boys with their
hats on, a group of women who were chattering loudly, and an old man
with a cigar in his mouth. This was the first Protestant church I had
entered, and I must confess I felt a disagreeable sensation, partly of
sadness, partly of scandal. I compared the dismantled appearance of
this church with the magnificent cathedrals of Italy and Spain, where
a soft and mysterious light shines from the walls, and where one meets
the loving looks of angels and saints through the clouds of incense
directing one's gaze toward heaven; where one sees so many pictures of
innocence that calm one, so many images of pain that help one to
suffer, that inspire one with resignation, peace, and the sweetness of
pardon; where the poor, without food or shelter, spurned from the rich
man's gate, may pray amid marble and gold, as if in a palace,--where,
surrounded by a pomp and splendor that do not humiliate, but rather
honor and comfort their misery, they are not despised;--those
cathedrals, finally, where as children we knelt beside our mothers,
and felt for the first time a sweet assurance that we should some day
live afresh in those deep azure spaces that we saw painted in the
dome suspended above us. Comparing this church with those cathedrals,
I perceived that I was more of a Catholic than I had believed myself
to be, and I felt the truth of those words of Castelar: "Well, yes, I
am a free-thinker, but if some day I were to return to a religion, I
would return to the splendid one of my fathers, and not to this
squalid and nude doctrine that saddens my eyes and my heart."

[Illustration: Interior of the Church of St. Lawrence, Rotterdam.]

From the top of the tower one gets a bird's-eye view of the whole city
of Rotterdam with its steep little red roofs, its wide canals, its
ships standing out against the houses, and all around the city a
boundless plain of vivid green traversed by canals, fringed with
trees, dotted with windmills and villages hidden in masses of verdure
and showing only the points of their steeples. At that moment the sky
was clear, and it was possible to see the gleaming waters of the Meuse
from Bois-le-Duc almost to its mouth. I distinguished the steeples of
Dordrecht, Leyden, Delft, the Hague, and Gouda; but nowhere, either
near or far off, was there a hill, a rise in the ground, or a curve to
break the straight even line of the horizon. It was like a sea, green
and motionless, on which the steeples were the