Dutch with regard to these birds. It is that in the fall, prior to the
departure of the storks for southern climes, all the old and decrepit
ones, too weakly to stand the long trip, are killed off so that the
general migration may not be delayed or impeded. Another belief held
by the Hollander, more or less a child of the imagination but not
without at least a tinge of fact, is that among the stork communities a
certain number of picked birds are detailed each season to act in the
capacity of a regular police force to preserve the peace and protect
the interests of the colony at large.
A stork’s nest on the roof serves, according to the superstitions of
many Dutch farmers, as a prevention to the ravages of lightning and the
contraction of contagious diseases by their families. Misfortune in
some form or other is sure to follow if the stork does not see fit to
nest somewhere near the house, and simply because of this, land holders
have been known to pack up, bag, baggage, and agricultural implements,
and move into another district.
XIII
THE HINTERLAND OF HOLLAND
If Friesland be considered the frontier of Holland’s tourist territory,
the provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, and Over-Yssel certainly
constitute its hinterland.
With the exception of one or two towns they lack the symmetry of
scenery, the quaintness of costumes, the masterpieces of art that adapt
the provinces west of the Zuyder Zee to intensive sight-seeing, so to
speak, while their peoples differ in manner so much from those in the
west that you seem to be traveling through another country altogether.
Old buildings they have in plenty, and rural and urban beauty spots may
be discovered here and there, but taken by and large, they offer fewer
attractions for and cater less to the invasion of the tourist than any
portion of Holland.
For the above reason, in planning a trip through this land of the brave
and the home of the sea, it might be well, if practicable, to tap these
three provinces at the beginning, embellishing first impressions by
reversing the time-honored route and returning, instead of advancing,
through North and South Holland, Utrecht, North Brabant, and Zeeland,
and spending a profitable day at least on the Island of Walcheren as a
kind of tasteful cordial after the seven course tour.
Groningen, the capital of the province of the same name, shares
the distinction with Leyden and Utrecht in being one of the three
university towns in Holland. Although twice as large as Leeuwarden,
it is barely half as interesting. It seems, too, a vastly more
modern place, with its trolley service, its large assortment of wide
streets, its apparent dearth of silent canals, while its narrow, busy
Heerestraat emulates the examples set by the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam
and the Spuistraat in The Hague.
Its university, established in 1614, is attended by half a thousand
students, and has within recent years moved into more commodious and
modern quarters in the form of an appropriate and handsome building
erected in 1850. Among the treasures of its library, housed in a
separate building, is to be found a copy of the revised New Testament
by Erasmus, bearing marginal annotations in the handwriting of Martin
Luther. This much for learning. With respect to art, Groningen is the
birthplace of two of Holland’s best known modern painters, H. W. Mesdag
and Josef Israels, the latter being especially distinguished for his
ability to record upon canvas the sadder aspects of humble life. At the
advanced age of eighty-seven this master of his craft died during the
past summer in The Hague, where he had resided for a number of years.
At the foot of the tower of the church of St. Martin on the edge of
the market square stands the old _regthuis_, a small brick building
of early sixteenth century erection, lately restored and put into use
as a guardhouse. With its green and white shutters of diamond design
it looks strangely out of place as the opponent of a building of such
conglomerate architecture as the columned _stadthuis_, on the western
side of the square. Grain being one of the staple commodities of the
place, one end of the _visch-markt_ is bounded by the corn exchange.
Behind this stands the Aa-Kerk, of Gothic construction and thirteenth
century origin. And, as is the habit with many of the towns in this
section of Holland, Groningen has made the most of the site of her old
ramparts and city fortifications by transforming it into a public park.
Without the least savor of favoritism, Groningen might easily capture
the palm for supporting about the most uninteresting market in Holland.
