The wind is the Dutchman's; servant before he lets it loose again it
has turned ten thousand mills, has pumped the water and sawn the
wood, has lighted the town and worked the loom, and forged the iron,
and driven the great, slow, silent wherry, and played with the
children in the garden. It is a sober wind when it gets back to sea,
worn and weary, leaving the Dutchman laughing behind his everlasting
pipe. There are canals in Holland down which you pass as though a
field of wind-blown corn; a soft, low, rustling murmur ever in your
ears. It is the ceaseless whirl of the great mill sails. Far out at
sea the winds are as foolish savages, fighting, shrieking, tearing--
purposeless. Here, in the street of mills, it is a civilized wind,
crooning softly while it labours.

What charms one in Holland is the neatness and cleanliness of all
about one. Maybe to the Dutchman there are drawbacks. In a Dutch
household life must be one long spring-cleaning. No milk-pail is
considered fit that cannot just as well be used for a looking-glass.
The great brass pans, hanging under the pent house roof outside the
cottage door, flash like burnished gold. You could eat your dinner
off the red-tiled floor, but that the deal table, scrubbed to the
colour of cream cheese, is more convenient. By each threshold stands
a row of empty sabots, and woe-betide the Dutchman who would dream of
crossing it in anything but his stockinged feet.

There is a fashion in sabots. Every spring they are freshly painted.
One district fancies an orange yellow, another a red, a third white,
suggesting purity and innocence. Members of the Smart Set indulge in
ornamentation; a frieze in pink, a star upon the toe. Walking in
sabots is not as easy as it looks. Attempting to run in sabots I do
not recommend to the beginner.