It is difficult to lose the feeling of disproportion between the size of the Dutch churches and that of the villages and congregations.  The villages are so small, the churches so vast.  It is as though the churches were built to compensate for the absence of hills.  From any one spire in Holland one must be able to see almost all the others.

The stained glass in Edam’s great church has reference rather to Holland’s temporal prosperity than to religion.  More interesting is the room over the southern door, which was used first for a prison, and later for a school, the library of which still may be seen.  Edam possesses in addition to the immense church of St. Nicholas a little church of the Virgin, with a spire full of bells, badly out of the perpendicular.  The town has also some interesting old houses, one or two of great beauty, and many enriched by quaint bas-reliefs.

The stadhuis is comparatively modern and not externally attractive.  Within, however, Edam does honour to three fantastic figures who once were to be seen in her streets—­Peter Dircksz, Jan Cornellissen and Trijntje Kever, portraits of whom grace the town hall.  Their claims to fame are certainly genuine, although unexpected.  Peter’s idiosyncrasy was a beard which had to be looped up to prevent it trailing in the mud; Jan, at the age of forty-two, when the artist set to work upon him, weighed thirty-two stones and six pounds; while Trijntje was a maiden nine feet tall and otherwise ample.  Peter and Trijntje were, I believe, true children of Edam, but Jan was a mere import, having conveyed his bulk thither from Friesland.  Like our own Daniel Lambert, he kept an inn.  One of Trijntje’s shoes is also preserved—­liker to a boat than anything else.

I have by no means exhausted Edam’s roll of honour.  Shipowner Osterlen must be added—­a burgher, who, in 1682, when his portrait was painted, could point (and in the canvas does point, with no uncertain finger,) to ninety-two ships of which he was the possessor.  And a legend of Edam tells how once in 1403, when the country was inundated by the sea, some girls taking fresh water to the cows saw and captured a mermaid.  Her (like the lady in Mr. Wells’s story) they dressed and civilised, and taught to sow and spin, but could never make talk.  Possibly it is this mermaid who, caught in a fisherman’s net, is represented in bas-relief (as the fish that pleases all tastes) on one of the facades of Edam, with accompanying verses which must not be translated, embodying comments upon the nature of the haul by various typical and very plain-spoken members of society—­a soldier and a schoolmaster, a monk and a fowler, for example.

Edam has yet another hero.  On the Dam bridge are iron-backed benches which never grow rusty.  “One owes this particularity,” says Through Noord-Holland, “to the invention of an Edamer about 1569, who also took his secret with him into the grave.”