Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/311

Rh. It takes one completely by surprise when, looking at the forest of solid and substantial houses on every side of him in Amsterdam, he is suddenly told that every one of these thousands of houses is built on piles of wood, and that man lives here (as Erasmus of Rotterdam said in jest) on tops of trees, like rooks!

The loam and sand which form the ground of Amsterdam cannot support masonry buildings, and hence every house is built on piles driven into the sand. The vast solid-looking and substantial Royal Palace of Amsterdam rests on 13,659 piles! The magnificent Gothic New Church by the side of the Palace is built on 6,000 piles! The Exchange house of Amsterdam has a foundation of 3,469 piles! And so on with every other house here. It gives one a feeling of uneasiness to think that the magnificent and solid hotel in which he is stopping stands on thousands of wooden piles, and that it is within the range of possibility that the whole structure may sink under heavy weight as the great corn magazine of Amsterdam did in 1822, when stored with 3,500 tons of grain!

Holland was a republic in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the present Palace of Amsterdam was therefore not a royal Palace but simply the Town Hall of Amsterdam. It is unfit to be a royal palace as it stands in the open market-place without any sort of enclosure or compound of its own. Otherwise it is a noble massive building, and the apartments which are shewn to the public, are richly adorned with sculptures in white marble and nobly furnished.