He who says the romance of the West is dead has never mingled much with the “eight-section man” down in the southwestern corner of Texas. He who avers that the romance of steel is played out and defunct has never straddled an I-beam of a New York skyscraper in the building high above the vortexes of street traffic, above the flirt of a housemaid hanging out clothes on a lower roof. He who claims that the romance of shipping has succumbed under the pressure of modern methods has never been to Rotterdam.

They have a pretty park in that San Francisco of Holland that fringes the bank of the Maas. On its river side, near the entrance, there is a cafÉ, where, in the evening, the less romantic Rotterdamer basks and imbibes in the throes of a virulent orchestra. Farther along under the trees, past the cafÉ and overlooking the river, numerous benches invite the lover of the sea and its ships to sit him down and gaze upon the great steel hulls—and wooden ones, too—that have just returned from, or are about to depart for, a lengthy and uncertain argument with Father Neptune.

The view from here is several times more magnetic than it is from the neighborhood of the cafÉ, and so here, about dusk, come those wizened warriors upon whom the sea has cast her spell once and for all time, to sit and smoke their pipes upside down and dream, perhaps, of other days, of other ships, of other seas. Three or four may occupy a single bench, but it will be an hour before a word is passed between them. It is their only method of rejuvenation, and they are loath to be reminded that their day is almost done. A certain sort of reverence pervades the place; it would seem a blasphemy even to speak aloud.

On one of these wooden benches I sat one evening at sunset, looking out across to the docks on the opposite side of the river. Busy little motor boats were sputtering hither and thither between the shipping, bent upon the fulfillment of their last missions of the day. A few hundred yards farther up, a couple of gloomy-looking steam ferries, built like Rhine river tugs, transferred their deck loads of workmen from the different docks and machine shops on the Feijenoord to the Westplein landing in Rotterdam. From out in the stream came the rattle of chain through hawse pipe, as a Portuguese tramp, having entered the harbor too late for a stranger to dock, was preparing an anchorage for the night. Close by lay a Norwegian “wind jammer”—so close that the two of them might easily have rubbed figure-heads. A big cargo boat, bound out, preceded by a tiny tug to herald her approach and followed by its twin to help keep her straight while passing, an exact fit, through the draw to one of the many “havens,” bayed sonorously for the less conspicuous craft to get out of her way; while alongside the Wilhelminakade the upper decks of a great passenger-carrying leviathan, already electric lighted, showed through the rigging of the intermediate vessels. Out of respect for the tide, she was to sail at three the next morning, and her passengers, when they awakened, would find themselves well down the English Channel on their way back to New York after a summer in Europe.

Presently, two young women, pushing a baby-coach between them, came strolling along, and took up positions at the railing just in front of me. Plainly they were English, and, although I strained every nerve to overhear their conversation (which was mean of me), but could not, I divined the reason for their coming. The same thing occurs a dozen times a day in Liverpool, in ’Frisco, in Sydney, in Valparaiso, in every port of any consequence in the world. One was the wife, and the other perhaps the sister, or her sister, or maybe a close friend. And there was also the kiddy.

Their vigil was not long in being rewarded, for during the three weeks’ absence—three months’, more likely, if the voyage had been a long one—they had perused the Lloyd reports daily and diligently, and with the additional aid of a letter or two, had calculated the time of arrival to a nicety.

Soon a great black hull appeared far down the river. Darkness was gathering fast, but they knew the lines of that ship as they knew their little gardens at home. They un-reticuled their handkerchiefs and waved and giggled and giggled and waved. For full twenty minutes they waved and giggled, and then they held the kiddy up. The ship turned off to enter a dock on the opposite side of the stream and, as she turned her port beam to us, someone—it would not have been difficult to guess whom—on her bridge held up a navigator’ s three-foot telescope, it having been doubtless already very much in hand, and waved a brief but significant, “All’s well; see you in two hours”—or waves to that effect.

Yes, there is still romance in shipping, and Rotterdam, being first, last, and all the time a shipping town, there is romance in Rotterdam.

The most satisfactory way of approaching Rotterdam is by water, and the most satisfactory water way is from Dortrecht. By this route you obtain not only the most characteristic views of Rotterdam and the bustle and business about her water front, but you get also the glimpse of Dortrecht that Albert Cuyp availed himself of so often, for the water front of Dortrecht doesn’t seem to have changed much, according to Cuyp, except in the item of steam for sail.

It is a pleasant trip of an hour and a half duration down the Maas, past numerous shipyards that are capable of building anything from a canal boat to an ocean-going cargo carrier; past great suction dredges assigned to the perennial duty of keeping the river conquered; past fishers for salmon, who, by treaty, may lower their nets only upon certain days in order to give the German fishers, higher up the stream, an equal opportunity to make a living; past little hamlets whose river docks and picturesque dock tenders serve in lieu of railway stations and the more prosaic red-capped and frock-coated station masters.

