Leeuwarden is the most important town in Friesland; therefore its capital. Also it is the only place in the province that is really worth a protracted visit. On the way from Stavoren you may wander up the coast a short distance to Hindeloopen, once famed for its highly decorated furniture and the many-colored costumes of its natives; you may stop off at Sneek and see its stadthuis and its waterpoort, better examples of which you will have already seen in North Holland; you may journey over to the coast town of Harlingen—a much less interesting fishing port than Volendam—breaking the trip at Franeker to see the wonderfully ingenious astronomical model of the workings of the solar system which took one of the more inventive citizens of the place, Eise Eisenga by name, seven years to construct; but all of these especial features, and more, can be seen and studied in Leeuwarden.

When you enter the interior of Friesland you will be penetrating one of the three or four provinces of Holland that are not overrun with tourists. Even in its capital an American is more or less of a curiosity and he may expect to be stared at until the people stumble over each other, almost, in their well-meaning efforts to divine his nationality; but he may console himself in the thought that they will be just as curious, if not as humorous, to him as he is to them.

Before the time of the terrific geographical convulsion responsible for the formation of the Zuyder Zee, there had been but one Friesland, stretching over much of the entire territory later known as that of the Dutch Republic, including Holland. Its inhabitants, the Frisians, were renowned throughout Europe for their physical prowess. Imbued with an unquenchable love for political independence, they had shaken off the yokes of the imperial counts and had formed the league of the seven “Sea Lands” in the eleventh century. After being subjugated for a time by Charlemagne, they suddenly rebelled, and in 1256 defeated and put to death the German king, William II of Holland. When the German ocean rolled in over the land, engulfing considerably more than a thousand Frisian villages, it separated kindred peoples, creating not only a geographical but a political chasm between them. West Friesland became absorbed in Holland, but East Friesland continued its career as a confederation of independently governed maritime provinces, until Saxony, hard pressed for funds, sold its sovereignty to the house of Austria for a paltry 350,000 crowns.

Then Charles V, Count of Holland, Emperor of Germany, King of Jerusalem, Sicily, and Spain, Duke of Milan, dominator of much in Asia and Africa and “autocrat of half the world,” established his predatorial authority, and “this little country, whose statutes proclaimed her to be ‘free as the wind as long as it blew,’ whose institutions Charlemagne had honored and left unmolested, who had freed herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny, who had never bowed her neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke,” finally forfeited her independent existence. Her peoples are the only Germanic tribe that have preserved an unaltered nomenclature since the time of the Romans; they will be Frisians to-morrow, as they were the day before yesterday.

The most prominent and characteristic feature of the Frisian costume is the headdress of its women—in fact, it is the only one extant worthy of any notice whatever, for the remainder of the make-up, not only of the men but of the women also, is commonplace and unattractive. This headdress consists of a kind of metal skullcap, as often made of gold as of silver, fitting closely at the temples and embellished at these points with a pair of spiral ornaments. Over this is worn a cap of white or light blue lace, having a so-called “tail piece” dangling down the back of the neck like the scoop of a fireman’s helmet. On top of all this, many of the women—as if their violent efforts to adapt the modern were wrestling with a series of sturdy determinations to retain the antique—will crown the sublime with the ridiculous by wearing an old-fashioned black “poke bonnet,” with the strings tied in a bow under the chin. These gold and silver head-pieces are handed down from one generation to another, and the gold ones, especially, are expensive; but that item does not curb the desire and ambition of every mother’s daughter in Friesland to own one, where the usual heirloom has not been forthcoming.

An admirable collection showing the evolution of the Frisian metal skull plate is on view in the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden. Adapted first as a kind of hair ornament of two coin-sized flat pieces connected simply by a thin wire, its size developed gradually until the two small termini became consolidated into a single large one that covered the entire head of the wearer. The latest specimen in the Museum is decorated in front with a diamond-studded brooch, the whole costing in the neighborhood of $1,200.

The Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden contains also about the most valuable and comprehensive collection of old Delft, Chinese, and Japanese ware in Holland, tastefully cabineted in one of the large rooms on the ground floor. To the connoisseur in such matters this room is a treat that cannot be overlooked with impunity, for the character of its contents is unparalleled and its value indeterminable. Shelf after shelf there are of the most delicately tinted tea sets and table services, vases and urns of every description, and the wooden columns that support the floor above are hung with graduated festoons of plates and saucers, so that it would take the greater part of a week to inspect them all.

On the second floor are a number of tiled rooms furnished in authentic sixteenth and seventeenth century style, even to the sleeping bunks in the walls and the miniature ladders that once assisted in climbing into them. The models of these and most of their furnishings were found in Hindeloopen. To increase the realistic effect of these apartments the authorities have introduced groups of three or four stuffed figures attired in the costumes of the period, posed in front of the fireplace or about a center table, but they are so stiff and ludicrous-looking that they might well be dispensed with, and their costumes shown to better effect behind the glass of a cabinet. In the basement can be seen a few rooms finished and outfitted with the domestic and culinary implements of the same centuries.

In addition to all these there are two adjoining rooms on the second floor of the Museum containing old furniture and decorations bequeathed to the State by the artist Bisschop. The most conspicuous object in one of these rooms is an immense cabinet of beautifully carved oak, black and glossy with age, that would excite the envy of any lover of the antique. Built in 1610, it was purchased thirty-five years ago by Bisschop for something like twelve or fifteen dollars; to-day it has a valuation of $2,000. On its top stand two pieces of old Delft for which the artist originally gave as little as ten gulden.

The remaining rooms of the Museum contain collections of Roman and Frisian coins and medals, Roman curiosities found in the neighborhood, fine old silver plate and flagons, remarkably carved ivory hunting horns, and, since the early Frisians were alleged by some to be the first pipe smokers in Europe, an instructive conglomeration of pipes and tobacco pouches and all the accessory appurtenances necessary to the full enjoyment of the weed.

The Chancellerie, a large building just around the corner from the Museum, erected in the reign of Philip II and used originally as a law court, still serves the government by housing the national archives and the provincial library. With its handsome Gothic faÇade, this building is Friesland’s architectural masterpiece and one of the best preserved of ancient buildings in all Holland. In forceful contrast to it is Leeuwarden’s structural curiosity, an unfinished church tower of brick, called the Olde-Hove, one hundred and thirty feet in height and marking the western boundary of the city proper. Just when it will take it into its head to topple over is a problem of uncertain solution, but, judging from this Dutch Leaning Tower of Pisa’s utter disregard for the perpendicular, it looks as though it might bury a part of Leeuwarden’s pretty park under its dÉbris almost any minute.

The city of Leeuwarden is entirely surrounded by the cobra-like coil of a wide canal, the quays of which afford loading and unloading facilities for the many boats that ply to and from Leeuwarden from and to almost every point in Holland. Along the north and west edges of this canal on the town side they have planted lawns and flower beds on the site of the old city bastions. And, speaking about flower beds, the largest geraniums I think I ever saw were growing in a little plot near the station in Leeuwarden; each cluster of blossoms seemed as great in diameter as the head of a small cabbage. Friesland is also the land of begonias, but in Groningen the plants seem to bear a larger flower than they do in Leeuwarden.

Distant as it is from the great centers of Dutch life and activity, Leeuwarden seems of more recent vintage than any city of its size you will have seen so far in the Netherlands; its types are fewer than in almost any town on the other side of the Zuyder Zee and its old buildings and churches are less numerous. Most of the former they have adapted to modern usage, and even the old weigh-house that stands severely alone beside the canal in the Waagsplein has been turned into a fire station. The canal that sweeps through the town from west to east is lined where the space permits with little colonies of shops on wheels, built of corrugated iron and capable of being closed at night against the mischievous pranks of young Holland—peripatetic shopping and marketing districts, offering anything and everything for sale that may be found in the permanent stores.

