first the guard carefully examined each departing load; but after a while the form was omitted.  Grotius’s wife, a woman of no common order (when asked why she did not sue for her husband’s pardon, she had replied, “I will not do it:  if he have deserved it let them strike off his head"), was quick to notice the negligence of the guard, and giving out that her husband was bedridden, she concealed him in the chest, and he was dumped on a tjalck and earned over to Gorcum.  While on his journey he had the shuddering experience of hearing some one remark that the box was heavy enough to have a man in it; but it was his only danger.  A Gorcum friend extricated him; and, disguised as a carpenter armed with a footrule, he set forth on his travels to Antwerp.  Once certain that Grotius was safe, his wife informed the guard, and the hue and cry was raised.  But it was raised in vain.  At first there was a suggestion that the lady should be retained in his stead, but all Holland applauded her deed and she was permitted to go free.

The river, as I have said, must be still much the same as in Grotius’s day; while the two towns Gorcum and Worcum cluster about their noble church towers as of old.  Worcum is hardly altered; but Gorcum’s railway and factories have enlarged her borders.  She has now twelve thousand inhabitants, some eleven thousand of whom were in the streets when, the tub having at length crawled back with us, we walked through them to the station.

Odd how one nation’s prettiness is another’s grotesque.  My companion was wearing one of those comely straw hats trimmed with roses which we call Early Victorian, and which the hot summer of 1904 brought into fashion again on account of their peculiar suitability to keep off the sun.  In England we think them becoming; upon certain heads they are charming.  But no head must wear such a hat at Gorcum unless it would court disaster.  The town is gay and spruce, bright as a new pin; the people are outrageous.  I suppose that the hat turned down at the precise point at which, according to Gorcum’s canons of taste, it should have turned up.  Whatever it did was unpardonable, and we had to be informed of the solecism.  We were informed in various ways; the men whistled, the women sniggered, the girls laughed, the children shouted and ran beside us.  The same hat had been disregarded by the sweet-mannered friendly Middelburgians; it had raised no smile at Breda.  At Dordrecht, it is true, eyes had been opened wide; at Bergen-op-Zoom mouths had opened too; but such attention was nothing compared with Gorcum’s pains to make two strangers uncomfortable.