But Rotterdam, by reason of her trade, does not coincide with the general idea of Holland. She is more or less cosmopolitan, to be sure, but this phase strikes the traveler less forcibly than her ardent activity. What with her electric cranes and machine shops and sugar refineries and tobacco factories and shipbuilding yards and distilleries, she gives one the impression of a thriving German seaport. The home port claimed by the greater number of the seven hundred or more steam and sailing vessels that make up the merchant marine of Holland, is Rotterdam, and through this port passes at least one-half the country’s total imports by sea and almost as much of her exports, together with four-fifths of Holland’s trade with the Rhine. But Baltimore, in the matter of population, would make two of this, the most active, the most important seaport of the Netherlands.

Still, Rotterdam is essentially Dutch, in fact if not in first appearances. She has her Groote Kerk, the Church of St. Lawrence, begun in 1412; she has her Town Hall, without which, it seems, no town in Holland could survive; she has her picture gallery, although a mediocre one, in the Boymans Museum; she has her old market and her new church; and she has her fish market, where women of the most uncertain antiquity sit and gossip and knit and sell sole between stitches. Here and there, too, she has her old windmill, thatch covered, browbeaten by the weather, massive and ponderous-looking, that, in the very midst of twentieth century hurry and scurry, waves its stiff arms as if depicting in pantomime a scene of other days. And then, in striking contrast, right at the very edge of the old harbor, stands the tallest building in the Netherlands. It must be as sky-scraping as eight or ten stories, and high up under its eaves it displays the advertisement of an American breakfast food. Its builders probably thought that a photographer would be the only mortal who could be induced to rent the top story, so they made the building’s sloping roof into one glorious skylight, under which rural Holland might sit and have its picture taken for the family album.

It was while waiting for a car at the beginning of The Oosterkade and just across the old harbor from this Metropolitan Tower of Rotterdam that the more nearly general of all Dutch customs was brought home to me.

The car had approached its terminus and I was about to mount, when the conductor, more forcibly than politely, requested that I discontinue the attempt and take up my position where I belonged, with the rest of the crowd, in the vicinity of a certain lamp-post a few steps beyond—the Dutch being most precise and systematic. I ambled thither and was standing in the more or less protecting umbrage of the lamp-post, with sarcastic but not envious mien, watching the traction company partake of a large slab of black bread and cheese (until the disappearance of which the car refused to continue) when I was accosted by a small street urchin of about the tender age of seven, who was armed with an immense cigar. I happened to be smoking at the time, and this was what brought the boy in my direction. He wanted a light and wasted no words in asking for it. Being somewhat shocked that a youth of such tender years should be so faithful a slave to the vile, pernicious weed, I submitted to his plea under mental protest. But he seemed not in the least embarrassed, for he saluted and marched off, apparently enjoying the thing as if it had been his fifth since breakfast.

Before I was through with Holland, however, I came to know that every able-bodied male in the kingdom acquires the cigar habit as early in life as his physical condition permits, and I have yet to see the adult Dutchman who doesn’t use tobacco in some form. Holland, by virtue of her colonial holdings in Sumatra and the Straits Settlements, is the paradise of smokers, and tobacco stores in every town, be it large or small, are as thick as saloons in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. If you pay more than the equal value of two American cents for a cigar in Holland you are branded as a foreigner or an extravagant rouÉ. Of course foreigners who unfurl their native colors full in the face of the tobacconist are expected to and do pay more, but a cigar equal in flavor and composition to the best of our ten cent brands can be bought in Holland for five Dutch cents, and often less, if you go about it in the proper manner. The age at which boys learn to smoke in Holland has never been correctly computed, but in the country I have seen lads of five or six serenely eliminating all possible chance of being rewarded the oft-referred-to gold watch at the age of twenty-one, and handling their cigars with as much real enjoyment as their paternal grandparent.

Perhaps at this point it might be opportune to tell the story of old Herr van Klaes of this same town of Rotterdam, who consumed a five-ounce package of tobacco daily and died in action at the age of ninety-eight with his pipe actually in his mouth. In his will he expressed the wish that every smoker in the kingdom be invited to his funeral “by letter, circular, and advertisement,” and all who took advantage of the invitation should be presented with ten pounds of tobacco and two pipes, the name of van Klaes, his crest, and the date of his demise to be engraved upon the latter. Every poor man in the neighborhood who accompanied the bier was to receive a large package of smoking mixture on each anniversary of the death of his champion. The will stipulated further that all who wished to partake of its benefits must smoke “without interruption during the entire ceremony.” The body was to be placed in a coffin lined with the wood of his old cigar boxes, and at the foot should be placed a package of French tobacco and one of the Dutch blend. At his side in the coffin was to be laid his favorite pipe and a box of matches, “For,” he said, “one never knows what may happen.” And all persons in the funeral procession were requested to sprinkle the ashes of their pipes upon the bier as they passed it while taking their departure from the grounds.

It is said the funeral of Herr van Klaes at least enjoyed the distinction of being the largest seen in Rotterdam in many a day. It must have been a busy time for the aanspreker. Indeed, it must have taken the concentrated efforts of all the aansprekers in Holland to help advertise the funeral. But here a few lines as to the solution of the word “aanspreker.”

The Dutch aanspreker is he of the mourning robes whose duty it is to go about from house to house, wherever even the flimsiest ties, whether social or business, exist, and announce the saddening news of a death; or it is he of the more gaudy apparel who gives the gladsome tidings of a birth in the family—and the degree of his mournfulness or jocundity in appearance bespeaks the mournfulness or jocundity of his employers.

