Page:Things Seen In Holland (1912).djvu/139

 “I am King of the Castle” (Man ik sta op je blokhuis) is a game which needs no description. The girls enjoy skipping, and when not engaged in this pastime seem to delight in knitting just as much.

Readers of H. S. C. Everard's “A History of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, St. Andrews, from 1754 to 1900,” will have seen that there are some reasons for supposing that the game of golf may have been borrowed from the Dutch. In the Boymans Museum at Rotterdam is a picture by Jan Steen (1626-1679), “Feast of St. Nicholas: a Family Group,” wherein is the figure of a little boy who holds in one hand an undoubted golf-club and in the other a golf-ball. Other illustrations of the fact are to be met with in other pictures. It seems certain that there was played for many centuries in Holland a game known as het kolven, which closely