If you happen to have penetrated Holland as far as The Hague without having availed yourself of the steam tram method of conveyance between one town and another the trip by this means from The Hague to Leyden might be suggested as an excellent one with which to commence to develop the habit.

The tram that operates on regular schedule between the Schenkweg in The Hague and the Groote Ryndyk in Leyden pierces a delightful country checkered by a labyrinth of canals, long and short, wide and narrow. Even every patch of humble cabbages appears to be surrounded with one, along which the truck gardeners pole their boats that bear the vegetables direct from soil to market. Tree crested dikes, straight as the shortest distance between two points, stretch away into the perspective in every direction. Villas and cozy country cottages come quickly into view and fade away again behind their groves of trees, giving the traveler just a flitting suggestion of the comfort their owners must find in them. In passing through the neat little brick-paved villages of Voorburg and Voorschoten the tram engine careens around through the streets as if it had developed a first-class state of intoxication. It aims directly for a kitchen door here and the walls of a church there, only to miss them by a few feet while making a dexterous turn to the other side of the road, twisting its diminutive train of two or three cars in its wake. Then out beside the dikes again it puffs and sputters on its seemingly remonstrative way to Leyden.

Leyden is a quiet, curious old town, rich in history and effervescent with learning. With due respect to art, it was the birthplace of a dozen or more of the most illustrious Dutch painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Jan Steen, Gerard Dou, and last, but by no means least, the celebrated Rembrandt; but, strange to tell, it cannot boast of a single masterpiece of any of them. At its university, then renowned throughout the world, the future savants of the age came to pore over their books. Hugo Grotius was one of its earlier sons, and later, in 1755, at the age of twenty-seven, Oliver Goldsmith aspired in vain to the degree of Doctor of Medicine, afterwards conferred at Louwain, giving Leyden the first opportunity of being its donor. The town’s many museums—of ethnography, of natural history, of comparative anatomy, of physiology, of archeology—bespeak its hobby: the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Even many of the signs one reads in the town are in Latin.

Four hundred years ago Leyden could brag about its 100,000 population without treading on the toes of any city in Holland. To-day it contains little more than half as many souls as it did then. Since its “revision downward” from its pinnacle at the top of the Dutch textile industry, it has seemed a sacrilege to conduct business in the place. Its university sustained for a time the reputation that its weaving enterprises relinquished, but now we go to Vienna, instead of to Leyden, to glean the fine points in the science of medicine. Using Discovery for a fulcrum, Time undermines methods with the infallibility of the sun’s attraction, and brands them as obsolete forever.

The historical bench mark of Leyden is the siege it survived at the point of the Spanish bayonet in the sixteenth century. Lasting, in the aggregate, from October 31, 1573, until October 3, 1574, this siege may be considered as one of the longest and most persistent in the annals of history, and its ultimate relief was as characteristic, picturesque, and ingenious as if it had been the plot of a tale by Dumas.

At the expense of the lives of 4,000 patriots, himself included, Count Louis of Nassau effected a partial relief of Leyden five months after the siege commenced; but, encouraged by the butchery of this Dutch commander and his comparative handful of soldiers, the Spaniards continued to hold on so tenaciously that William the Silent concocted the daring scheme to flood the intervening country with water from the sea so that his fleet might sail in to the rescue.

Having already reduced Leyden to the point of starvation, Valdez, the Spanish general, in glowing phrases offered pardon to the citizens if they would but open the gates of the beleaguered city and surrender. But the people would have none of it, placing renewed confidences in their leader, William of Orange, and consoling themselves as best they could with the firm belief that he was listening to their prayers and would ultimately devise some means of raising the blockade.

As time dragged wearily on, the sorties of the Dutch became less frequent and, finally, it was announced by the din of clanging church bells that the gates should henceforth be kept closed and no man should venture outside the city.

Even at this time, William, unbeknown to the people of Leyden, was appealing to the States to allow him to open the flood gates of Rotterdam and Schiedam and to pierce the dikes along the Meuse and the Yssel in order to inundate the country and give his fleet a fairway to the very watchtowers of Leyden. After much debate, his proposition for effecting the relief, although a most destructive one to the surrounding country, was accepted; bonds were issued by the States to help defray the expenses of the task, and patriotic Dutch housewives disposed of silver plate and jewelry as their contributions to the financial furtherance of the scheme.

