At this juncture a pretty Scheveningen lassie entered and greeted me. Alas! I knew but five words of Dutch, and when I thought the matter over I concluded that they were not very appropriate for carrying on a mild flirtation. Still, it's wonderful how much you can do with facial expression. Just before the train started a man entered. He knew English, and with more kindness than knowledge of humanity he offered to act as interpreter. The ass! as if a fellow can tell a girl through an interpreter that her hair is just the shade he admires. This fisher lassie was the only pretty girl I saw in Holland in ten days.
Rotterdam. My first and abiding impression was that never before had I seen so many badly-dressed people. If I had money and a profiteering complex I should set up a Bond Street shop in the centre of Rotterdam. No, that's wrong; that wasn't my first impression at all: my first impression was of a window filled with cigars at six cents each—one and a fifth pence. From that moment I loved Holland and the Dutch. What did it matter if their clothes were badly cut? What did anything matter? I dived into that shop and bought twenty . . . and ten yards farther on discovered a shop with fatter and longer cigars at five cents each. Three days later in the Hague I walked round the cigar shops for two hours, dying for a smoke, but not daring to buy a cigar at five cents lest in the next street I should find a shop offering them at four cents.
It was in Rotterdam that I discovered how bad my manners were. I was sitting in a cafe when a gentleman entered. He swept off his hat and bowed graciously . . . and I hastily put a protecting hand on the pocket containing my pocket-book. But every man who entered greeted me in the same way, and I realised that I was in a polite country. By the end of the week I was beating the Dutch at their own game, for I swept off my hat to every policeman, shopkeeper, tramwayman I spoke to.
On a Monday morning I walked forth to inspect the Dutch schools. I saw a troop of little girls following a mistress, and I joined the procession. They turned into a playground, and I followed. I approached the lady.
"Do you speak English?"
"Engelish! Ja!" she said with a smile.
"I am an English—no, Scots teacher," I explained, "and I should like to see the school."
"I will ask the head-mistress," she said, and entered the school, while
I stood and admired the bonny white dresses of the girls.
She returned shaking her head.
"The head-mistress says that it is not allowed to visit a school in
Holland without a permit from the Mansion House."