ies flit about a clover blossom, baby laughter tinkled, and
tiny shrieks cut the stillness of the sleepy, summer afternoon.

It was all so dream-like to Miss Van Buren that she declared incredulity
in Holland's real existence. "There is no such country," she said, "and
worse than all, I have no motor-boat."

Nevertheless, a shape which closely resembled "Lorelei" was floating
like a white water-lily on a green calyx of canal, in the place where I
had, or dreamed that I had, left her an hour ago. And having assembled
on board that white apparition, we started, or dreamed that we started
for Leiden--a place where I hoped to score a point or two with my lady.

The boisterous wind of the early morning had dropped at noon, leaving
the day hot and unrefreshed, with no breath of air stirring. But on the
water, traveling at eight or nine miles an hour, we forgot the heavy
July heat which on shore had burned our faces. They were fanned by a
constant breeze of our own making which tossed us a bouquet of perfume
from flowery fields as we slipped by, the only sound in our ears the cry
of sea-going gulls overhead, and the delicate fluting of the water as
our bows shattered its crystals among pale, shimmery sedges and tall
reeds.

Tiny canals of irrigation wandered like azure veins through a maze of
blossoming pink and gold in the sun-bright meadows, and as far as the
most sweeping glance could reach, the horizon seemed pinned down to
earth with windmills.

Suddenly the land lay far below the level of the canal, and people
walking in the main streets of villages, behind the dykes, were visible
for us only as far as their knees. Quaint little houses had sat
themselves down close to the water's edge, as if determined to miss no
detail of canal gossip; and from their bright windows, like brilliant
eyes, they watched the water with a curious expression of
self-satisfaction and contentment on their painted, wooden faces. On
verandas, half as big as the houses themselves, the life of the family
went on. Children played, young girls wrote letters to their lovers;
mothers busily worked sewing-machines, but saw everything that passed on
the water; fathers read newspapers, and white-haired old grandpapas
nodded over long-stemmed pipes. Every garden blazed with color; and
close-planted rows of trees, with their branches cut and trained (as
Miss Van Buren said) "flat as trees for paper dolls," shaded the upper
windows of the toy mansions.