A Dutch saw has it that you “make your fortune in Rotterdam, consolidate it in Amsterdam, and spend it at The Hague.” I am not so sure about the veracity of the first two clauses, but you can certainly spend it at The Hague.

The Hague is at once the most beautiful and the most expensive city in Holland. It is the Paris, the Washington, the Berlin of the Netherlands all in one. Like Paris, it is so overflowing with history and art that it would take a small book to tell of it all in detail; like Washington, it is beautiful, and the official residence of the chief executive of the nation and the diplomatic corps, but not half so expensive; like Berlin, again it is just as beautiful and twice as expensive. It is the magnetic pole of the American tourist in Holland, and it takes pains to cater in many ways to his whims and fancies, not to mention his pocketbook, and thus hold his patronage. Half the town speaks English and most of the remaining half understands it. Its people are obliging and courteous and seem to take a personal interest in making your stay one of pleasure and instruction as they do in no other city in Europe. In The Hague I have tried to explain to an obtuse conductor, in smatterings of German, Dutch, and English, where I wished to get off the car, and half a dozen fellow-passengers, finding a stranger in difficulty, have chimed in without the least solicitation and untangled my knots of pantomime with real Dutch verbiage.

But, being the tourist center that it is, it has naturally developed the old familiar nuisance to be found in all cities of its ilk in Europe: the piratical parasite who stands in ambush behind the hotel porter as you start out in the morning and tags along halfway to your destination, shouting an incessant “Do you vont a guite, sir? Do you vont a guite?” You will find him in almost every part of the town, but his particular lair is in the lee of the picture galleries. Either by instinct or by abnormal powers of observation he knows that the average tourist whose time is limited will make a bee line for the nearest picture gallery before he has even had an opportunity to unpack his grip. So here near the galleries the guide awaits the coming of his prey. If you succumb to his prattle, all is lost, save the hope that he may soon run out of things to show you. But an excellent entertainment for a party of, say, four or five is to club together and hire a guide, let him take you whither he will, and, during the process, keep him under a rapid fire of questions so foolish and insipid that it will tax his ingenuity even to answer them incorrectly—as, you may remember, Mark Twain and his friend overwhelmed their guide in Genoa. This is the only way to obtain value received with—more often, without—respect to the guide, for his sense of humor is proverbially null and void and affords a vulnerable target.

And a wonder it is to me that some of these “old master” centers do not consider us Americans the most appreciative of art of any people in the world. They must think that we are picture and cathedral crazy—and I have no doubt they do, and snicker up their sleeves in lieu of a less ill-mannered outburst. Granted that in itself it is an education to see the famous pictures—I admit that there are other things in the world just as wonderful as old paintings, many of which are of notoriously poor draughtsmanship but have become famous merely from the fact that the paint still retains its luster after three hundred and some years. We pay too little attention to the life of the cities and the traits of their peoples as they are found to-day.

But I digress. This is not a lecture on the marvels or fallacies of art.

The site of The Hague was originally a hunting-park owned and operated by the Counts of Holland who used to come over frequently from Haarlem to hunt their deer. From this fact it derived its Dutch nomenclature, ’S Graven Hage, meaning “the Count’s inclosure.” The allurements of the place must have been to the detriment of official business in Haarlem, for they felled most of the trees with which it was overgrown and transferred thither the seat of government about the middle of the thirteenth century. Beginning with Maurice of Nassau in 1593, it became the official residence of the stadtholder of the Republic.

Having been thus honored as the capital of Dutch statesmanship in the early days, the main historical curiosity in The Hague is the Binnenhof, a group of ancient buildings where the stadtholders lived and worked and had their being and tried to dissolve frequent plots for their own extermination. Here William II, Count of Holland and afterward elected Emperor of Germany, built a castle in 1250, which, forty years later, was enlarged and fitted up for a permanent residence by his son, Floris V. At the east of the Binnenhof stands the old gabled and turreted Hall of the Knights, erected at the time of Floris and recently restored and put into use for legislative purposes.