In earlier times the services of the aanspreker were augmented by those of the huilebalk, a kind of a professional mourner, who, in the case of a death, accompanied the aanspreker on his rounds and wept more or less fluently after the completion of each doleful message. His coat was long-tailed and his hat wide-brimmed and the extent of his sorrow in each case depended wholly upon the receipts for his services; the more money, the more tears. Both must have been depressing professions at best, but this manner of announcing the news constituted an essential factor of every funeral. The aanspreker is often seen to-day, but the huilebalk has wept himself out of existence, probably on account of a simple dearth of apprentices.

The patron saint, almost, of Rotterdam is Gherardt Gherardts, better known by the more poetic name of Erasmus Desiderius—meaning “beloved and long desired”—scholar, critic, philosopher, intellectual fly-by-night, born in Rotterdam in 1466. A bronze statue of him by Hendrik de Keyser decorates the Groote Markt of his birthplace. Known best by his immortal satire, “The Praise of Folly,” and for his being, in 1516, the first to be so bold as to amend the text of the Greek New Testament, Erasmus was undoubtedly the “intellectual dictator of his age.” He entered the order of the Brethren of the Common Life, first at ’S Hertogenbosch and later at Delft, and the year America was discovered saw him acting as secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai. He studied in Paris, in Orleans, in Oxford, in Rome, and then returned to England to accept a professorship at the University of Cambridge. He died in Basle in 1536.

Rotterdam cannot be said to be noted for its cleanliness; in fact, it crowds Amsterdam for first place as the dirtiest city in Holland. But still Rotterdam as well as Amsterdam has its beauty spots. Some of the residence streets in the newer part of the city are veritable gardens in themselves. The Parklaan, with the Park at one end and the Grooteveerhaven, the latter crowded with private motor boats and yachts that gleam in their innocence of dirt, at the other, is lined with beautiful homes. It and the Mauritsweg and the Eendragtsweg are tree studded and kept swept and sprinkled quite as thoroughly and as frequently as any of the streets in The Hague. The canal that borders these two latter streets is banked with lawns and crossed here and there by artistic rustic bridges, for in Rotterdam, as in the German municipalities, they pay more attention to the details of city beautification than do we in America. The community at large seems to take a personal interest in such affairs. Can you imagine the linemen for a telegraph company or an electric light corporation coming along the streets of a German city, exercising the right of eminent domain by ripping up the pavements of the property holders and digging holes big enough to bury a horse, in which to plant the unsightly wooden poles that seem to them, on account of their comparative cheapness, the only known method of carrying wires? The Germans wouldn’t stand it for a minute. They use steel wire carriers over there—a more businesslike looking trestle work in the shape of an elongated truncated pyramid, set slightly above the ground on a concrete foundation. And I noticed that these “trestle” telegraph poles in Rotterdam, when the conditions permitted, were planted in the center of a little bed of geraniums, while some even had vines climbing upon them.

The Dutch, too, are sticklers for coziness and they try to make their living quarters as habitable as possible. In the congested harbors of Rotterdam, where, sometimes, you can step from one side of the stream to the other upon the flat decks of the swarms of canal boats, it is doubtful if you will see an uncurtained cabin window, and pots of flowers will be displayed in most of them. The train shed of the Beurs railway station in the heart of the city has an outside cornice of flower boxes filled with pink geraniums. But then, you will remember about the Dutch locomotives—which accounts for much.

As you enter Rotterdam or Amsterdam on the railway you pass row after row of what we please to call tenement houses. Even these are not devoid of a cozy, homelike aspect that our tenements and even reasonably inexpensive apartment houses know not. Each apartment can boast of a balcony in the rear that is partitioned off from its neighbors. In many cases these balconies are shaded with awnings from the glare of the sun and decorated with flowerpots in profusion. This serves the city dweller in lieu of a garden, and here he eats his meals and spends his evenings after work. In the daytime the family use the balcony as an improvised sewing room. Many of the back yards of the smaller houses consist of a tree lined canal over which the family looks from the seclusion of a flower girdled, awning covered veranda.

The Dutch not only keep themselves cozy but they take a tender sort of interest in the well-being of their birds and dumb animals. True, they train their dogs to help their masters pull the milk carts or vegetable wagons, but the dogs look husky and well fed and seem to take pride in their accomplishment. A spare-ribbed stray canine prowling around the neighborhood is an unknown quantity in Holland.

In the center of some of Rotterdam’s canals which are barred to traffic and made, instead, to assist in the beautification of the city, you will see little wicker duck nests, like empty market baskets turned on their sides. They rest on piles driven into the bottom of the canal, and the entrance to each is approached from the water by means of a wooden incline about the size of a shingle. This is not only a convenience for the ducks but features as an artistic break in the monotony, I might say, of the canal.

And these are but a few of the reasons why a visit to Rotterdam, although barren of the types and characteristics that Holland is noted for, is well worth the trouble; if only to study the city and its inhabitants from a psychological point of view it is well worth while.