It was not until some days after the Prince had supervised in person the unlocking of the gates at Schiedam and Rotterdam on August 3rd and the rupture of the dikes at sixteen different places along the Yssel, that the starving prisoners of Leyden commenced to grow impatient and appealed by letter to Orange, telling him that their bread was gone and that the supply of its only substitute, malt cakes, would last but four days longer. To their letters the Prince, having unfortunately and most untimely contracted the fever, answered reassuringly from his sick bed in Rotterdam to the effect that the dikes had been cut, that water was already pouring in over the land, and that as soon as its depth was sufficient to float the fleet an attempt at rescue would be made. The message was read by the Burgomaster, Van der Werf, to the people assembled in the market place, and the welcome news was received with great rejoicings.

Although the water about Leyden had by this time reached a depth of ten inches, the Spaniards, at first confused, later became confident that the thing could not be accomplished. When, from the lack of a breeze, the water failed to rise higher; and because of the inability of the prostrate Prince, which neither the besiegers nor besieged had heard of nor even imagined, curtailed additional attempts to flood the country; the Spaniards began to taunt the valiant citizens. “Go up to the tower, ye Beggars,” they cried, “go up to the tower and tell us if ye can see the ocean coming over the dry land to your relief.”

But the citizens did go up to the tower, and, after bravely having withstood the siege until early in September, by which time a gale of wind had risen and the Prince had recovered in a measure from his illness, they did see the ocean coming over the dry land to their relief, and with a vengeance. Not only that, but they also saw a welcome fleet of two hundred vessels coming in on the crest of the ocean; they saw this fleet come up from the south, steadily and undisputed, to within five miles of Leyden; they saw it demolish the Spanish forts—a navy of surgeons cauterizing the festering sores on the face of fair Holland. Then, to their consternation, they saw the gale die out and the waters recede, leaving the entire fleet stranded at North Aa, just beyond cannon’s shot of its goal.

Despair took the place of hope in the hearts of the besieged. They implored, and then threatened the life of Burgomaster Van der Werf if he refused to surrender to the Spaniards. He came out into the little square just opposite the old church of St. Pancras, waved his felt hat as a signal for silence, and delivered himself of a short but pithy address that turned despair into faith, animosity into pride, and fired the hearts of his countrymen with renewed patriotism. What he said on that occasion has gone down in history as one of the most superb proclamations ever uttered by a brave man for a national cause.

“What would ye, my friends?” he said. “Why do ye murmur that we do not break our vows and surrender the city to the Spaniards?—a fate more horrible than the agony which she now endures. I tell you that I have made an oath to hold the city, and may God give me strength to keep my oath! I can die but once; whether by your hands, the enemy’s, or by the hand of God. My own fate is indifferent to me. Not so that of the city intrusted to my care. I know that we shall starve if not soon relieved; but starvation is preferable to the dishonored fate which is the only alternative. Your menaces move me not. My life is at your disposal. Here is my sword; plunge it into my breast and divide my flesh among you. Take my body to appease your hunger, but expect no surrender so long as I remain alive.”

How the populace of Leyden, after listening to this, rushed to the ramparts with renewed courage engendered within them and hurled defiance in the teeth of the bloodthirsty Spaniards; how as many as 8,000 died in the streets from the plague alone, germinated by the foulness of the beleaguered city; how the frantic people stripped even the leaves from the trees to relieve their hunger and fought over the garbage pits for every possible morsel of food; how at last a violent equinoctial gale on the first two days of October filled the lowland with water and floated the stranded fleet; how this fleet sailed in between the trees and the chimney pots of submerged farmhouses, putting the Spaniards to flight as it advanced; and how, on the morning of the 3rd of October, the Dutch ships, under Admiral Boisot, paddled up the canals of Leyden while the stricken citizens gathered on the banks and tried to shout with wild delight, but could not on account of their emaciated condition—are all matters of historical fact that may be perused in detail in the pages of any authoritative work on the rise of the Dutch Republic.

It is also an historical fact that on the very next day after the relief of Leyden the gale shifted and blew with all its fury from the northeast, driving out the waters before it, so that within a few days the country was as it had been before and the labor of repairing the dikes commenced forthwith.

As a reward for the sufferings of the people of Leyden the city was granted an annual fair of ten days with exemption from taxes and the States caused the university to be established.

The University of Leyden doesn’t look much like our idea of a university, for the professors, except those in the department of medicine, teach their classes at home, the nine hundred students live in the town, and, as a result, dormitories and classrooms are things that may be dispensed with. The old “university building,” however, originally a nunnery, maintains in its connection one of the finest libraries in Holland.

