From the palace we drove back to town to visit two private collections of paintings. It seemed odd, if not impertinent, to walk through the drawing-rooms of strangers, criticise their pictures, and fee their servants. Upon the table, in one, were thrown down carelessly the bonnet and gloves of the lady of the house. I was tempted to carry them off. Only a vigorous early training, and the thought of a long line of pious ancestors, prevented. Here were pictures from most of the earlier and some of the later Dutch artists--Paul Potter's animals, Jan Steen's pots and pans, Vandervelde's quays and luggers, and green, foaming seas, and even a touch or two from the brush of the master of Dutch art. We stopped on our way back to the hotel, at a bazaar,--a place of beguilement, with long rooms full of everything beautiful in art, everything tempting to the eye,--and after dinner went out to one of the adjacent tea-gardens. It was filled with family parties drinking tea around little tables. The music was fine, though unexpected at times, as, for instance, when a trumpet blew a startling blast, and a little man in its range sprang from his seat as though blown out of his place. It was amusing and interesting to watch the stream of promenaders circling around the musicians' stand--broad, heavily-built men, long of body, short of limbs; women "square-rigged," of easy, good-natured countenance. I doubt if there was a nerve in the whole assembly.
At noon the next day, we took the train for Amsterdam--another two hours' ride. The land began to undulate as we went towards the sea, with the shifting hillocks of sand raised by wind and wave. We passed Leyden, famous for its resistance to the Spaniards, as well as for having been the birthplace of Rembrandt and a score of lesser lights, and Haarlem, known for its great organ, and still the sand-hills rose one above the other, until they shut out everything beyond. It was only when we made a sharp turn, and struck out in a straight line for the city, that the Zuyder Zee opened before us, the curving line of land along its edge alive with windmills. We counted a hundred and twenty in sight at one time, and still did not exhaust them; so many skipped and whirled about, and refused to be counted. It hardly seems possible that the city of Amsterdam is built upon piles driven into the sand and mud. Certainly, when you have been jolted and shaken until your teeth chatter, for a long mile, in one of the hotel omnibuses from the station through the narrow streets and over the rough pavements, you will think there must be a tolerably firm foundation. Such a peaceful, sleepy, free-from-danger air, these slimy canals give to the cities! You forget that just beyond the dikes the mighty, restless sea lurks, and watches day and night for a chance to rush in and claim its own. The canals run in a succession of curves, one within the other, all through the city. Upon the quays are the dwellings and warehouses. In the narrow streets, crossing them by means of endless bridges, are the shops and dwellings of the lower classes. Looking down a street, no two houses present an unbroken line. They have all settled in their places until they nod, and leer, and wink at each other, in a decidedly sociable, intoxicated manner. The whole city, to a stranger, is a curious sight--the arched bridges over the interminable canals; the clumsy boats (for the canals are too shallow to admit anything but coasters and river boats); the antic and antiquated houses with high gables, rising in steps, to the street; the women of the lower classes, with yokes over their shoulders, and long-eared white caps on their heads, surmounted by naked straw bonnets of obsolete fashion and coal-scuttle shape, and out and from which, on either side, protruded all the wonderful tinkling ornaments of which the prophet speaks; the long quays and streets utterly bare of trees; the iron rods thrust out from the houses half way up their height, upon which all manner of garments, freshly washed, hang over the street to dry. Down in an open Place stands the dark, square palace, grand and grim, where Hortense played queen a little time while Louis Bonaparte was king of Holland. Near the palace is a national monument, for the Dutch, too, remember their brave. There are old and new churches also to be seen, but churches bare of everything which clothes cathedrals with beauty, having been stripped in the time of the reformation. I suppose one should rejoice; but we did miss the high altar, the old carved saints, and the pictures in the chapels.