There can be only one reason for my clearing my conscience of Utrecht and ’S Hertogenbosch in one and the same chapter. This may or may not be apparent to him who has already toured Holland, for the two towns cannot be said to be on the same line of traffic; they are not even in the same province; neither are they alike in appearance. Utrecht, the capital of the province of that name, with its canals and old houses, its lime avenues and its shady parks, has more of the typical Dutch element in its make-up, and can be as easily reached, and as profitably, from either Rotterdam or Amsterdam.

’S Hertogenbosch, on the other hand, the frontier town of the southern provinces, lies along the route that leads into Germany, and its “windmills and wooden shoes” are conspicuous in their absence. It seems, out of respect for its geographical position, more of a Belgian city. Indeed, the Belgians, unable to conquer its Dutch nomenclature, long ago rechristened the place, and now it is as often spoken of by the more euphonious name of Bois le Duc—a merciful convenience for all of my personal purposes, because it is as difficult to write ’S Hertogenbosch as it is to pronounce it. Since to Bois le Duc it has been simplified, Bois le Duc it shall be henceforth called within these pages.

Now to divulge my secret for treating Utrecht and Bois le Duc in the same chapter: with their famous churches they are the most important ecclesiastical cities in Holland. Utrecht, in addition, is a university town, a cattle center, and one of the oldest places, as well as one of the largest, in the Netherlands. In Roman times it was known by the Latin translation of “The Ford of the Rhine”—Trajectum ad Rhenum. In the seventh century, under the Frisians, King Dagobert I founded here the first Frisian church. Subsequently the archbishops of Utrecht grew to be the most powerful of medieval prelates, and their see at an early date became renowned for the magnificence of its houses of worship. Utrecht was included in the French province of Lorraine, was later annexed to the German empire by force of circumstances, and enjoyed the distinction of being a favorite residence of the emperors. The union of the seven Dutch provinces was formed in Utrecht in 1579, under the sponsorship and direction of John of Nassau, brother of William, Prince of Orange, to establish the independence of the Netherlands. From that time on until 1593 the States-General assembled here; in that year the seat of the Dutch Government was transferred to The Hague. The most celebrated event in the old city’s history, however, took place on the 11th of April, 1713, when the peace was here concluded that terminated the Spanish wars of Succession.

That much for history.

Twentieth century Utrecht is different. Its old-time importance as one of the foremost commercial cities of the Middle Ages was owing to its enviable position on the Rhine where the river wrenches itself into two branches—the Old Rhine and the Vecht. The former percolates, according to the will and calculations of the Dutch engineers, into the North Sea at Katwyk, and the Vecht empties into the Zuyder Zee, near Muiden. The city’s commercial importance and activity have dwindled piteously into a weekly cattle market held in the Vreeburg, Utrecht’s great central square, occupying the site of a castle built in 1517 by Emperor Charles V.

With the break of day on Saturday the farmers from the surrounding country, “klomped” in more varied styles of wooden shoes than you will find in any other single town in Holland, begin to arrive with their stock at the Vreeburg. In the night a conglomerate collection of little side-show tents and canvas-covered stalls for the sale of almost everything, has sprung up like a bed of mushrooms on the outskirts of the market place, so that the cattle dealer, after he has negotiated a substitution of stock for its equivalent in the coin of the realm, may want for neither amusement nor a convenient place to purchase the hundred and one articles that his better seven-eighths has cautioned him not to come home without.

Singularly enough, the same methods obtain in bargaining for cows in Utrecht that are prevalent while dickering for cheeses in Alkmaar. There is the same placid composure on the part of the seller, the same minute examination on the part of the buyer; there is the same Captain John Smith pose; there is the same whacking of hands; there is the same general exodus from the market place, after the ceremonies, to the more blithesome lunchrooms and halls of frivolity. I wish I might have followed up the case of a cattle dealer whom I saw in a certain cafÉ after the market, making a lunch of the uncertain mixture of a glass of beer and a dish of currants. The notation of the after effects of the combination might have been of value to materia medica.

Utrecht’s famous old churches have been pillaged and desecrated to a great extent by the elements and the changes wrought by time and tide. Once, long ago, when the followers of the various creeds were all at sixes and sevens, the Munsterkerk, the Pieterskerk, the Janskerk, and the cathedral itself, no doubt, with their cloistersful of clergy, were walled in and moated, and patronized as much as asylums of refuge as for worship. To-day they are simply tolerated. A coffeehouse does a land office business in the archbishop’s palace, and the tramcar company has tunneled through the vaulted archway of the great detached cathedral tower rather than go to the trouble of laying the tracks around it.