Not far from where the lofty perpendicular Gothic windows of the church of St. Pancras overlook the square in which the Burgomaster extemporized with such eloquence at the time of the siege, a shipload of gunpowder exploded in 1807. After removing the dÉbris of the buildings which it razed, the Leydeners planted the site as a public park and erected a statue of the valiant Van der Werf in the center of it. Backed by two or three handsome new buildings belonging to the university and facing a wide, clear canal, this Van der Werf Park vies with the Botanical Gardens behind the old university building, as peaceful a spot in which to spend a moonlit evening pondering over the history of the old place as may be found in Leyden; while from the Morsch Gate, a well preserved remnant of earlier fortifications, many temptingly shaded walks twist and twine through the immediate neighborhood.

In Leyden, and not in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, as one might suppose, I came across a beggar for the first time in Holland, although technically, he came across me. The atmosphere of book learning was probably what launched him on his career, for he certainly seemed able-bodied enough to make a more honest living by the sweat of his brow; but the people of Leyden are not given much to fluent perspiration. And it might be here mentioned that one of the reliefs of travel in Holland, compared with Italy, for example, is its dearth of mendicants and beggars. Cripples and the poverty stricken are to be found in Holland as in any other country, but, as a rule, they do not submit their complaints to the sympathies of the tourist. Wherever possible, one of Holland’s world famed charitable institutions gets hold of them and sends them from the congested city to the pauper colony in the country. Three such colonies, founded in 1817, are situated near the railway line from Meppel to Leeuwarden, while in the one city of Amsterdam there are more than a hundred benevolent institutions. The Society for the Public Welfare, or, in Dutch, Maatschappij tot Nut van’t Algemeen, with headquarters in Amsterdam, was founded in 1784 and has made its influence felt throughout the entire kingdom.

Katwyk and Noordwyk, three miles apart, the particular seashore resorts that cater especially to the people of Leyden and Haarlem, are both connected by steam tram with Leyden. Both are insignificant and expensive, and neither is so attractive as Domburg nor so gay as Scheveningen. Their wide beaches of fine sand would seem to us their only assets.

But if you would have further evidence of the Dutch mastery of the element of water, take the tram to Katwyk aan Zee and walk up the beach a half mile or more to where they have harnessed the mouth of the old Rhine and curbed its outlet to suit their convenience.

A hurricane having thrown up the sand before the mouth of the river in the year 839, thus causing its flow into the ocean to be blocked, its backed-up waters created a swamp which all but covered the entire territory known as Rynland, and which, in the subsequent diversion of the river’s course, was largely responsible for the formation of the vast delta in the south. In 1807 the Dutch conceived the project of draining this swamp and making polders of it by pumping its water into especially constructed canals. Later they relieved the congestion of sand at the old Rhine’s mouth and built a series of flood gates across it. By closing these gates at high tide they were enabled to exclude the inrush of water from the ocean, and by opening them again at low tide, they permitted the accumulated waters of the river to flow out into the ocean at the rate of 50,000 cubic feet per minute. Thus was the Haarlemerpolder, seventy-two square miles in extent, reclaimed from what used to be the Haarlemermeer.

The tram line from Leyden to Katwyk passes first through the village of Endegeest, the home and workshop of Descartes for a number of years, and then through Rynsburg, the former residence of that grandfather of modern philosophy, Spinoza, born of Jewish parents in Amsterdam in 1632. The little places are so shady, so peaceful, so still, that anyone having been brought up within their solitudes might very naturally develop the pastime of philosophizing without half trying.

The latter part of April or the first part of May is the proper time of year to visit Haarlem and its vicinity. Then the tulips, crocuses, lilies, and hyacinths are in the halcyon days of their bloom, swaying languidly to and fro in the gentle breeze and diffusing a delicious perfume that is wafted over the country for miles. Fields and fields of them there are—a sweetly scented “crazy quilt” of superlative sheen and luster; for Haarlem, the greatest flower garden in the world, exports bulbs of all varieties to every civilized country.

Whether the Dutch or the Portuguese became the first European tulip fanciers is a moot question. The flower originally came from the East, its name being derived from the Persian toliban, or turban. Suffice it to say that by 1636 bulb culture in general and tulip culture in particular had developed into a veritable mania in and about Haarlem. Bulbs became then as much an item of speculation as shares of mining stock are at the present day—and just as uncertain. Fortunes were made and lost in the open market. Generally speaking, everybody in Haarlem, whether or not he professed to be anything of a floriculturist, dickered through the brokers in bulbs. One speculator in Amsterdam netted almost $35,000 in four months. Prices went up steadily until, at the height of the boom, the bulb of a “Viceroy” brought $2,000, an “Admiral Liefkens” slightly more, and a “Semper Augustus” was sold for $6,000.

Then came the panic. The bottom dropped out of the bucket of bulbs. The government forbade the gambling, and between suns the price of an offshoot of the “Semper Augustus” dropped to fifty florins, or approximately twenty-two dollars.

