I find that this plan works very well with guides:  when I see one approaching, I at once offer to guide him.  It is an idea from which he does not rally in time to annoy us.  The other day I offered to show a persistent fellow through an old ruin for fifty kreuzers:  as his price for showing me was forty-eight, we did not come to terms.  One of the most remarkable guides, by the way, we encountered at Stratford-on-Avon.  As we walked down from the Red Horse Inn to the church, a full-grown boy came bearing down upon us in the most wonderful fashion.  Early rickets, I think, had been succeeded by the St. Vitus’ dance.  He came down upon us sideways, his legs all in a tangle, and his right arm, bent and twisted, going round and round, as if in vain efforts to get into his pocket, his fingers spread out in impotent desire to clutch something.  There was great danger that he would run into us, as he was like a steamer with only one side-wheel and no rudder.  He came up puffing and blowing, and offered to show us Shakespeare’s tomb.  Shade of the past, to be accompanied to thy resting-place by such an object!  But he fastened himself on us, and jerked and hitched along in his side-wheel fashion.  We declined his help.  He paddled on, twisting himself into knots, and grinning in the most friendly manner.  We told him to begone.  “I am,” said he, wrenching himself into a new contortion, “I am what showed Artemus Ward round Stratford.”  This information he repeated again and again, as if we could not resist him after we had comprehended that.  We shook him off; but when we returned at sundown across the fields, from a visit to Anne Hathaway’s cottage, we met the sidewheeler cheerfully towing along a large party, upon whom he had fastened.

The people of Amsterdam are only less queer than their houses.  The men dress in a solid, old-fashioned way.  Every one wears the straight, high-crowned silk hat that went out with us years ago, and the cut of clothing of even the most buckish young fellows is behind the times.  I stepped into the Exchange, an immense interior, that will hold five thousand people, where the stock-gamblers meet twice a day.  It was very different from the terrible excitement and noise of the Paris Bourse.  There were three or four thousand brokers there, yet there was very little noise and no confusion.  No stocks were called, and there was no central ring for bidding, as at the Bourse and the New York Gold Room; but they quietly bought and sold.  Some of the leading firms had desks or tables at the side, and there awaited orders.  Everything was phlegmatically and decorously done.