and pictures, windmills and cows, quaint buildings, and quainter
costumes, but it is a country of canals before all. The canals set
the tune. The canals keep it deliberate and wise.

One can be in Rotterdam, or in whatever town one's travels really
begin, but a very short time without discovering that the Dutch
unit--the florin--is a very unsatisfactory servant. The dearness
of Holland strikes one continually, but it does so with peculiar
force if one has crossed the frontier from Belgium, where the unit
is a franc. It is too much to say that a sovereign in Holland is
worth only twelve shillings: the case is not quite so extreme as
that; but a sovereign in Belgium is, for all practical purposes,
worth twenty-five shillings, and the contrast after reaching Dutch
soil is very striking. One has to recollect that the spidery letter
"f," which in those friendly little restaurants in the Rue Hareng at
Brussels had stood for a franc, now symbolises that far more serious
item the florin; and f. 1.50, which used to be a trifle of one and
threepence, is now half a crown.

Even in our own country, where we know something about the cost of
things, we are continually conscious of the fallacy embodied in the
statement that a sovereign is equal to twenty shillings. We know that
in theory that is so; but we know also that it is so only as long as
the sovereign remains unchanged. Change it and it is worth next to
nothing--half a sovereign and a little loose silver. But in Holland
the disparity is even more pathetic. To change a sovereign there
strikes one as the most ridiculous business transaction of one's life.

Certain things in Holland are dear beyond all understanding. At The
Hague, for example, we drank Eau d'Evian, a very popular bottled water