And what a cathedral this Gothic curiosity of Utrecht is! Erected in the eleventh century upon the site of a former ecclesiastical edifice founded in 720, in its day it must have easily outclassed anything of its ilk in all the Netherlands. Now its back is broken, so to speak, beyond repair, for in 1674 a violent hurricane that bowled a spare with the church towers in the district, tore out the nave of the cathedral and left the tower and the choir completely disconnected. The site of the demolished nave now forms the center of the Cathedral Square, and is as much a thoroughfare as any street in the city.

The interior of the church, like the interior of almost every church of any size in Holland, offers little of originality or interest. The walls are covered with many layers of unbecoming whitewash, and any pleasing effect that the columned interior might have originally had is lost, for a portion in the center is boarded up, like a bull ring with its barrier, segregating the inclosed space for the purpose of uninterrupted worship. The one redeeming feature of the whole place, aside from a few meritorious monuments, is a handsome oaken pulpit, elaborately carved by hand, so as to give the effect of a miniature cathedral in itself.

After being a city of disabled and decrepit churches, Utrecht is a university town, and the seven or eight hundred students in attendance do their best to emulate the early ecclesiastics by trying to keep the place in a state of perennial siege, for it is to be remembered that the drudgery and frugality of university life in Holland is not what it is cracked up to be. In a way, a Dutch college education is a good bit of a farce. The student is under very few obligations except to himself. He does not have to appear in chapel; he does not even have to attend classes, and there are a large number of students in each of Holland’s three universities—young men of private fortune who take up a course in law or what not, with no intention of ever practicing, in order to avail themselves of the gaiety and freedom of university life—who never enter a lecture room from one term’s end to the other. Consequently, there is much hilarity and much extravagance, all of which is more or less resented by the thrifty, peaceful townspeople, and which sometimes places the two factions under strained relations. When a student does complete a course, having seen fit to relegate himself to the hard, honest work necessary to the attainment of a doctor’s degree, he deems it of such momentous occurrence that he forthwith has his thesis published in book form de luxe, and, hiring a carriage, which is manned by student initiates into his Corps, he drives in state to the residences of his several professors and intimate friends, leaving with each a copy of his work.

In the above mentioning of the Students’ Corps, I have named a salient feature of student life in Holland, and one which none of her universities is without. Although of broader membership, it takes the place of our own fraternities. It includes, however, all the students who can afford to pay its dues and subscriptions. A senate, comprising a rector, a secretary, and three other functionaries, elected annually by the Corps from among its members of four or more years’ standing, dictates the policy of the Corps and administers its affairs. Any member of the Corps is eligible for membership in the Corps Club, the culminating distinction of Dutch university life, or for any of its various subdivisions of athletic or social societies. The initiates undergo most of the harmless little byplays, not to mention some new ones, that provide for such a halcyon period in the careers of our own fraternal neophytes.

Among its numerous idiosyncrasies Utrecht has a canal, called the Oude Gracht, that is unique in comparison with other canals in other cities in Holland. The water in this canal lies far below the level of the bordering streets. Between the street and the water there is a great stone step that forms the real canal bank. In the old days the “riser” above this step was made up of foundation arches of stone upon which were built the specious mansions that fronted the thoroughfares alongside the canal. To make use of spaces which would otherwise be wasted, these vaulted foundations served as cellars, with the street for a roof, and were in as constant use as any other part of the dwelling. Most of them are now occupied as shops, to the entrances of which you must descend a flight of steps from the roadway above; but here and there their windows display the lace curtain and the boxful of flowers that give evidence of domestic habitation.

Utrecht, too, has many verdant beauty spots, the most verdant being the Hoogeland Park, with its circumference bordered with attractive villas and reached through a wide lime avenue they call the Maliebaan. In the Antiquarian Museum, situated in the park, one may behold the two most interesting relics in the possession of Utrecht, if we exclude, perhaps, the seventy different kinds of lace on view in the Archiepiscopal Museum on the Nieuwe Gracht. These are: a table, handsomely and delicately carved, at which the signatories of the famous Peace of Utrecht were said to have sat in 1713; and the “Doll’s House,” an accurate reproduction in miniature of a patrician dwelling of the period, executed in 1680, and worked out in the minutest detail from cellar to chimney pot, from kitchen utensils to genuine oil paintings by celebrated masters on the walls of the drawing room.

