Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/229



At Antwerp the party scattered and went their several ways. Godwin, a very agreeable gentleman, who had gone abroad for a rest and left his wife and family at home, oppressed with the loneliness of the situation, met Mrs. Pennypacker and myself again in the Zoological Garden. He hurried forward to present a bouquet, and after a separation of a day we came together like long-lost friends. Two things we soon learned to avoid—the beaten routes of travel where ignorant guides show you the new things you can better see at home, and the table d'hote dinners which injure your stomach and waste your time. Through the advice of E. V. Lansdale, a society man of experience, we put up in Antwerp, at the Hotel de la Paix, but did not like it. In the Temple of Cloaca I found this rather naïve notice: “On est prie de ne pas rester debout sur la siege.” We examined the cathedral with its treasured Rubens' Descent from the Cross, there meeting Bishop O. W. Whitaker and his wife, but found the most interest in the narrow old streets along the Scheldt, the carts pulled by dogs, the women gathering the garbage, but most of all in the old stone prison “La Steen” with its dungeons in which some of my people, in the sixteenth century, had been confined before being burned and beheaded. In Holland, at The Hague, we saw, of course, Paul Potter's Bull and Scheveningen, but The Hague itself had become a modern city and was disappointing. At Haarlem we saw the tulip garden, heard the great church organ played and at the town hall stood wonderingly before those old burgomasters whom Franz Hals has kept alive through the centuries since. Dutch art Rh