we were in luck to see the inside of a Dutch
home, and determined to make the most of our experience, which may not
occur again.

I never supposed it possible for the interior of a house to shine as
this does. Everything shines, even things that no one expects to present
a polished surface. For instance, does anybody (not Dutch) call upon
walls to behave as if they were mirrors? Yet as I went up the rather
steep stairs of the Villa van Buren I could see each movement I made,
each rise and fall of an eyelash repeated on a surface of brilliantly
varnished walnut.

"What wonderful wood!" I exclaimed.

"It is not real. It is paint," said pretty Lisbeth. "Do you not have
walls like this?"

"Never," I replied.

"Every one does in Holland. We admire them," explained Lilli.

"But what a lot of work to keep them so bright."

"It is only done once a day," she said apologetically. "The servant does
it when she has finished the windows."

"What--all the windows in the house--every day?"

"How else would they be clean?" asked Lisbeth, surprised.

There was no answer to this, from a Dutch point of view, so I remarked
meekly that it must take all the servant's time.

"It is what they like," said Lilli. "But we have another woman for the
floors and beating out the rugs, and doing the brass, so it is not so
much."

"Floors and rugs and brass every day, too?"

"Of course," returned both girls together, as if I had asked them about
their baths or their tooth-brushes. "_Of course._"

Lisbeth opened the door of a front room on the second floor.

"This is the spare room," said she, and advanced cautiously through the
dusk caused by the closing of the shutters. "We keep them so in the
afternoon," she explained, "because of the sunshine."

"Yes, otherwise the room would be hot, I suppose?"

"We do not mind its being hot. It is because the sun would fade the
carpet and the curtains." She threw open the blinds as she spoke, but
carefully shut both windows again.

"Oh, mayn't we have them open?" I ventured to ask. "The air is lovely."

"If you like," my cousin replied. "Only, if you do, the sand may blow
in."

"Just at the top then."

"At the top? I have not seen a window that opens at the top. We do not
have them made so."

"How funny! But I suppose there must be a reason why a whole nation
should go on having windows that won't open at the top."

"I do not know, except that we have always had them like that, so
p