Surrounding Utrecht and penetrating far to the east and the south are the great fortifications, of whose presence the casual observer is entirely unaware, belonging to the first line of national defense that might be used to protect the Dutch capital from invasion—a defense in which she seeks the assistance of her mortal enemy, and discovers him weighed in the balance and not found wanting. Upon a process of general inundation, by fresh water wherever possible so as not to impair the future productiveness of the fields, does Holland depend for her safety from invasion both by land and by sea. In the probability of the latter, her power of self-exclusion is augmented by a treaty with Belgium, signed in 1892, confirmed in 1905, and only recently made public, reserving for her the right to block the great estuary of the Scheldt in case of war or rumors of war. In times of peace Belgium shares with the Netherlands all rights of navigation of the Scheldt, and Holland may not displace or remove buoys, lights, or other aids to navigation, without Belgian consent.

But with regard to Holland’s ability to isolate herself by general inundation, it is a scheme that gives little outward evidence of being in operation. A stranger might roam within her boundaries for a year and a day without even surmising that such a thing could be accomplished, so successfully are her greatest works hidden from the eye. The scheme provides, in brief, for the blowing up of railway bridges and for the opening of the sluice gates of great reservoirs, regulating the amount of water to be poured in over the country so that it should all be of the same depth, prohibiting both the possibility of wading through it and the passage of vessels over it.

A half a day, if time presses, will suffice to see Bois le Duc. After you have wandered about in its great Gothic cathedral of St. John, one of the largest and, by all odds, the fanciest church—if a church can be said to be fancy—in Holland, you will have done with the town. It holds nothing else of interest. Although of 32,000 population, and the capital of the Province of North Brabant, it is dull and unappealing to the tourist. There are few types and few distinctive mannerisms. Of its costumes, the only feature is a headdress, affected by some of the countrywomen of the surrounding district, composed of white lace and topped with garlands of artificial flowers as ridiculous and disappointing as the “poke bonnets” worn by the middle-aged matrons of Leeuwarden, and just as out of place.

Even the market square is devoid of the usual fringe of ancient buildings. Here they hold a cattle market on Wednesdays, but to strike every city in Holland upon the day of its distinctive market would necessitate a vast amount of vibratory traveling, which in itself, and not considering the markets, would soon grow monotonous. I happened upon Bois le Duc on a Saturday, when one of those nondescript, unsavory bazaars of cooking utensils and crockery was in full swing. It was a hot day, for Holland, and the sun beat down upon the unprotected square with a most uncomfortable effect. So I spent most of my spare time under the awning of a nearby cafÉ watching the business transactions of a couple of “hokey-pokey” wagons, decorated and garnished so that they resembled the floats in a Queen of the May pageant.

But an inspection of Bois le Duc’s cathedral will reimburse any traveler who has planned to pay the town a visit. It stands on the edge of a wide parade ground, not far from the market, from the opposite side of which the church’s Gothic gargoyles and entablatures can be seen to good advantage above the trees.

Founded in the eleventh century, this cathedral was originally erected as a Romanesque edifice. After suffering the inevitable results of a devastating conflagration, it was rebuilt in the early half of the fifteenth century, its Romanesque design having been discarded and a late Gothic one adopted. Since 1860 it has been subjected to a plan of restoration. And not only from without is it a pleasing contrast to the usual run of Dutch churches, but it is the only one in Holland whose interior, having marvelously escaped the iconoclasm of early days, and having been allowed to remain undesecrated by the customary coat of whitewash and the central bull ring, is what it ought to be. The visitor of to-day may obtain an uninterrupted view from one end of the cathedral to the other, for the authorities, always in need of funds to carry on the restorations to the church, sold its handsome choir screen some years ago and realized $4,500 on it. But the absence of the screen will scarcely be noticed in the cathedral—indeed, the general effect is more satisfying without it. Stowed away, however, among a collection of other ecclesiastical curios in the new Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London, without the lights and shadows of its church to enhance its richness, it has lost much of its beauty.

From Bois le Duc I was ticketed to quit the country. I had seen the cathedral, and time hung heavily, so I wandered back to the station all of an hour before the scheduled departure of my train, to jot down a few notes and indulge in a few final musings upon a great nation—the only little thing about which I found to be its area—a nation of great deeds in peace and in war, a nation of great men, a nation that has, by the sheer character of its people, surmounted great obstacles, and a nation with a future as great as its past.

Each time I have visited Holland I have been loath to leave, but in more ways than one this feeling was mitigated in Bois le Duc, for Bois le Duc is a more satisfactory place to leave from than The Hague, for example, and when the always solicitous station master, in black frock coat and bright red cap, finally came to tell me that my train was due, I gathered together my impedimenta and followed him resignedly toward the train shed.

As I passed through the waiting-room my eye caught some lettering over the mantel of an artistic fireplace. Its words pronounced the traveler’s benediction: “Goede Reis.” Whether he appreciated the fact or not, that old fireplace had stood there for years, wishing the voyageur a pleasant journey, and the gentleness, the simple kindliness of the message struck me as being characteristic of the men who put it there—the Hollanders.