Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 171, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 July 1913 — THROUGH A LAND OF CANALS CANALS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THROUGH A LAND OF CANALS CANALS

ROM Antwerp to Rotterdam is less % than three hours by the rails, but on the little steamer which crawls through the creeks, canals and lakes of Zeeland it is a full day. Come, steep yourself in sober lux- ' ury in an atmosphere of self-respect and much peace and dampness. The steamer starts in the cold half dawn with all the Antwerp stretch of river lights burning an orange yellow. After two hours of tonic shivering

you see uie buu across a nat ana lertiie land, a Dig red sun which you may look at without blinking. There if a mighty river flowing full and broad between low banks with scattered trees. You glide Into canals lined to the water’s edge with grass and buttercups, enlivened with groups of fishers in trousers of the strangest cuts, who stand chatting with the keepers of the locks and drinking healths in schnapps. The trousers are bloomers, not unlike the knickers of the fair when full built (speaking of the knickers), and they wear round knit caps of vivid green. Others, more sober, wear bomb-shaped casquettes of orange velvet-embroidered with black silk.

* The captain promised breakfast in five minutes. That was an hour and twenty minutes ago. The second cabin passengers are drinking gin. The captain says the breakfast only waits for some cow to be milked near a lock. The boat is still in a canal between high banks, which thrust on the view the ankles of the village girls who stand along the edge and look down philosophically, knitting; for their skirts are very bell-shaped. The village girls are silhouettes against the sky. Then a one-horse gig, •with yellow wheels and a green box, flits by mysteriously and disappears behind the ridge. And there is nothing more. -■ Ah, yes, it rains. The steamer crawls through the canal, imnoded by the locks and dams. Here is another Dutch girl. She is standing on the bank above our heads as we descend, a Dutch girl In a white starched percale cap, cream-colored kerchief crossed upon her breast, with a black bodice, a bine skirt, wooden shoes and blue stockings. The boat is in a narrow river once again, with scenery green and clean, with sweet effects of light in this peculiar air—a milky, velvety light:— near a comic opera village. More village girls, the milk and blush rose blondes of Zeeland, with their silky masses of pale golden hair, Immaculately clean. They look so solid, tight and tidy, do these little Dutch girls in their stiff bodices. Out in the open Ooester Skelt, three miles - across, the yellow brownish water scarcely marks itself against the banks of yellow green, low dikes, with long, long lines of trees, whose roots assist to hold the soil together. We hug the edge. Along the bank there coughs and snorts a dinky little ancient automobile. As it nears we see it is conducted by a pretty girl In white. She looks like a bride! The villagers run out, rejoicing. Who is she? What is jt? What Is he? Mystery. We steam onward. Now, there are always these long lines of trees that stand like a grim regiment to defeat the floods of the encroaching sea It is the Verdronken Land, where thousands perished—villages and towns and all the countrjaide—in 1632, when a dike burst. There Is a short Canal de Keeten. At a village where the captain stofrn to get his hair cut a fair bumboat girl sells us schnapps. Then the little steamer quits the subdivisions of the Schelde, meanders through the mazes of the Maas, comes through the Krammer and the Volkerak to the wide Hollandscb Dlep, which has rough water and looks almost like the sea. Once this bay was land, but long ago, In 1421, a tidal wavefwtped out a hundred market towns and villages, and upward of 100,000 people perished, and the water stayed. Then soon it is the little Dorsche Kil, a very narrow stream (where the Prince of Orange was drowned in 1711), which takes ue to the broad and lovely Merwede, a double river, where the windmills of the landscape aad rtbe busy villages proclaim the land of Holland one has read of. Now it Is raining. Dort, or Dordrecht is the llrst fine town. It is the cleanest land! The very a»ws are scrubbed down with soap and rubbed

dry with bath toweling till they shine. The sloping stone dikes are mopped every morning between 7 and 9 o’clock. Tiled roofs of a soft red rise like flowers amid the foliage of the trees; thatched roofs of ardove-tint go sloping down close to the ground as if they would slip off the cosy houses Just as

