This reminds me that one of the most agreeable performances that I saw in any of the Dutch music halls (which are not good, and which are rendered very tedious to English people by reason of the interminable interval called the Pause in the middle of the evening), was a series of folk songs and dances by eight girls known as the Orange Blossoms, dressed in different traditional costumes of the north and south—­Friesland, Marken, and Zeeland.  They were quite charming.  They sang and danced very prettily, as housewives, as fisher girls, but particularly as Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes.

In the music halls both at Amsterdam and Rotterdam I listened to comic singers inexorably endowed with too many songs apiece; but I saw also some of those amazing feats of acrobatic skill and exhibitions of clean strength which alone should cause people to encourage these places of entertainment, where the standard of excellence in such displays is now so high.  I did not go to the theatre in Holland.  My Dutch was too elementary for that.  My predecessor Ireland, however, did so, and saw an amusing piece of literalness introduced into Hamlet.  In the impassioned scene, he tells us, between the prince and his mother, “when the hero starts at the imagined appearance of his father, his wig, by means of a concealed spring, jumped from ’the seat of his distracted brain,’ and left poor Hamlet as bare as a Dutch willow in winter.”

The Oude Kerk has very beautiful bells, but Amsterdam is no place in which to hear such sweet sounds.  The little towns for bells.  Near the church is the New Market, with the very charming old weigh-house with little extinguisher spires called the St. Anthonysveeg.  Here the fish market is held; and the fish market of a city like Amsterdam should certainly be visited.  The Old Market is on the western side of the Dam, under the western church.  “It is said,” remarks the author of Through Noord-Holland, “that Rembrandt has been buried in this church, though his grave has never been found.”

Napoleon’s sarcasm upon the English—­that they were a nation of shopkeepers—­never seemed to me very shrewd:  but in Holland one realises that if any nation is to be thus signally stigmatised it is not the English.  As a matter of fact we are very indifferent shopkeepers.  We lack several of the needful qualities:  we lack foresight, the sense of order and organised industry, and the strength of mind to resist the temptations following upon a great coup.  A nation of shopkeepers would not go back on the shop so completely as we do.  No nation that is essentially snobbish can be accurately summed up as a nation of shopkeepers.  The French for all their distracting gifts of art and mockery are better shopkeepers than we, largely because they are more sensibly contented.  They take short views and live each day more fully.  But the Dutch are better still; the Dutch are truly a nation of shopkeepers. [4]