a
drawbridge lay before the door. Then there were the white curtains,
the green doors, the flowers, the looking-glasses--in fact, it was a
perfect little model of a Dutch house.

The road was deserted. Before I knocked at the door I waited a little
while, looking at it and thinking. That house made me understand
Holland better than all the books I had read. It was at the same time
the expression and the reason of the domestic love, of the modest
desires, and the independent nature of the Dutch people. In our
country there is no such thing as the true house: there are only
divisions in barracks, abstract habitations, which are not ours, but
in which we live hidden, but not alone, hearing a thousand noises made
by people who are strangers to us, who disturb our sorrows with the
echo of their joys and interrupt our joys with the echo of their
sorrows. The real home is in Holland--a house of one's own, quite
separate from others, modest, circumspect, and, by reason of its
retirement, unknown to mysteries and intrigues. When the inhabitants
of the house are merry, everything is bright; when they are sad, all
is serious. In these houses, with their canals and drawbridges, every
modest citizen feels something of the solitary dignity of a feudal
lord, and might imagine himself the commander of a fortress or the
captain of a ship; and indeed, as he looks from his windows, as from
those of an anchored vessel, he sees a boundless level plain, which
inspires him with just such sentiments of freedom and solemnity as are
awakened by the sea. The trees that surround his house like a green
girdle allow only a delicate broken light to enter it; boats freighted
with merchandise glide noiselessly past his door; he does not hear the
trampling of horses or the cracking of whips, or songs or street-cries;
all the activities of the life that surrounds him are silent and gentle:
all breathes of peace and sweetness, and the steeple of the church hard
by tells the hour with a flood of harmony as full of repose and constancy
as are his affections and his work.

I knocked at the door, and the master of the house opened it. He read
the letter which I gave him, regarded me critically, and bade me
enter. It is almost always thus. At the first meeting the Dutch are
apt to be suspicious. We open our arms to any one who brings us a
letter of introduction as if he were our most intimate friend, and
very often do nothing for him afterward. The Dutch, on