The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the Dutch army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand the phrase “East Indian cigar.” He said there were no such cigars in his parents’ shop. When I said “Sumatra,” he understood, and fetched his mother. When I said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn, his mother put away all the samples already exhibited and fetched his father. The family had begun to comprehend that a serious customer had strayed into the shop. The father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity and deference went up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of cigars that were warm to the touch. “These are the best?”

“These are the best.” I bought. They were threepence apiece.

A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like too many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of dogs—dogs that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order to prove that they are of the race that has always ended by expelling invaders with bloodshed.

I was safer in the yacht’s dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched, three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into the canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone on the quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as table-tops—cleaner.

The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first glance, exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I remember it as the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner steering, and foul the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his owner, as if to say, “You see what owners do when they take charge.” I admitted it.

We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy and recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having taken to his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail in a jiffy. The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become an omnibus conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus conductor will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young man, and himself painted in water-colors.

I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town; but I know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely practical town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the cook. We were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised even by E. V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation. Kampen has architecture,—wonderful gates,—but it also has the crudest pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east wind was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner of Kampen was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen, which perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning was warm and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven weeks continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three hours we were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was steering.

“Please keep the center of the channel,” the skipper enjoined me.

I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go to Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the town.

Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end surcease, and all their long-colored weins (vanes) streamed in the wind against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was the spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses that pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue ensign), and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay and held him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the spectacle of his aged father’s trading barge, unexpectedly making for the same port, with his mother, brother, and sister on deck—the crew! Arrived in port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the skipper boarded his old home with becoming placidity.

The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom nated by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a smack arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed to be always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass. The town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a square. Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in Indian reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely imitated from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the church was a picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a sacristan out of a late novel by Huysmans.

The churchyard was a mass of tall flowers.

The women’s costumes here showed a difference, the gilt casque being more visibly divided into two halves. All bodices were black, all skirts blue. Some of the fishermen make majestic figures, tall, proud, commanding, fit adversaries of Alva; in a word, exemplifications of the grand manner. Their salutes were sometimes royal.

The gaiety of the color; the distinction of the forms; the strange warmth; the completeness of the entity of the town, which seemed to have been constructed at one effort; the content of the inhabitants, especially the visible, unconscious gladness of the women at the return of their mariners; the urbanity of everybody—all these things helped to produce a comfortable and yet disconcerting sensation that the old, unreformed world was not quite ripe for utter destruction.

All day until late in the evening smacks ceased not to creep up the canal. The aspect of the basin altered from minute to minute, with disastrous effect on water-colorists. In the dusk we ferreted In a gloomy and spellbound second-hand shop, amid dozens of rococo wall-clocks, and bought a few little things. As we finally boarded the yacht in the dark, we could see a group of sailors in a bosky arbor bending over a table on which was a lamp that harshly lighted their grave faces. They may have thought that they were calculating and apportioning the week’s profits; but in reality they were playing at masterpieces by Rembrandt.