If Friesland be considered the frontier of Holland’s tourist territory, the provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, and Over-Yssel certainly constitute its hinterland.

With the exception of one or two towns they lack the symmetry of scenery, the quaintness of costumes, the masterpieces of art that adapt the provinces west of the Zuyder Zee to intensive sight-seeing, so to speak, while their peoples differ in manner so much from those in the west that you seem to be traveling through another country altogether. Old buildings they have in plenty, and rural and urban beauty spots may be discovered here and there, but taken by and large, they offer fewer attractions for and cater less to the invasion of the tourist than any portion of Holland.

For the above reason, in planning a trip through this land of the brave and the home of the sea, it might be well, if practicable, to tap these three provinces at the beginning, embellishing first impressions by reversing the time-honored route and returning, instead of advancing, through North and South Holland, Utrecht, North Brabant, and Zeeland, and spending a profitable day at least on the Island of Walcheren as a kind of tasteful cordial after the seven course tour.

Groningen, the capital of the province of the same name, shares the distinction with Leyden and Utrecht in being one of the three university towns in Holland. Although twice as large as Leeuwarden, it is barely half as interesting. It seems, too, a vastly more modern place, with its trolley service, its large assortment of wide streets, its apparent dearth of silent canals, while its narrow, busy Heerestraat emulates the examples set by the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam and the Spuistraat in The Hague.

Its university, established in 1614, is attended by half a thousand students, and has within recent years moved into more commodious and modern quarters in the form of an appropriate and handsome building erected in 1850. Among the treasures of its library, housed in a separate building, is to be found a copy of the revised New Testament by Erasmus, bearing marginal annotations in the handwriting of Martin Luther. This much for learning. With respect to art, Groningen is the birthplace of two of Holland’s best known modern painters, H. W. Mesdag and Josef Israels, the latter being especially distinguished for his ability to record upon canvas the sadder aspects of humble life. At the advanced age of eighty-seven this master of his craft died during the past summer in The Hague, where he had resided for a number of years.

At the foot of the tower of the church of St. Martin on the edge of the market square stands the old regthuis, a small brick building of early sixteenth century erection, lately restored and put into use as a guardhouse. With its green and white shutters of diamond design it looks strangely out of place as the opponent of a building of such conglomerate architecture as the columned stadthuis, on the western side of the square. Grain being one of the staple commodities of the place, one end of the visch-markt is bounded by the corn exchange. Behind this stands the Aa-Kerk, of Gothic construction and thirteenth century origin. And, as is the habit with many of the towns in this section of Holland, Groningen has made the most of the site of her old ramparts and city fortifications by transforming it into a public park.

Without the least savor of favoritism, Groningen might easily capture the palm for supporting about the most uninteresting market in Holland. Held in the great square that serves the town as a center for outdoor business transactions and trolley service, it is a market of everything and a market of nothing. It looks as if all the shopkeepers had put up tents and transferred their stock from their shops to the street. Here they sell anything from cucumbers to cocoanuts, from stepladders to safety matches—a nondescript assortment of edibles, cooking utensils, secondhand clothing, cheap crockery, old books, and umbrellas. There are no types to speak of, and the place reeks with the essence of small and insignificant bargaining. The hotel at which I registered in Groningen was centrally located—too centrally, in fact—on the market square. Just in front along the curb a purveyor of dried fish held forth in his tent. The breeze was blowing gently, and the hotel stood to the leeward of the dried fish purveyor. As Sam Bernard would say, “Sufficiency!”

The railway line from Groningen down through Assen and Meppel to Zwolle penetrates a flat, barren, unattractive-looking country which, in places, might be mistaken for the “meadows” near Atlantic City. The roadbed of the railway itself is the worst in the world—at least I think it is the worst in the world, although the allegation may arouse the envy of one or two Mexican roadbeds that I am no longer on speaking terms with, each of which claims the same distinction. The engineers who were responsible for this piece of track, through a perfectly flat country with no curves or grades to cope with, could hardly have done much worse. It is even beyond the powers of the imagination how they contrived to make it as bad as it is. Its construction reminds one vaguely of the story of the “jealous pie,” whose top and lower crusts grew jealous of each other for fear something might come between them. So with this railway. If one rail bulges outward a little the other rail bulges inward sympathetically. And it is fortunate that they are so attached to each other, because if one rail bulged outward and the other rail likewise bulged outward at the same point we might not be here to tell of it.