Held in the great square that serves the town as a center for outdoor
business transactions and trolley service, it is a market of everything
and a market of nothing. It looks as if all the shopkeepers had put up
tents and transferred their stock from their shops to the street. Here
they sell anything from cucumbers to cocoanuts, from stepladders to
safety matches--a nondescript assortment of edibles, cooking utensils,
secondhand clothing, cheap crockery, old books, and umbrellas. There
are no types to speak of, and the place reeks with the essence of
small and insignificant bargaining. The hotel at which I registered in
Groningen was centrally located--too centrally, in fact--on the market
square. Just in front along the curb a purveyor of dried fish held
forth in his tent. The breeze was blowing gently, and the hotel stood
to the leeward of the dried fish purveyor. As Sam Bernard would say,
“Sufficiency!”
The railway line from Groningen down through Assen and Meppel to
Zwolle penetrates a flat, barren, unattractive-looking country which,
in places, might be mistaken for the “meadows” near Atlantic City.
The roadbed of the railway itself is the worst in the world--at least
I _think_ it is the worst in the world, although the allegation may
arouse the envy of one or two Mexican roadbeds that I am no longer
on speaking terms with, each of which claims the same distinction.
The engineers who were responsible for this piece of track, through
a perfectly flat country with no curves or grades to cope with,
could hardly have done much worse. It is even beyond the powers
of the imagination how they contrived to make it as bad as it is.
Its construction reminds one vaguely of the story of the “jealous
pie,” whose top and lower crusts grew jealous of each other for fear
something might come between them. So with this railway. If one rail
bulges outward a little the other rail bulges inward sympathetically.
And it is fortunate that they are so attached to each other, because if
one rail bulged outward and the other rail likewise bulged outward at
the same point we might not be here to tell of it.
Neither is the tediousness of the two-hour ride relieved at all by the
congeniality of one’s traveling companions. For the information of the
prospective tourist through Holland it might be well to state in this
connection that smoking is only forbidden in those few and far-between
compartments of the railway carriage marked “_Niet Rooken_.” In all
others, whether labeled “_Rooken_” or not, whether occupied by men,
women, or children, smoking is not only permitted but encouraged; and
however vigorous and healthy a Hollander may be, his one weak point is
his aversion to ventilation. In this matter he may be likened to the
elephant afraid of a mouse. Consequently, the first move he makes when
he enters the compartment is to close both windows. If he lacks the
boorishness to reach over deliberately and try to curtail _your_ supply
of fresh air, which is not often, he will huddle himself in a corner as
far from the offending draft as possible, and eye you up and down for
your failure to appreciate his position.
[Illustration: The Town Hall and market square in Groningen, where one
may buy anything, from cucumbers to stepladders]
For the full distance from Groningen to Zwolle I traveled in the same
compartment with three of the most rabid stale air agitators I have
ever run afoul of. To make matters worse, one was highly perfumed
with a mixture of musk and mint, and wore the nails of his little
fingers long--half an inch would not be an exaggeration--as some
sort of a mark of caste, possibly borrowed from the Chinese. During
the trip they tried to make things as blithe and agreeable for me as
possible--although with the opposite intent, judging from several
remarks which I finally succeeded in translating--by giving a variety
of imitations of various barnyard animals because I guarded one open
window with my life.
All through the province of Drenthe the sources of another industry
in which little Holland is preëminent may be seen from the car
windows--the great peat bogs. Upon peat the Dutch housewife must rely
for her fuel, for the coal mines in the Netherlands are next thing to
null and void; so the preparation of peat has become at once an art
and an industry. Towns and hamlets are named for it--“_veen_” with an
appropriate prefix. It is as indigent to Holland as the wild turkey to
the mountains of Virginia. But, instead of striving to eliminate as
quickly as possible a very essential natural resource, the Dutch have
developed the scientific cultivation of peat and made the vast bogs
into almost inexhaustible producers of fuel.
The lighter, more fibrous peat, _laagveen_, in Dutch--found several
feet in thickness in the eastern part of Groningen, all through
Drenthe, and even stretching well across the German border--is
contrasted with the dry peat, or _hoogeveen_, underlying a thick layer
of clay. In the case of the latter, the layer of clay is removed
carefully, the peat is dredged from under it, and what water remains is
drained off. The peat is then spread upon the ground and worked by foot
pressure until the process, assisted by exposure to the sun, brings
it to a certain consistency. It is then cut into convenient lengths,
stacked, and allowed to dry. In the meantime the layer of clay has
been mixed with sand, replaced, and planted with crops. With respect
to the bog peat, the fen is first surrounded with a canal for drainage
purposes; also the plant putrefaction is assisted by successive
reformations of soil from city refuse, laden with which the peat boats
return to the fens.