Hotel accommodations, however, are more provincial. In the dining-room everyone is seated at one long table, as in the smaller hotels in The Hague, so that an ordinary mealtime looks more like a banquet. The business and social phases of the hotel are conducted in one large room wherein the men gather after dinner to sit and smoke, read, or play chess. Here in a corner at a little desk holds forth the head waiter. Although he is the functionary who assigns you to your room and to whom you pay your bill, he is not so preËminent as the head waiters of most of the hotels in the south, for the proprietor usually shows a preference to manage the place according to his own ideas. As a general rule he will do his own marketing and, if conditions require it, he is not above helping to wait upon the table and making himself useful in many other ways.

Not far from Leeuwarden, in the village of Dronrijp, was born, in 1836, one of Holland’s most eminent modern artists, although a naturalized subject of Great Britain since 1873—Sir Laurens Alma Tadema, some noted examples of whose work are to be seen in the Mesdag Museum in The Hague.

Another town, Marssum, a few miles distant, is famous as the center of the cattle district, and dealers and breeders come to some of the large farms in the vicinity from all over the world, including America, to purchase blooded Frisian stock. Indeed, all along the thirty-three miles of railway between Leeuwarden and Groningen the pastures are dotted with fine, healthy-looking black and white cows. Each field being surrounded by a small canal eight or ten feet in width, the cattle may be segregated, one herd from another, by simply closing the gates on top of the narrow hills that lead across the intervening canal from one pasture to its neighbor; thus the labor and expense of building fences is saved. As much as North Holland is noted for its cheese, just so much is Friesland famed for its butter, and between 130,000,000 and 140,000,000 pounds of it are churned annually. The conditions of the trade are exceptionally sanitary and at all times under government inspection.

Here and there through Friesland—in fact, through almost any part of the Netherlands—you will see a high wooden tripod topped with the usual cartload of dÉbris that constitutes a stork’s nest; for the stork, be it remembered, is the national bird of Holland, and if the farmhouse offers no suitable place, such as a chimney pot, for example, for the stork to build its summer home, the farmer is wont to court the luck that a nesting stork about the place is thought to be sure to bring, and builds a nesting place for it.

They wend their migratory way northward, these storks, from the interior of Africa near the sources of the Nile, and make their appearance in Holland contemporaneous with the first signs of approaching spring. Their coming is regarded as a veritable Godsend by the Netherlander and the various Dutch journals feature the “stories” of first reported arrivals, and devote to them an amount of space commensurate with the importance of the event, while any decrease in the numbers of the birds is quickly observed and promptly linotyped.

When the storks, so high in the air that they appear as mere specks, approach the familiar scenes and nesting places of previous summers, they descend to the earth in pairs to hunt about for their old abodes. Having finally discovered these, a deal of repairing will have to be done to render them once more habitable. Both the male and the female labor with a great deal of energy and no little resourcefulness in the reconstruction of the old nest, collecting sticks and twigs, and weaving them together with much mathematical precision. Endowed with no vocal power of calling each other or criticising their work, their silence while at the task is punctuated only with a comical snapping of bill and a suggestive flapping of wings. If a certain pair has been a little premature, perhaps, and chosen, not always by mistake, another pair’s nest, the ensuing imbroglio often results in such a complete destruction of the point at issue that both pairs instead of one must build anew.

The story of the “Stork’s Judgment” is one of the best known among the Dutch with regard to these birds. It is that in the fall, prior to the departure of the storks for southern climes, all the old and decrepit ones, too weakly to stand the long trip, are killed off so that the general migration may not be delayed or impeded. Another belief held by the Hollander, more or less a child of the imagination but not without at least a tinge of fact, is that among the stork communities a certain number of picked birds are detailed each season to act in the capacity of a regular police force to preserve the peace and protect the interests of the colony at large.

A stork’s nest on the roof serves, according to the superstitions of many Dutch farmers, as a prevention to the ravages of lightning and the contraction of contagious diseases by their families. Misfortune in some form or other is sure to follow if the stork does not see fit to nest somewhere near the house, and simply because of this, land holders have been known to pack up, bag, baggage, and agricultural implements, and move into another district.