But those days, however glorious from the point of view of national advancement, were also the days of plot and intrigue, and there is scarce an historical building in Holland but might tell its tale of a tragedy. On the 13th of May, 1619, the seventy-two year old prime minister of the nation at the time, Jan van Oldenbarnevelt, was put to death on a scaffold erected in the Binnenhof “for having conspired to dismember the States of the Netherlands, and greatly troubled God’s church,” according to Maurice of Orange, whose displeasure he had incurred. The learned Grotius, scholar and statesman and the then senator from Rotterdam, who was arrested at the same time as Oldenbarnevelt for alleged conspiracy with him, was sentenced to prison for life in the castle of Loevenstein, near Gorinchem. Happily, however, with the help of his wife, he effected means of escape ere he had been confined a full year.

Hard by the Binnenhof stands the old Gevangenpoort, now containing a morbidly interesting collection of guillotine blocks that have seen their grewsome service, neck twisters, back breakers, and other such unhappy instruments of torture, which recall, all too vividly, perhaps, the days when they were wont to be put into actual and frequent use in that same tower. In the tower, too, they will show you some of the dark, musty old dungeons, used for the former incarceration of political prisoners. Their names, written in blood by many of the victims, can still be traced upon the walls. Here also is where, in 1672, Cornelius De Witt, falsely accused of plotting against the life of William III, and his brother John, who had unwisely hastened to the tower to intercede in his behalf, were put to their horrible deaths by the gullible mob of citizens, who, believing in the guilt of Cornelius, had assembled in the neighborhood to make a demonstration against him. The remains of the brothers De Witt rest in the Nieuwe Kerk.

The Willem’splein, a large square a hundred yards or less to the east of the Binnenhof, is the center of gravity of The Hague’s traffic and street railway service. From here you may take an electric car to almost any part of the city, and to the suburbs as well. In the center of the plein stands the bronze statue of William the Silent, done by Royer and erected in 1848, with the Prince’s motto, “Tranquil Amid Raging Billows,” inscribed in Latin on the pedestal.

Facing the square on the west side stand the Colonial Offices and the Ministry of Justice, while just off the northwest corner is the Mauritshuis—the Louvre, the Corcoran Gallery, the Kaiser Friedrich’s Museum of The Hague. Built in the early half of the seventeenth century as a residence for the Dutch West India Company’s Governor of Brazil, it now shelters what is probably the most notable collection of paintings gathered under one roof in Holland, the gifts to the nation of the different stadtholders.

The reputed gems of this collection are Rembrandt’s rather morbid of subject, but admirably executed, “School of Anatomy,” and a large animal painting by Paul Potter, known as “The Bull,” in which Potter presents a collection of farm animals. Their owner, standing nearby, appears to be nearly as large as the bull, which is the central figure, and the bull, in turn, is just a shade smaller than the tree under which the owner stands. Taken individually, the animals are painted in a most marvelous manner, but with regard to composition I should think the accomplished Potter would rather have been known by his smaller animal pictures and his landscapes; eight of the best of the latter now hang in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. “The Bull” was carried off to the Louvre by the French at the time of the flight of the Dutch stadtholder in 1795, where it was awarded fourth place in point of value. Originally purchased in 1749 for something like $300, Napoleon restored it to the Dutch nation at a handsome profit for about $25,000.

The Mauritshuis also contains masterpieces by Holbein, Jan Steen, Rubens, Van Dyke, Terburg, Vermeer, and other famous Dutch artists, together with a Madonna by Murillo and some interesting royal portraits by Velasquez.

Backing upon the Mauritshuis is the picturesque Vyver, a broad sheet of water punctured here and there by the divings of ducks and swans. Near the center of its south side it reflects the walls and towers of the ancient Binnenhof, while on its north it is lined with many rows of trees.

Not far from where the lofty spire of iron openwork of the Groote Kerk—the scene of the wedding ceremony of Wilhelmina and Duke Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin on February 7, 1901—serves as a conspicuous landmark for strangers in the city, and facing a continuation of the busy Hoogstraat, rises the unimposing royal palace, from the front windows of which the Queen may look out upon an equestrian statue of the father of her country, William the Silent. It is a palace that gives the impression of having been built for comfort rather than ostentation, and when the Queen is not in residence you may obtain tickets of permission to be taken through by a servant, from a little tobacco store near by.

None of the rooms of the palace is particularly striking as to decorations and furniture, save one, and that is about the most remarkable apartment of any palace on the continent. Floor, walls, and ceiling, it is one solid mass of the most exquisitely carved teakwood, given by the colony of Java as a wedding present to the Queen. You will wonder little that it took upwards of thirty-five men seven years to complete the job. There are gold and inlaid pieces of wonderful workmanship in the cabinets that border the walls—presents from the Javanese to the little Juliana—which add to the whole impression of unalloyed richness welded together in perfect taste, without so much as giving the hint of a “gingerbread” effect. In beautiful gardens at the rear of the palace the Queen walks every morning with Juliana after dÉjeuner at eleven.

