Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 127.djvu/624

612 In the mean time, as we said, our friend is smoking like a chimney, and, early as it is, applying himself from time to time to the flask of schiedam he produces from his pocket. Those worthy Netherlanders live by gin and tobacco; the heavy clouds breaking up on the horizon ahead on your starboard bow came from the smoke of the numerous distilleries of the flourishing town of Schiedam. And we can hardly conceive the most fanatical of temperance lecturers having the hardihood to persist in a professional tour of the United Provinces, after experiencing the depressing effects of the rawness of their mornings and evenings. Like Mynheer Van Dunk of the national ballad, the Dutchmen, though great drinkers, are no drunkards, chiefly for the reason that in their peculiar climate their sluggish constitutions take a deal of stimulating. Considerably beyond the point where the average Englishman begins to feel decidedly the worse for liquor, the Dutchman is only imbibing medicinally, and he swallows like the sand-beds of his Haarlem tulip-gardens. If he took the pledge, he would have to change his habits and renounce all his favourite enjoyments. For the best part of the year, the whole of his country is enveloped in fogs or dense driving rain. When it does clear up, away from the sand-beds on the coast everything is left soaking; pools are forming in the bottom of the polders, the canals are brimming over, and there is a constant plash of water in course of falling from the pumps. The country people are out in steaming mists, on meadows divided by broad water-ditches. When they go to market, they travel on the canal by trekschuit or jog along on a causeway running through a waste of water. The wealthy citizen, as likely as not, has perched his mansion upon piles driven into the liquid sand that underlies his cellarage. In any case his front windows look out on one canal, his back windows on another: around him is a forest of masts and yards with sails of all sizes hung out to dry, while the great place at the corner of the street is a basin covered with boats and barges. When he takes his pleasure of an evening in his pretty suburban garden, he reposes in a summer-house reared upon poles over a canal that is brilliantly carpeted by duck-weed. The air about him is of course impregnated with damp which is often overcharged with unwholesome exhalations. Naturally he must correct that deleterious atmosphere with ardent spirits and strong tobacco; and as if to make the agreeable regimen easy for over-tender consciences, beneficent nature leaves him little choice in the matter. The inhabitants of great part of Holland are in the position of the seaman in the "Ancient Mariner," — with "water, water everywhere," there is not a drop that is fit to drink. Foreigners fall back on the bottled produce of the German springs; the natives dash their beverage with schiedam, and work the better for it and live the longer.

We grant that, to live in the country with comfort, a man ought to have been born and brought up in it; but it is the very circumstances of the struggle for existance that make a short visit so interesting to strangers. It is the fashion to speak of the Dutch as if they were anything rather than romantic. To our mind, their national history has been a sustained romance of the most sensational character, in which the famous war to the knife that shook them free of the Spanish yoke was merely an episode, and not the most remarkable. Ever since their savage ancestors, migrating westward, settled down in the swampy woodlands of Friesland and North Holland, they have been committed to a ceaseless struggle with the most formidable forces of nature. Heroically enduring and resolutely aggressive, they have hitherto had the best of it in their battle with the waters, although the storm-lashed ocean that assails them from without has found treacherous allies within their entrenchments. For the great rivers that drain the plains and mountains of Northern Europe come down in flood on the Dutch flats; and the spring freshets that follow the of the winter ice, they always threaten to burst their embankments. Frequently the water has had its way for the time, and it has kept its hold on some of the land it has conquered. Not so many centuries ago, although the precise date is uncertain, the sea burst through the northern breakwater. It has left the old land-line marked out by the chain of islands that stretches to Hanover eastward from the Texel, and has rolled the shallow Zuyder Zee over what was once an inhabited country. Nor was there any reason, according to all appearance, why a recurrence of similar disasters should not have drowned the rest of Holland. Much of the surface lies well below the sea-level, with no better natural protection than the barrier of shifting sand-heaps which is sometimes slightest and most vulnerable where the danger is most imminent. The 