Neither is the tediousness of the two-hour ride relieved at all by the congeniality of one’s traveling companions. For the information of the prospective tourist through Holland it might be well to state in this connection that smoking is only forbidden in those few and far-between compartments of the railway carriage marked “Niet Rooken.” In all others, whether labeled “Rooken” or not, whether occupied by men, women, or children, smoking is not only permitted but encouraged; and however vigorous and healthy a Hollander may be, his one weak point is his aversion to ventilation. In this matter he may be likened to the elephant afraid of a mouse. Consequently, the first move he makes when he enters the compartment is to close both windows. If he lacks the boorishness to reach over deliberately and try to curtail your supply of fresh air, which is not often, he will huddle himself in a corner as far from the offending draft as possible, and eye you up and down for your failure to appreciate his position.

For the full distance from Groningen to Zwolle I traveled in the same compartment with three of the most rabid stale air agitators I have ever run afoul of. To make matters worse, one was highly perfumed with a mixture of musk and mint, and wore the nails of his little fingers long—half an inch would not be an exaggeration—as some sort of a mark of caste, possibly borrowed from the Chinese. During the trip they tried to make things as blithe and agreeable for me as possible—although with the opposite intent, judging from several remarks which I finally succeeded in translating—by giving a variety of imitations of various barnyard animals because I guarded one open window with my life.

All through the province of Drenthe the sources of another industry in which little Holland is preËminent may be seen from the car windows—the great peat bogs. Upon peat the Dutch housewife must rely for her fuel, for the coal mines in the Netherlands are next thing to null and void; so the preparation of peat has become at once an art and an industry. Towns and hamlets are named for it—“veen” with an appropriate prefix. It is as indigent to Holland as the wild turkey to the mountains of Virginia. But, instead of striving to eliminate as quickly as possible a very essential natural resource, the Dutch have developed the scientific cultivation of peat and made the vast bogs into almost inexhaustible producers of fuel.

The lighter, more fibrous peat, laagveen, in Dutch—found several feet in thickness in the eastern part of Groningen, all through Drenthe, and even stretching well across the German border—is contrasted with the dry peat, or hoogeveen, underlying a thick layer of clay. In the case of the latter, the layer of clay is removed carefully, the peat is dredged from under it, and what water remains is drained off. The peat is then spread upon the ground and worked by foot pressure until the process, assisted by exposure to the sun, brings it to a certain consistency. It is then cut into convenient lengths, stacked, and allowed to dry. In the meantime the layer of clay has been mixed with sand, replaced, and planted with crops. With respect to the bog peat, the fen is first surrounded with a canal for drainage purposes; also the plant putrefaction is assisted by successive reformations of soil from city refuse, laden with which the peat boats return to the fens.

The bait with which Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe, should lure the tourist to stop off, if only between trains, is the church of an ancient nunnery suppressed during the Reformation. This relic, with a fragment of the old cloisters still attached to it, has been transformed into Assen’s Town Hall, and forms a part of the adjoining provincial offices erected on the site of the nunnery. The great tumuli, or so-called “giants’ caves,” within half an hour’s drive from Assen, and marked with huge boulders borne down by the glaciers from Scandinavia, are of interest more to the profound archeologist than to the ordinary sight-seer.

Meppel, farther down, is a peat town of no artistic or historical importance, although it is the junction of the peat and the butter routes through the hinterland. From it the traveler may journey up through the butter district direct to Leeuwarden, or he may break through the peat country on another line to Groningen.

Zwolle, the first stop below Meppel, is an attractive town, but with fewer types even than Groningen. Here the familiar windmills and wooden shoes begin to diminish perceptibly in numbers. With its 32,000 inhabitants, Zwolle is but a shade smaller than Leeuwarden. It is the capital of the province of Over-Yssel and was the birthplace of Gerard Terburg, one of Holland’s celebrated seventeenth century wielders of the brush and crayon. But like too many other towns in the Netherlands, Zwolle has been so short-sighted and so remiss in her duty that she has failed to preserve for public appreciation a single example of the work of her most famous son.

The most striking architectural feature of the town is her old Sassen-Poort, or Saxon gateway, the five Gothic spires of which tend to relieve any monotony of city skyline. It stands but a short distance from the station, framed behind a green mat of trees that lends a pleasant contrast to its diamond window shutters of delicate blue and spotless white. The modern stone bridge across the canal just in front, although forming rather an inappropriate approach to the old tower, is one of the most artistic in all Holland.

