But there is still to be mentioned a district of Amsterdam which from the evening of Friday until the evening of Saturday is more populous even than Kalverstraat.  This is the Jews’ quarter, which has, I should imagine, more parents and children to the square foot than any residential region in Europe.  I struggled through it at sundown one fine Saturday—­to say I walked through it would be too misleading—­and the impression I gathered of seething vivacity is still with me.  These people surely will inherit the earth.

Spinoza was a child of this Ghetto:  his birthplace at 41 Waterloo Plein is still shown; and Rembrandt lived at No. 4 Jodenbree Straat for sixteen years.

A large number of the Amsterdam Jews are diamond cutters and polishers.  You may see in certain cafes dealers in these stones turning over priceless little heaps of them with the long little finger-nail which they preserve as a scoop.

Amsterdam may be a city builded on the sand; but none the less will it endure.  Indeed the sand saves it; for it is in the sand that the wooden piles on which every house rests find their footing, squelching through the black mud to this comparative solidity.  Some of the piles are as long as 52 ft., and watching them being driven in, it is impossible to believe that stability can ever be attained, every blow of the monkey accounting for so very many inches.  When one watches pile-driving in England it is difficult to see the effect of each blow; but during the five or fewer minutes that I spent one day on Damrak observing the preparation for the foundations of a new house, the pile must have gone in nearly a foot each time, and it was very near the end of its journey too.  In course of years the black brackish mud petrifies not only the piles but the wooden girders that are laid upon them.

Pile-driving on an extensive scale can be a very picturesque sight.  Breitner has painted several pile-driving scenes, one of which hangs in the Stedelijk Museum at Amsterdam.

Statistics are always impressive.  I have seen somewhere the number of piles which support the new Bourse and the Central Station; but I cannot now find them.  The Royal Palace stands on 13,659.  Erasmus of Rotterdam made merry quite in the manner of an English humorist over Amsterdam’s wooden foundations.  He twitted the inhabitants with living on the tops of trees, like rooks.  But as I lay awake from daybreak to a civilised hour for two mornings in the Hotel Weimar at Rotterdam—­prevented from sleeping by the pile-driving for the hotel extension—­I thought of the apologue of the pot and the kettle.

I referred just now to the new Bourse.  When I was at Amsterdam in 1897, the water beside Damrak extended much farther towards the Dam than it does now.  Where now is the new Bourse was then shipping.  But the new Bourse looks stable enough to-day.  As to its architectural charms, opinions differ.  My own feeling is that it is not a style that will wear well.  For a permanent public building something more classic is probably desirable; and at Amsterdam, that city of sombre colouring, I would have had darker hues than the red and yellow that have been employed.  The site of the old Bourse is now an open space.