Their beds are no other than land-cabines, high enough to need a ladder or stairs.  Up once, you are walled in with Wainscot, and that is good discretion to avoid the trouble of making your will every night; for once falling out else would break your neck perfectly.  But if you die in it, this comfort you shall leave your friends, that you dy’d in clean linnen.

Whatsoever their estates be, their houses must be fair.  Therefore from Amsterdam they have banisht seacoale, lest it soyl their buildings, of which the statelier sort are sometimes sententious, and in the front carry some conceit of the Owner.  As to give you a taste in these.

    Christus Adjutor Meus;
    Hoc abdicato Perenne Quero;
    Hic Medio tuitus Itur.

Every door seems studded with Diamonds.  The nails and hinges hold a constant brightnesse, as if rust there was not a quality incident to Iron.  Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies; their bodies than their souls.  Goe to one, you shall find the Andirons shut up in net-work.  At a second, the Warming-pan muffled in Italian Cutworke.  At a third the Sconce clad in Cambrick.

The absence of any lively traffic on the canals, as in Venice, has this compensation, that the surface is left untroubled the more minutely to mirror the houses and trees, and, at night, the tramcars on the bridges.  The lights of these cars form the most vivid reflections that I can recollect.  But the quiet reproduction of the stately black facades is the more beautiful thing.  An added dignity and repose are noticeable.  I said just now that one desired to learn the secret of the calm life of these ancient grachts.  But the secret of the actual houses of fact is as nothing compared with the secret of those other houses, more sombre, more mysterious, more reserved, that one sees in the water.  To penetrate their impressive doors were an achievement, a distinction, indeed!  With such a purpose suicide would lose half its terrors.

For the greatest contrast to these black canals, you must seek the Kalverstraat and Warmoes Straat.  Kalverstraat, running south from the Dam, is by day filled with shoppers and by night with gossipers.  No street in the world can be more consistently busy.  Damrak is of course always a scene of life, but Damrak is a thoroughfare—­its population moving continually either to or from the station.  But those who use the Kalverstraat may be said almost to live in it.  To be there is an end in itself.  Warmoes Straat, parallel with Damrak on the other side of the Bourse, behind the Bible Hotel, is famous for its gigantic restaurant—­the hugest in Europe, I believe—­the Krasnapolsky, a palace of bewildering mirrors, and for concert halls and other accessories of the gayer life.  But this book is no place in which to enlarge upon the natural history of Warmoes Straat and its southern continuation, the Nes.

For the principal cafes, as distinguished from restaurants, you must seek the Rembrandt’s Plein, in the midst of which stands the master’s statue.  The pavement of this plein on Sunday evening in summer is almost impassable for the tables and chairs that spread over it and the crowds overflowing from Kalverstraat.