as messengers of death, or, as
a traveller defines them, living funeral letters.

We noticed one of these men who had stopped in front of a house, and
my companion drew my attention to the fact that the shutters were
partly closed, and observed that there must be some one dead there. I
asked who it was. "I do not know," he replied, "but, to judge from the
shutters, it cannot be any near relative to the master of the house."
As this method of arguing seemed rather strange to me, he explained
that in Holland when any one dies in a family they shut the windows
and one, two, or three of the divisions of the folding shutters
accordingly as the relationship is near or distant. Each section of
shutter denotes a degree of relationship. For a father or mother they
close all but one, for a cousin they close one only, for a brother
two, and so on. It appears that the custom is very old, and it still
continues, because in that country no custom is discontinued for
caprice; nothing is changed unless the alteration becomes a matter of
serious importance, and unless the Hollanders have been more than
persuaded that such a change is for the better.

I should like to have seen at Delft the house where was the tavern of
the artist Steen, where he probably passed those famous debauches
which have given rise to so many questions among his biographers. But
my host told me that nothing was known about it. However, apropos of
painters, he gave me the pleasing information that I was in the part
of Holland, bounded by Delft, the Hague, the sea, the town of Alkmaar,
the Gulf of Amsterdam, and the ancient Lake of Haarlem, which might be
called the fatherland of Dutch painting, both because the greatest
painters were born there, and because it presented such singularly
picturesque effects that the artists loved and studied it devotedly. I
was therefore in the bosom of Holland, and when I left Delft, I was
going into its very heart.

Before leaving I again glanced hastily over the military arsenal,
which occupies a large building, and which originally served as a
warehouse to the East India Company. It is in communication with an
artillery workshop and a great powder-magazine outside of the town. At
Delft there still remains the great polytechnic school for engineers,
the real military academy of Holland, for from it come forth the
officers of the army that defends the country from the sea, and these
young warriors of the dykes and locks, about