The bait with which Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe,
should lure the tourist to stop off, if only between trains, is the
church of an ancient nunnery suppressed during the Reformation. This
relic, with a fragment of the old cloisters still attached to it,
has been transformed into Assen’s Town Hall, and forms a part of the
adjoining provincial offices erected on the site of the nunnery. The
great tumuli, or so-called “giants’ caves,” within half an hour’s
drive from Assen, and marked with huge boulders borne down by the
glaciers from Scandinavia, are of interest more to the profound
archeologist than to the ordinary sight-seer.
Meppel, farther down, is a peat town of no artistic or historical
importance, although it is the junction of the peat and the butter
routes through the hinterland. From it the traveler may journey up
through the butter district direct to Leeuwarden, or he may break
through the peat country on another line to Groningen.
Zwolle, the first stop below Meppel, is an attractive town, but with
fewer types even than Groningen. Here the familiar windmills and
wooden shoes begin to diminish perceptibly in numbers. With its 32,000
inhabitants, Zwolle is but a shade smaller than Leeuwarden. It is the
capital of the province of Over-Yssel and was the birthplace of Gerard
Terburg, one of Holland’s celebrated seventeenth century wielders of
the brush and crayon. But like too many other towns in the Netherlands,
Zwolle has been so short-sighted and so remiss in her duty that she has
failed to preserve for public appreciation a single example of the work
of her most famous son.
The most striking architectural feature of the town is her old
Sassen-Poort, or Saxon gateway, the five Gothic spires of which tend to
relieve any monotony of city skyline. It stands but a short distance
from the station, framed behind a green mat of trees that lends a
pleasant contrast to its diamond window shutters of delicate blue and
spotless white. The modern stone bridge across the canal just in front,
although forming rather an inappropriate approach to the old tower, is
one of the most artistic in all Holland.
Upon a certain warm, sunlit morning I crossed this bridge and turned
down along the canal, following one of the many labyrinthian pathways
under the spreading trees. Soon I came upon what anyone on not too
familiar terms with the customs of the country might have supposed to
be a public café. It was neither fenced nor hedged in, and the path I
was following led straight as a die to its low, broad veranda, carpeted
and freely sprinkled with comfortable wicker chairs. Little round
tables were scattered here and there, and I concluded that the place
lacked nothing for the enjoyment of a glass of liquid refreshment.
Accordingly, I followed the course of least resistance, and presently
found myself reclining deeply and luxuriously in one of the wicker
armchairs on the veranda.
After a short struggle, my thirst overcame my lethargy, and I summoned
enough energy to push a convenient electric button.
No response.
A second, and then a third push at the button.
Still no response.
As a drastic last resort, I arose with no little effort, and wended my
angry way into the building to ascertain the cause for such delinquent
service.
I was approached by a gentleman who, having observed my impatience,
had come to my rescue from his little secluded corner in the reading
room.
[Illustration: The best of Kampen’s gateways, of which architectural
features the town originally possessed seven]
In my very best Dutch--my vocabulary consists of some three or four
words--I asked the gentleman where on earth the waiter might be in
hiding. In his very best English the gentleman replied politely that
the place was a private club and not a public grogshop. Whereupon, I
could have accomplished an exit through any convenient keyhole without
the least pinching.
Near Zwolle, in a monastery on the Agnetenberg, reached after a
drive of three or four miles from the town, lived and died Thomas à
Kempis, the author of “The Imitation of Christ”--a work that has been
translated into almost every tongue.