Farther along to the northwest is the fashionable residence section of The Hague, with the Willem’s Park as its principal focus. In the center of this park, in an open space called the “Plein 1813,” rises a handsome national monument, unveiled in 1869 to commemorate the restoration of Dutch independence by the expulsion of the French in 1813 and the return of the pristine exile, Prince William Frederic of Orange, who landed at Scheveningen and ascended the throne of Holland as king. Not far from here and still to the northwest, is the finest modern picture gallery in Holland, the Mesdag Museum, presented to the State by the modern Dutch artist, H. W. Mesdag, and his wife, in 1903.

The shopping district of The Hague comprises the Hoogstraat and its immediate vicinity, the Spuistraat and the Wegenstraat. The narrow Spuistraat is always the most congested. Like the Hoogstraat in Rotterdam and the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, it is so thickly patronized from four-thirty, say, until dark that vehicular traffic through it is self-suspended for the sake of saving time; even the pitiless Hague bicyclist is compelled to dismount and push his wheel through it. At this late hour of the day the cafÉs are given over to the cordially inclined and the coffee drinkers, who fill their favorite rendezvous to the bursting point. As in Berlin, the Zoological Garden at The Hague, with its cafÉ-concerts, is also a much frequented spot for recreation, but, unlike the Berlin garden, the less said about its zoology the better.

The beautiful old forest called the Bosch, lying just to the east of The Hague, intersected with disused and, therefore, rather stagnant canals, is the Versailles of Holland, and the “House in the Wood” is its Trianon. But the Bosch is much more accessible to The Hague than Versailles is to Paris, for an electric car will take you there from the plein in fifteen or twenty minutes.

Erected in 1645 by Prince Frederic Henry of Orange for his consort, the Princess Amalia of Solms, “The House in the Wood” latterly became famous as the seat of the international peace conference which the representatives of twenty-six different world powers held here in 1899. The conference convened in the so styled “Orange Room,” an octagonal hall lighted with a cupola, its walls and ceiling embellished with allegorical scenes from the life of Prince Frederic, done in oils by Dutch and Flemish artists. It is by far the most important apartment in the palace. The other rooms contain some wonderful Japanese embroideries, cabinets of elaborately and minutely carved ivories, rice paper tapestries, porcelains, and other exquisite objects of Oriental handcraft. It was here that the American historian, John Lothrop Motley, wrote a greater part of his “The Rise of the Dutch Republic” and a portrait of him hangs upon the wall of one of the rooms.

A short distance to the north of the forest will be erected the much talked of Peace Palace for the International Court of Arbitration, toward the cost of which Mr. Carnegie has promised to contribute a million and a half.

But two miles from The Hague lies Scheveningen—Holland’s most fashionable, most expensive, most diverting seaside resort—the Atlantic City of the Netherlands. It may be approached by divers means: by railway train, by electric car, by omnibus, or on foot. The two principal and most popular routes served by the electric cars from The Hague are the Old Way and the New. Both are tree shaded and attractive, but the more tree shaded and attractive is the Old Way. The clinkers with which the most of it is paved were put down as early as 1666. Lined on the left with handsome summer residences and on the right with a pretty park, the Old Way to Scheveningen, with its geometric rows of stately trees, is undoubtedly the finest avenue in Holland.

Scheveningen, besides being a watering place of many merits and numerous shortcomings, is a town of no mean importance as a fishing port. Its fleet numbers two hundred or more pinken, or small fishing boats, and their catch is sold at auction at the fishing harbor upon arrival, as at Ostend.

The name of the place is a hard one for the English-speaking tourist to pronounce, but he will not be far wrong if, in his apparent eagerness to get there, he inquires of the genial head porter at the hotel in The Hague the number of the car line that will take him to “Shave agin.” He may slur over a syllable or two in the abbreviation, but the head porter will make due allowance for at least a brave attempt to master the word—which is something—and will direct him accordingly.

