As it happened, we had philosophy, and the discomfort was very slight.  Indeed, after a while, as we ran the gauntlet to the station, annoyance gave way to interest.  We found ourselves looking ahead for distant wayfarers who had not yet tasted the rare joy which rippled like a ship’s wake behind us.  We waited for the ecstatic moment when their faces should light with the joke.  Sometimes a mother standing at the door would see us and call to her family to come—­and come quickly, if they would not be disappointed!  Women, lurking behind Holland’s blue gauze blinds, would be seen to break away with a hasty summoning movement.  Children down side streets who had just realised their exceptional fortune would be heard shouting the glad tidings to their friends.  The porter who wheeled our luggage was stopped again and again to answer questions concerning his fantastic employers.

In course of time—­it is a long way to the station—­we grew to feel a shade of pique if any one passed us and took no notice.  To bulk so hugely in the public eye became a new pleasure.  I had not known before what Britannia must feel like on the summit of the largest of the cars in a circus procession.

I am convinced that such costly and equivocal success as the British arms achieved over the Boers had nothing to do with Gorcum’s feelings.  The town’s aesthetic ideals were honestly outraged, and it took the simplest means of making its protest.

We did not mean to wait at the station; having left our luggage there, we had intended to explore the town.  But there is a limit even to the passion for notoriety, and we had reached it, passed it.  We read and wrote letters in that waiting-room for nearly three hours.

At Gorcum was born, in 1637, Jan van der Heyden, a very attractive painter of street scenes, combining exactitude of detail with rich colour, who used to get Andreas van der Velde to put in the figures.  He has a view of Cologne in the National Gallery which is exceedingly pleasing, and a second version in the Wallace Collection.  I shall never forget his birthplace.

We came into Utrecht in the evening.  At Culemberg the country begins to grow very green and rich:  smooth meadows and vast woods as far as one can see:  plovers all the way.  The light transfiguring this scene was exactly the golden light which one sees in Albert Cuyp’s most peaceful landscapes.

When I was last on this journey the time was spring, and the sliding, pointed roofs of the ricks were at their lowest, with their four poles high and naked above them, like scaffolding.  But now, in August, they were all resting on the top pegs, a solid square tower of hay beneath each; looking in the evening light for all the world as if every farmer had his private Norman church.