A short ride in the train from Zwolle brings you to Kampen, on the
broad Yssel at its point of discharge into the Zuyder Zee. It is
Holland’s home town of ancient gateways, no less than three of which,
leading out into the park that has superseded the old fortifications,
are in excellent state of preservation and worthy of study from an
architectural point of view. Originally the town possessed seven of
these gates, and there might have been fourteen, had the City Council
listened to a learned one of its members who arose at a certain meeting
and proposed that they double the original number; for, he argued,
had not each of the seven gates contributed its 10,000,000 florins a
year to the town treasury in the shape of taxes upon merchandise and
produce passing through it? Therefore, it would be a simple matter to
double the town’s revenue, for all they had to do was to double the
number of gates.
But the rank and file of tourists that include Kampen in their
itineraries come to view its Town Hall, a venerable building erected in
the fourteenth century, restored after a devastating fire in 1543, and
which may be numbered to-day among the most characteristic curiosities
in the Netherlands. Among the features of its Gothic façade are six
statues in stone, dating from the original building. From left to right
these may be recognized as the effigies of Charlemagne and Alexander
the Great and the characterizations of Moderation, Fidelity, Justice,
and Neighborly Love. One of the windows of the weather-stained edifice
still remains trellised with iron as in the days of Kampen’s olden
time importance. The interior contains a medieval council room with
magistrates’ seats of oak, handsomely carved, and a gigantic chimney
piece, unfortunately overladen with ornaments.
Kampen stripped of its gateways and its Town Hall would scarcely be
worth the time spent to reach it. The town itself seems to be given up
to small manufacturing establishments, and its people made up of the
class that keeps them in operation. But the fine architectural relics
of its earlier days raise its instructive power to as high a degree as
that of any town now within Holland’s tourist area.
From Kampen you may take a steamer out across the Zuyder Zee to the
Island of Urk, inhabited by a colony of daring fishermen who are less
spoiled, yet whose costumes and customs are less interesting, than
those of the people of Marken. But you will have to hurry if you wish
to pay it a visit, for Urk will soon go the way of Schokland, an island
nearer to Kampen, the habitation of which has recently been forbidden
by the government on account of the imminent prospects of total
encroachment by the sea. To-day Urk is tussling for life with every
tide; it may be merely a question of months, perhaps of weeks or days,
before its people will be compelled to give up their homes and move to
the less dangerous mainland.
Eighteen and a half miles south of Zwolle, still on the river Yssel,
and just across the frontier of Gelderland, lies Deventer, noted
commercially for a rather incongruous assortment of enterprises: iron,
carpets, and honey cakes. A weigh-house, abnormally large for a town
of Deventer’s size, having a great flight of steps ascending to its
entrance from the Brink, the principal square of the town, has been
converted into a gymnasium. Also facing the Brink are several handsome
private houses of seventeenth century erection. Deventer, strange to
say, seems to be most athletically inclined; it maintains no less than
fifty different association football clubs, which strive with each
other for the title of champion on the many athletic fields along the
banks of the Yssel.
After years of study in Spain and other foreign lands, after a lengthy
residence in Haarlem, and his experiences in the studio as co-worker
with Franz Hals, to Deventer came Gerard Terburg, where he finally
settled down and where he died in 1681 at the age of sixty-four. Unlike
Rembrandt, Hals Holbein, and Jan Steen, Terburg took a lively interest
in public and municipal affairs, and in his later years he served his
adopted city as Burgomaster.
[Illustration: Queen Wilhelmina’s summer residence at Het Loo is the
center of a large settlement of country homes and villas on the
outskirts of Apeldoorn. The landscape gardening throughout the colony
is the best to be seen in Holland]
XIV
GELDERLAND
From Deventer to Apeldoorn is simply a matter of a quarter of an hour
in a railway carriage which now darts past so many fields of grain, now
past so many fine old woods and terraced summer homes that the effect
upon the tourist is kaleidoscopic--like being shot through a Christmas
wreath.
Apeldoorn is a beautiful little city, very much unlike what might be
expected of Holland, since its canals are few and its windmills at a
premium. Its streets remind one more of those of an English village.
