On arriving at Rotterdam, you perceive at once that you are in Holland.  The city has as many canals as streets, the canals are generally overhung with rows of elms, and the streets kept scrupulously clean with the water of the canals, which is salt.  Every morning there is a vigorous splashing and mopping performed before every door by plump servant girls, in white caps and thick wooden shoes.  Our hotel stood fronting a broad sheet of water like the lagoons at Venice, where a solid and straight stone wharf was shaded with a row of elms, and before our door lay several huge vessels fastened to the wharf, which looked as if they were sent thither to enjoy a vacation, for they were neither loading nor unloading, nor did any person appear to be busy about them.  Rotterdam was at that time in the midst of a fair which filled the open squares and the wider streets of the city with booths, and attracted crowds of people from the country.  There were damsels from North Holland, fair as snow, and some of them pretty, in long-eared lace caps, with their plump arms bare; and there were maidens from another province, the name of which I did not learn, equally good-looking, with arms as bare, and faces in white muslin caps drawn to a point on each cheek.  Olycoeks were frying, and waffles baking in temporary kitchens on each side of the streets.

The country about Rotterdam is little better than a marsh.  The soil serves only for pasture, and the fields are still covered with “yellow blossoms,” as in the time of Goldsmith, and still tufted with willows.  I saw houses in the city standing in pools of dull blue water, reached by a bridge from the street:  I suppose, however, there might be gardens behind them.  Many of the houses decline very much from the perpendicular; they are, however, apparently well-built and are spacious.  We made no long stay in Rotterdam, but after looking at its bronze statue of Erasmus, and its cathedral, which is not remarkable in any other respect than that it is a Gothic building of brick, stone being scarce in Holland, we took the stage-coach for the Hague the next day.

Green meadows spotted with buttercups and dandelions, flat and low, lower than the canals with which the country is intersected, and which bring in between them, at high tide, the waters of the distant sea, stretched on every side.  They were striped with long lines of water which is constantly pumped out by the windmills, and sent with the ebb tide through the canals to the ocean.  Herds of cattle were feeding among the bright verdure.  From time to time, we passed some pleasant country-seat, the walls bright with paint, and the grounds surrounded by a ditch, call it a moat if you please, the surface of which was green with duck-weed.  But within this watery inclosure, were little artificial elevations covered with a closely-shaven turf, and plantations of shrubbery, and in the more extensive and ostentatious of them, were what might be called groves and forests.  Before one of these houses was a fountain with figures, mouths of lions and other animals, gushing profusely with water, which must have been pumped up for the purpose, into a reservoir, by one of the windmills.