It is stated that the kindly custom of allowing the children of Amsterdam the run of the Bourse as a playground for a week every year is some compensation for the suppression of the Kermis, but another story makes the sanction a perpetual reward for an heroic deed against the Spaniards performed by a child in 1622.

My advice to any one visiting Amsterdam is first to study a map of the city—­Baedeker gives a very useful one—­and thus to begin with a general idea of the lie of the land and the water.  With this knowledge, and the assistance of the trams, it should not appear a very bewildering place.  The Dam is its heart:  a fact the acquisition of which will help very sensibly.  All roads in Amsterdam lead to the Dam, and all lead from it.  The Dam gives the city its name—­Amstel dam, the dam which stops the river Amstel on its course to the Zuyder Zee.  It also gives English and American visitors opportunities for facetiousness which I tingle to recall.  Every tram sooner or later reaches the Dam:  that is another simplifying piece of information.  The course of each tram may not be very easily acquired, but with a common destination like this you cannot be carried very far wrong.

One soon learns that the trams stop only at fixed points, and waits accordingly.  The next lesson, which is not quite so simple, is that some of these points belong exclusively to trams going one way and some exclusively to trams going the other.  If there is one thing calculated to reduce a perplexed foreigner in Amsterdam to rage and despair, it is, after a tiring day among pictures, to hail a half empty tram at a fixed point, with Tram-halte written on it, and be treated to a pitying smile from the driver as it rushes by.  Upon such mortifications is education based; for one then looks again more narrowly at the sign and sees that underneath it is a little arrow pointing in the opposite direction to which one wished to go.  One then walks on to the next point, at which the arrow will be pointing homewards, and waits there.  Sometimes—­O happy moment—­a double arrow is found, facing both ways.

It is on the Dam that guides will come and pester you.  The guide carries an umbrella and offers to show Amsterdam in such a way as to save you much money.  He is quite useless, and the quickest means of getting free is to say that you have come to the city for no other purpose than to pay extravagantly for everything.  So stupendous an idea checks even his importunity for a moment, and while he still reels you can escape.  The guides outside the Ryks Museum who offer to point out the beauties of the pictures are less persistent.  It would seem as if they were aware of the unsoundness of their case.  There is no need to reply to these at all.

On the Dam also is the Royal Palace, which once was the stadhuis, but in 1808 (when Amsterdam was the third city of the French Empire) was offered to Louis Napoleon for a residence.  Queen Wilhelmina occasionaly stays there, but The Hague holds her true home.  The apartments are florid and not very interesting; but if the ascent of the tower is permitted one should certainly make it.  It is interesting to have Amsterdam at one’s feet.  Only thus can its peculiar position and shape be understood:  its old part an almost perfect semicircle, with canal-arcs within arcs, and its northern shore washed by the Y.