Its outskirts and environs are freely sprinkled with attractive country
homes and villas belonging to that class of Hollanders that passes
its time, for one purpose or another, hovering in the neighborhood of
royalty, for near by at Het Loo the Queen is wont to summer. The town’s
two parks, named appropriately Oranje and Wilhelmina, present effects
in landscape gardening incomparable with those of almost any other
parks in Holland, and the broad avenues that lead out to Her Majesty’s
palace are barely surpassed in beauty even by the Old Way from The
Hague to Scheveningen. Like the spokes of a wheel their shaded
roadways stretch straight as a die, with the palace of Het Loo as their
common hub.
_Pensions_ and private villas are as thick in and about Apeldoorn as
seventeen-year locusts. Each has its velvety lawn; each its variegated
flower garden. Apparently the town boasts of everything to make the
lives of its summer residents one blissful dream of being some day
bidden to dinner or tea at the dazzling white palace at the end of the
avenue. I imagine the sanitary arrangements of some of the summer homes
of these pseudo patrons of royalty must be primitive in the extreme.
This may or may not be a criterion by which to judge the others, but,
as I drove by the estate of one of Apeldoorn’s nabobs, a maidservant
appeared upon the second-story balcony and emptied the contents of a
pocket folding rubber bath tub full upon the lawn in front--anything
but a discreet exhibition, to say the least about it.
Het Loo, or The Grove, was the favorite palace of Wilhelmina’s father,
William III, and of his grandfather, William I, the first King of the
Netherlands. A steam tram operates upon rather uncertain schedule
between the railway station at Apeldoorn and Het Loo, but a much more
pleasant method of consuming the time, if only between trains, is to
drive by carriage out the long avenue, returning through the parks of
Apeldoorn.
The peasants of the surrounding country are of purely agricultural
proclivities, and their land seems more like real farm land than the
lower level portions of the Netherlands. Apeldoorn itself lies in the
district known as the Veluwe, a territory between the Yssel and the
Zuyder Zee, in places as much as three hundred feet above the level
of the ocean and, with few exceptions, the highest in Holland. Parts
of it, however, are so sandy and sterile that the ground is available
after complete fertilization mainly for the cultivation of tobacco.
Zutphen, a few miles below Apeldoorn, was the first city in the east
to offer any speakable resistance against the Spaniards during the
war of independence, and there still stands the gateway, called the
Nieuwstadtspoort, through which Don Frederic of Toledo, the son of
the notorious Duke of Alva, forced an entrance into the town on the
16th day of November, 1572. Mons and Mechlin having been captured and
promptly sacked, Alva had repaired to Nymwegen, leaving Don Frederic
to conquer the provinces in the north and east--preferably by force,
for they were a bloodthirsty lot, those Spaniards. A seeming lack of
patriotism on the parts of the cities which had already submitted, too
enthusiastically perhaps, to the Spaniards, gave these international
marauders little excuse to resort to their usual heinous methods of
effecting subjugation.
When Zutphen, therefore, offered a feeble and half-hearted resistance
against the troops of Frederic of Toledo, and the fact was reported
to his father, the commander in chief and arch brigand of the whole
depredating crew, he promptly sent orders to his son to enter the city
and kill every man and burn every house to the ground. According to
Motley, “the Duke’s command was almost literally obeyed. Don Frederic
entered Zutphen, and without a moment’s warning put the whole garrison
to the sword. The citizens next fell a defenseless prey; some being
stabbed in the streets, some hanged on the trees which decorated the
city, some stripped stark naked and turned out into the fields to
freeze to death in the wintry night. As the work of death became too
fatiguing for the butchers, five hundred innocent burghers were tied
two and two, back to back, and drowned like dogs in the river Yssel.
A few stragglers who had contrived to elude pursuit at first, were
afterwards taken from their hiding-places and hung upon the gallows
by their feet, some of which victims suffered four days and nights of
agony before death came to their relief.”
To-day Zutphen is a quiet old city, very un-Dutch, if the expression
may be permitted, with many narrow, crooked streets and a few canals
of varying degrees of picturesqueness on its outskirts. Lumber is the
principal industry of the place, and a great deal of poplar wood which
goes to supply the wooden shoes for many parts of Holland is shipped
from Zutphen.