Yet it seemed to be a deserted village, a place of the dead rather than of the living, an ornamental graveyard.  The liveliness of social beings was absent and was even inconsistent with the superlative neatness of all around us.  It was a best parlor out-of-doors, where the gayety of frolicking children would derange the set order of the furniture, or an accidental touch of a sacrilegious foot might scratch the polish of a fresh-varnished fence, or flatten down the nap of the green carpet of grass, every blade of which is trained to grow exactly so.

“The grounds and gardens of a Mr. Vander Beck were, indeed, a curiosity from the strange mixture of the useful with the ridiculously ornamental.  Here were the beautiful banks of a lake and Nature’s embellishment of reeds and water plants, which, for a wonder, were left to grow in their native luxuriance, and in the midst a huge pasteboard or wooden swan, and a wooden mermaid of tasteless proportions blowing from a conchshell.  In another part was a cottage with puppets the size of life moving by clock-work; a peasant smoking and turning a reel to wind off the thread which his ‘goed vrow’ is spinning upon a wheel, while a most sheep-like dog is made to open his mouth and to bark—­a dog which is, doubtless, the progenitor of all the barking, toy-shop dogs of the world.  Directly in the vicinity is a beautiful grapery, with the richest clusters of grapes literally covering the top, sides and walls of the greenhouse, which stands in the midst of a garden, gay with dahlias and amaranths and every variety of flowers, with delicious fruits thickly studding the well-trained trees.  Everything, however, was cut up into miniature landscapes; little bridges and little temples adorned little canals and little mounds, miniature representations of streams and bills.

“We visited the residence of the burgomaster.  He was away and his servants permitted us to see the house.  It was cleaning-day.  Everything in the house was in keeping with the character of the village.  But the kitchen! how shall I describe it?  The polished marble floor, the dressers with glass doors like a bookcase, to keep the least particle of dust from the bright-polished utensils of brass and copper.  The varnished mahogany handle of the brass spigot, lest the moisture of the hand in turning it should soil its polish, and, will you believe it, the very pothooks as well as the cranes (for there were two), in the fireplace were as bright as your scissors!

“Broek is certainly a curiosity.  It is unique, but the impression left upon me is not, on the whole, agreeable.  I should not be contented to live there.  It is too ridiculously and uncomfortably nice.  Fancy a lady always dressed throughout the day in her best evening-party dress, and say if she could move about with that ease which she would like.  Such, however, must be the feeling of the inhabitants of Broek; they must be in perpetual fear, not only of soiling or deranging their clothes merely, but their very streets every step they take.  But good-bye to Broek.  I would not have missed seeing it but do not care to see it again.”