Page:A Tour Through the Batavian Republic.djvu/375

Rh of freedom. Even the birds of the air are chased away from this abode of cleanliness, lest, like the obscene harpies which Virgil tells us of, they should defile with their excrements the streets or the houses.

The virtue of cleanliness is carried in Broek to a painful extreme, I never saw a more joyless, uncomfortable, and melancholy place. The houses and gardens were fit only to amuse the infancy or the dotage of life, to gratify the vanities of childhood, or to give employment to the caprices of old age.

The inhabitants of Broek, even children, partake of the melancholy of the place. We saw a group of boys, of an age when gaiety and playfulness are qualities almost inherent in youth, soberly seated by the side of one of the canals, with countenances as contemplative and sedate as could have been expected in old men; and we passed them without exciting so much of their curiosity, as to make them turn their heads to see which way we went. If any women were at the