In most other European countries national costume is dying out. The
slop-shop is year by year extending its hideous trade. But the
country of Rubens and Rembrandt, of Teniers and Gerard Dow, remains
still true to art. The picture post-card does not exaggerate. The
men in those wondrous baggy knickerbockers, from the pockets of which
you sometimes see a couple of chicken's heads protruding; in gaudy
coloured shirts, in worsted hose and mighty sabots, smoking their
great pipes--the women in their petticoats of many hues, in
gorgeously embroidered vest, in chemisette of dazzling white, crowned
with a halo of many frills, glittering in gold and silver--are not
the creatures of an artist's fancy. You meet them in their thousands
on holiday afternoons, walking gravely arm in arm, flirting with
sober Dutch stolidity.

On colder days the women wear bright-coloured capes made of fine spun
silk, from underneath the ample folds of which you sometimes hear a
little cry; and sometimes a little hooded head peeps out, regards
with preternatural thoughtfulness the toy-like world without, then
dives back into shelter. As for the children--women in miniature,
the single difference in dress being the gay pinafore--you can only
say of them that they look like Dutch dolls. But such plump,
contented, cheerful little dolls! You remember the hollow-eyed,
pale-faced dolls you see swarming in the great, big and therefore
should be happy countries, and wish that mere land surface were of
less importance to our statesmen and our able editors, and the
happiness and well-being of the mere human items worth a little more
of their thought.

The Dutch peasant lives surrounded by canals, and reaches his cottage
across a drawbridge. I suppose it is in the blood of the Dutch child