Instead of the old familiar seaside board walk, Scheveningen has its stone paved Boulevard, a mile and a quarter long and eighty feet wide. This is the promenade of the international hodgepodge of holiday makers, augmented on a Sunday and in the evenings by giggling girls and sober countenanced fishermen from the village. Invariably dressed in their best Sunday-go-to-meetings, the most conspicuous feature of the feminine attire is a wide shawl, often suggesting the Persian in design, worn tight about the shoulders and reaching down to the waist in the back. Of course the skirts are padded voluminously about the hips, and the girls display at the temples many varieties of gilded antennÆ to hold their white caps securely.

About midway of the Boulevard and back of it, stands the ever present Kurhaus, although what they profess to cure in that house may simply be a reluctance on the part of the holder to diminish his letter of credit. It is three hundred feet or more in length, this Kurhaus, and its commodious hall, in which are held some very excellent symphony orchestra concerts, can seat as many as 3,000 people. On the side of the Kurhaus overlooking the sea there is a large stone terrace where the band plays in the afternoons, and, underneath this, a very expensive cafÉ.

Just opposite the Kurhaus is the pier—a real old-fashioned ocean going steel pier, terminating in a concert pavilion and built right out into the water for almost a quarter of a mile, having a plate glass partition down the middle, so that there is a lee and a weather side to it. At intervals along its sides are fish nets, which may be raised from or lowered into the water by means of a crank and spindle attached to the pier railing. These are rented to the public on the time basis, and there is ever a group of persistent people vibrating between one net and another in the hope that its operator may bring to the rail a real denizen of the watery depths. I contracted the fever one day myself and fell in with this flitting crowd for an hour, more or less, only to be unrewarded in the end, but I am told that if anything piscatorially larger than an adult white-bait inadvertently becomes enmeshed in any of the nets and is brought to the surface the successful fisher receives round after round of enthusiastic applause.

And Scheveningen is in no sense of the word a philanthropic institution. Everything in the place has its price mark tagged securely on. You have to pay to walk on the pier, concert or no concert; you have to pay to listen to the band from the Kurhaus terrace; you have to pay to sit in one of the yellow mushroom chairs that make the beach resemble a fungus growth; you have to pay even to take a bath in the ocean, and are then restricted to the hours of from seven in the morning until sunset. On Sundays they close up the ocean for bathing purposes at 2 p.m.

But sea bathing is a different proposition in Europe from what it is in America. At Scheveningen it is a matter of the most serious import, and the necessities for its success—I almost said “enjoyment”—are many. To go about it in the proper manner, you first approach the ticket window on the Boulevard in front of the Kurhaus and apply to the cashier for a permit, varying in price according to the class of bath selected. Providing you have brought your own bathing suit, this will be the only payment necessary, for the permit graciously entitles you to the use of two towels, obviously for drying purposes. In case you have come unprepared with regard to bathing apparel, you will have to pay for a suit, although, judging from those I have seen personally, the wearer should be the one to be rewarded. To avail yourself of the use of a “bath-sheet”—whatever that may be—necessitates additional expenditure, and there are various other alleged indispensable articles that the cashier may try to inflict upon the unwary at face value.

The next step is to repair to the beach and await the calling out of the number shown on your ticket, whereupon you are assigned to a striped kind of house on wheels, of the same kith and kin as an English “caravan” wagon. In this you must wait until the attendant sees fit to hitch his horse to it and haul you, wagon and all, into the surf. During the voyage you will have finished changing your costume and the minute your wagon is backed into the water you are ready to commence your amphibious performance. A high sign to the attendant will be the signal that you have survived the operation of bathing, and, presto! his horse will haul you out upon dry land again.

Doubtless on account of the expenses incurred in taking the proper precautions for bathing there are more waders at Scheveningen, especially among the thrifty Dutch, than there are bathers. Human snipe, ducks, and storks, according to their respective builds, with trousers rolled to their knees or petticoats pinned up to a similar altitude, daily patrol the edge of the ocean for a mile or more.

Surf riding is another favorite method of spending a half hour’s time at Scheveningen, the game being to suffer oneself to be bobbed up and down at the mercy of the breakers in a tethered fishing boat, only to be ultimately carried ashore again on the backs of the crew.

An obelisk at the southern end of the Boulevard commemorates the landing of Prince William Frederic of Orange, but the victorious naval achievement of Admiral de Ruyter in defeating the combined French and English fleets off the coast of Scheveningen in 1673, remains unhonored.