After a century of quiet, somebody started a short-lived palpitation in hyacinths, but the highest price paid for a single hyacinth bulb was not more than $800.

To-day the Dutch make more of a serious business of bulb raising, and the rather inconspicuous offshoot has become a recognized article of trade and commerce. Almost all of the 2,000 Dutch varieties of tulips have been developed by patient and thoughtful culture from the Tulipa Gesneriana, which Conrad Gesner purchased in Constantinople and brought to Augsburg in Germany in 1559.

In Holland the tulip is propagated both from the seed and from the offshoots of the bulb. The offshoots may be expected to reproduce their true variety as to colorings and markings, growing to a flowering size in three or four years. Seedlings, on the other hand, are less vain and more reticent. No matter what the complexions of their parents might have been, the first flowers of a seedling, appearing after it has had four or five years’ growth, are of a single color. A tulip in such a state is called a “breeder,” and remains so until, after several years, its flower suddenly “breaks” into the gorgeous colors of the “flamed” or the “feathered” tulip. It is then classified according to color and variety and placed upon the market. To hasten this period of “breaking” in the career of the tulip—for no man can compute with any degree of certainty the year in which it will take place—the growers resort to various means, even sending the bulbs away sometimes for a change of climate. “Breeders” that have taken on the desired markings and colors are said to have become “rectified.” But the problem of chance that the seedling tulips will “break” into a new variety is one that the Dutch have been pondering over for centuries, and, as has already been said, they have been rewarded to the extent of 2,000 varieties. Much care is devoted to the preparation of the soil and, after fertilizing thoroughly, the grower will first plant it with potatoes for a couple of years in order to diminish its strength and adapt it better to the cultivation of tulips. The bulbs are taken up each summer, their offshoots detached, and then replaced in fresh soil.

The year before the siege of Leyden, Haarlem suffered a siege under Frederic of Toledo, the son of the Spaniard, Alva; but Haarlem was not so fortunate as her sister city. After bravely maintaining the place against the enemy for a period of seven weary months, with odds of seven to one against them, the Prince of Orange, with heavy heart, sent a message asking the commandant to make the best terms he would with the Spaniards and surrender, the many attempts of the Prince to rescue the city having proved futile.

The massacre that followed the surrender was too shocking to bear the telling of in detail. The garrison and its commandant, the Protestant clergy, and 2,000 or more burghers were cruelly butchered by the Spaniards. Alva himself, however, was forced to admit to Philip that “never was a place defended with such skill and bravery as Haarlem”; not only the men of the town, little accustomed to arms, but the women also had taken an active part in Haarlem’s defense, and Kenau Hasselaer, “a widow of distinguished family and unblemished reputation, about forty-seven years of age, who, at the head of her amazons” (some three hundred or more) “participated in many of the most fiercely contested actions of the siege, both within and without the walls.”

As the birthplace of a number of Holland’s celebrated painters, including Franz Hals and Jacob van Ruysdael, Haarlem holds as her most cherished possession a handsome percentage of the works of the former, numbering among which are his ten famous corporation and regent canvases, arranged in chronological order in the museum of the old Town Hall. To know these will mean that you know the jovial Franz.

Across the market place from the Town Hall rises the Groote Kerk, and, just beside it, the old meat market, erected in 1602, and said, by those who know, to be the quaintest brick and stone Renaissance building in the Netherlands. The Groote Kerk is of a graceful cruciform shape and around the edges of its buttresses, like chicks peeping from under the protecting wings of the mother hen, are built a number of curious little one-story houses whose interiors suggest the last word in coziness and cleanliness, and where the much maligned Dutch decorative taste may be seen at its best. The church contains what was long considered the largest and loudest pipe organ in the world, possessing three keyboards, sixty stops, and 5,000 pipes of varying lengths and diameters up to thirty-two feet in the case of the former and fifteen inches with respect to the latter. A cannon ball, imbedded in the wall of the south aisle of the church, was allowed to remain undisturbed during the restoration as a reminiscence of the siege of 1572.

At the side of the church, in the market place, stands a bronze statue of a Dutchman of the name of Coster, erected in 1856 upon rather fictitious evidence of his having been the inventor of printing. Nothing in the way of printed matter having been proven to have been done by Coster prior to or even shortly after 1447, when Gutenburg of Mayence developed the art, the palm for this distinction was finally, but reluctantly, relegated to the latter.

Instead of Spanish encampments, Haarlem is now surrounded with a beautiful forest, a prominent collection of attractive residences, municipal playgrounds for the children, and lives in an atmosphere of peace and comfort. The old Amsterdam Gate at the east end of the city serves as the only reminder that the place at one time possessed strong fortifications.