, called pakschuyten, are used
for carrying fuel and merchandise. Instead of green country lanes,
green canals stretch from field to barn and from barn to garden; and
the farms, or polders, as they are termed, are merely gre