Upon a certain warm, sunlit morning I crossed this bridge and turned down along the canal, following one of the many labyrinthian pathways under the spreading trees. Soon I came upon what anyone on not too familiar terms with the customs of the country might have supposed to be a public cafÉ. It was neither fenced nor hedged in, and the path I was following led straight as a die to its low, broad veranda, carpeted and freely sprinkled with comfortable wicker chairs. Little round tables were scattered here and there, and I concluded that the place lacked nothing for the enjoyment of a glass of liquid refreshment.

Accordingly, I followed the course of least resistance, and presently found myself reclining deeply and luxuriously in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.

After a short struggle, my thirst overcame my lethargy, and I summoned enough energy to push a convenient electric button.

No response.

A second, and then a third push at the button.

Still no response.

As a drastic last resort, I arose with no little effort, and wended my angry way into the building to ascertain the cause for such delinquent service.

I was approached by a gentleman who, having observed my impatience, had come to my rescue from his little secluded corner in the reading room.

In my very best Dutch—my vocabulary consists of some three or four words—I asked the gentleman where on earth the waiter might be in hiding. In his very best English the gentleman replied politely that the place was a private club and not a public grogshop. Whereupon, I could have accomplished an exit through any convenient keyhole without the least pinching.

Near Zwolle, in a monastery on the Agnetenberg, reached after a drive of three or four miles from the town, lived and died Thomas À Kempis, the author of “The Imitation of Christ”—a work that has been translated into almost every tongue.

A short ride in the train from Zwolle brings you to Kampen, on the broad Yssel at its point of discharge into the Zuyder Zee. It is Holland’s home town of ancient gateways, no less than three of which, leading out into the park that has superseded the old fortifications, are in excellent state of preservation and worthy of study from an architectural point of view. Originally the town possessed seven of these gates, and there might have been fourteen, had the City Council listened to a learned one of its members who arose at a certain meeting and proposed that they double the original number; for, he argued, had not each of the seven gates contributed its 10,000,000 florins a year to the town treasury in the shape of taxes upon merchandise and produce passing through it? Therefore, it would be a simple matter to double the town’s revenue, for all they had to do was to double the number of gates.

But the rank and file of tourists that include Kampen in their itineraries come to view its Town Hall, a venerable building erected in the fourteenth century, restored after a devastating fire in 1543, and which may be numbered to-day among the most characteristic curiosities in the Netherlands. Among the features of its Gothic faÇade are six statues in stone, dating from the original building. From left to right these may be recognized as the effigies of Charlemagne and Alexander the Great and the characterizations of Moderation, Fidelity, Justice, and Neighborly Love. One of the windows of the weather-stained edifice still remains trellised with iron as in the days of Kampen’s olden time importance. The interior contains a medieval council room with magistrates’ seats of oak, handsomely carved, and a gigantic chimney piece, unfortunately overladen with ornaments.

Kampen stripped of its gateways and its Town Hall would scarcely be worth the time spent to reach it. The town itself seems to be given up to small manufacturing establishments, and its people made up of the class that keeps them in operation. But the fine architectural relics of its earlier days raise its instructive power to as high a degree as that of any town now within Holland’s tourist area.

From Kampen you may take a steamer out across the Zuyder Zee to the Island of Urk, inhabited by a colony of daring fishermen who are less spoiled, yet whose costumes and customs are less interesting, than those of the people of Marken. But you will have to hurry if you wish to pay it a visit, for Urk will soon go the way of Schokland, an island nearer to Kampen, the habitation of which has recently been forbidden by the government on account of the imminent prospects of total encroachment by the sea. To-day Urk is tussling for life with every tide; it may be merely a question of months, perhaps of weeks or days, before its people will be compelled to give up their homes and move to the less dangerous mainland.

Eighteen and a half miles south of Zwolle, still on the river Yssel, and just across the frontier of Gelderland, lies Deventer, noted commercially for a rather incongruous assortment of enterprises: iron, carpets, and honey cakes. A weigh-house, abnormally large for a town of Deventer’s size, having a great flight of steps ascending to its entrance from the Brink, the principal square of the town, has been converted into a gymnasium. Also facing the Brink are several handsome private houses of seventeenth century erection. Deventer, strange to say, seems to be most athletically inclined; it maintains no less than fifty different association football clubs, which strive with each other for the title of champion on the many athletic fields along the banks of the Yssel.

After years of study in Spain and other foreign lands, after a lengthy residence in Haarlem, and his experiences in the studio as co-worker with Franz Hals, to Deventer came Gerard Terburg, where he finally settled down and where he died in 1681 at the age of sixty-four. Unlike Rembrandt, Hals Holbein, and Jan Steen, Terburg took a lively interest in public and municipal affairs, and in his later years he served his adopted city as Burgomaster.