TAKES HIS DOCTORS DEGREE IN HOLLAND 289 



is more varied in its produce ; there are standard fruit 

 trees with currant bushes growing beneath them ; and 

 there are more silver-helmed peasant women about, and 

 grander females with gold frontlets and engraved-plate 

 head-bands and earrings ; and here sound the sweet caril- 

 lons of Sint Joriskerk at Amersfoort, where the young 

 men rested to eat bread beside the canal rippling through 

 the pretty town. On again across the sandhills, beyond 

 which lies good ploughed land tilled with varied cereal 

 crops, and the river Eem glides for rivers never run in 

 Holland gently through a wood. The ground is slightly 

 undulating here, so it is able to glide ; otherwise it would 

 become a * mere ' like the rest of the rivers. Beyond 

 this again the land is sandy and in all stages of re- 

 clamation, with fir plantations and beech. Linnaeus 

 6 saw all that, and saw all that lay behind it a miracle 

 of human industry, two millenniums of human history. 5 1 

 What a good description of the country hereabout is 

 given in the name Watergrassmeer ! The man was a 

 genius who coined the word ; the village here, with its 

 pretty pleasure-houses set in bowers and ornamental 

 waters, is an oasis among the sand-dunes ! 



Beyond the further marshy ground is a blaze among 

 the colza. What a smoke ! It is a damp reed-hut on 

 fire. The travellers rested again at Weesp a town 

 fortified with grass terraces, and set as usual in a mere 

 and they arranged their travel-soiled dress and put on 

 the gay green hats that they might enter Amsterdam with 

 1 Froude. 



VOL. i. u 