the d,o v e-c 010 re d shawl slips ofT the shoulders of a Quaker girl—if there be any left who wear dove-colored shawls. I am thinking of Philadelphia and Penn’s Manor. Here thfere are villages that do not know the railway and their daughters do not know the modern fashions. A village girl buys one fine gown and it will last her fifteen years. Do you thing she is not just as nice beneath it? These girls spare no expense on their best gowns. They have real linen and real lace and fine silk stockings if they choose to wear them, and each girl has a gold helmet, which is worth from S9O to S3OO. It begins to rain. This helmet is a thin and supple shell of gold which snugly fits the head. Sometimes it is scoop-shaped to let the back hair be coiled in a knot, sometimes they plait their back hair in two long queues, which hang down before the ears on each side of the face; but the gold helmet must be always there, though it be only seen to shimmer in the sunlight through the meshes of a kind of night-cap, also fitting snugly, which may be of linen or of lace, in which case it has ruffles. Each girl has her gold helmet, even those who go to service up in Rotterdam, thodgh when they grow sophisticated, citified and shame-faced they first put on city bonnets over their gold helmets and white nightcaps and then later on lock up their caps and helmets In their bureaus and take to smart pink cotton prints for gowns and wear coquettish ruffles of gauzy tulle on thieir heads, for all the world like London chambermaids. These helmets, horned on each side of the forehead with long twisted prongs of gold and dating back to when the Germanic tribes were struggling with the Romans, are, together with the bomb-shaped skirts, soon bound to disappear and figure only, like the peasant costume of the ‘ north of France, in charity bazaars on city girls instead of country girls, who are abandoning them for flimsy trash three years behind the current mode. The air is sultry' like a gentle steaming in the laboring noonday sun. Clouds rising above clouds around the whole horizon meet at the zenith like a dome. There is no end of peaceful hamlets, pretty, tidy. busy. We stop captain to make an afternoon call. Small girls pass In procession bearing tulips. Where to? What for? Mystery. We steam on. And there is nothing more. The river widens and the windmills and the sawmills giVe place to shipping. Then the squat spires of a city full of little unartistlc churches show themselves, and we approach the seventh commercial port of Europe. The captain says It looks like rain From boosy Belgian Antwerp to Dutch Rotter- * dam and Its mild thoroughfares is all the distance from the continental system to our American respectability. The town is Puritan. The girls look at you with straight eyes, as Innocent of coquetry as lambs; they are not like French girls walking with their mammas, casting down their eyes consciously. Would a French girl play

Copenhagen or other promiscuous kissing gamesf Here they kiss all the afternoon, as innocent as little billing birds. They kiss in the rain; and it rains often. ' In speaking of the handsome quays they call the Boompjes (more like a park than any ordinary waterfront), the guidebook says that visitors may enter and inspect the vessels without objection provided they do not get in the way of the work in hand. We did not enter and inspect, but I can well believe we might have done so. We did walk Innocently into the garden of the most aristocratic club of Rotterdam and mingled freely with the smart set were holding tulip competition, where the heroine was a blonde, blue-eyed, fourteen-year-old girl who had grown an apple green variety! We were only made aware of our position when we drank curacao and bitters offered by a waiter in blue broadcloth and a yellow vest, who refused to take our money, we not being club members. Rotterdom is so airy, open, bright, so shady, flowery and well watered that its citizens may sing. Canals are everywhere, and the canals are beautiful. Tliey give a park-like look to all the streets,' bordered by lawns, garnished by shrubs and trees and tulips. And the citizens, from out their kitchen windows or their parlor windows, when they have company for dinner, hook .up fresh fish In profusion, which adds a labor-saving element to their blithe freedom. Should a list be made of continental cities which have no great sights, no monuments, no ruins, no collections —in a word, no treadmill tourist round —the town of Rotterdam .would take a place of honor in it, although she has a maritime museum, a picture gallery and a statue of Erasmus. In the market you can make a study of the bodices and headgear of the peasants. Catching the Dutch taste for still life you may muse on symphonies of color in the produce. Here are the fish stalls, where all the shades of white —silver white, blue white, white shaded with bronze green, white with metallic reflections —unite in a clear scale of -hartoony. Here all the tints of green are heaped together in the vegetables, melodiously accompanied by the fragrance of the flowers, which sing together with the fruits in the most diverse color tones. • Though Rotterdam is a great port and an important manufacturing center, my best impressions of the pleasant city are connected with a case chantant, a park, the markets and the residential streets. The great manufactures are shipbuilding, tobacco factories, sugar refineries and many great distilleries, especially of gins and Dutch liqueurs. The more important articles of commerce are coffee, sugar, tobacco, rice and spices. It is the seventh port of Europe. Again and again the vision of a well-known and bqloved city rises up before the writer's docile Imagination ard affects him to the point of tears —the city of Philadelphia. Pa., which, I see. must be a faithful moving picture today of what New York was In 1750. It is the city of homes par excellence, and it resembles Rotterdani. and Rotterdam resembles It. The wearied tourist seeking for a snug retreat in which to raise a beard will find Rotterdam a second Philadelphia. And looking from the watch tpwer of St. Lawrence's church, down on the tranquil panorama; on the river and the suburbs; on the red brick houses and the streets so straight and self-re-specting, where the children play jackstones on the front doorsteps, and their big sisters play bull In the ring and kiss the boys on the sidewalk; to look down. I say, on the slow but yellow trolleys whose faint jingle rises as from some secure blameless and fruitful sheep field; to admire the smoke of manufactories. And police wagons taking drunken factory hands to jail, he will cry. “It Is Philadelphia—Philadelphia, for the eok side of the platter la so clean 1”