Not far from where the lofty perpendicular Gothic windows of the church of St. Pancras overlook the square in which the Burgomaster extemporized with such eloquence at the time of the siege, a shipload of gunpowder exploded in 1807. After removing the débris of the buildings which it razed, the Leydeners planted the site as a public park and erected a statue of the valiant Van der Werf in the center of it. Backed by two or three handsome new buildings belonging to the university and facing a wide, clear canal, this Van der Werf Park vies with the Botanical Gardens behind the old university building, as peaceful a spot in which to spend a moonlit evening pondering over the history of the old place as may be found in Leyden; while from the Morsch Gate, a well preserved remnant of earlier fortifications, many temptingly shaded walks twist and twine through the immediate neighborhood.
In Leyden, and not in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, as one might suppose, I came across a beggar for the first time in Holland, although technically, he came across me. The atmosphere of book learning was probably what launched him on his career, for he certainly seemed able-bodied enough to make a more honest living by the sweat of his brow; but the people of Leyden are not given much to fluent perspiration. And it might be here mentioned that one of the reliefs of travel in Holland, compared with Italy, for example, is its dearth of mendicants and beggars. Cripples and the poverty stricken are to be found in Holland as in any other country, but, as a rule, they do not submit their complaints to the sympathies of the tourist. Wherever possible, one of Holland’s world famed charitable institutions gets hold of them and sends them from the congested city to the pauper colony in the country. Three such colonies, founded in 1817, are situated near the railway line from Meppel to Leeuwarden, while in the one city of Amsterdam there are more than a hundred benevolent institutions. The Society for the Public Welfare, or, in Dutch, Maatschappij tot Nut van’t Algemeen, with headquarters in Amsterdam, was founded in 1784 and has made its influence felt throughout the entire kingdom.
Katwyk and Noordwyk, three miles apart, the particular seashore resorts that cater especially to the people of Leyden and Haarlem, are both connected by steam tram with Leyden. Both are insignificant and expensive, and neither is so attractive as Domburg nor so gay as Scheveningen. Their wide beaches of fine sand would seem to us their only assets.
But if you would have further evidence of the Dutch mastery of the element of water, take the tram to Katwyk aan Zee and walk up the beach a half mile or more to where they have harnessed the mouth of the old Rhine and curbed its outlet to suit their convenience.
A hurricane having thrown up the sand before the mouth of the river in the year 839, thus causing its flow into the ocean to be blocked, its backed-up waters created a swamp which all but covered the entire territory known as Rynland, and which, in the subsequent diversion of the river’s course, was largely responsible for the formation of the vast delta in the south. In 1807 the Dutch conceived the project of draining this swamp and making polders of it by pumping its water into especially constructed canals. Later they relieved the congestion of sand at the old Rhine’s mouth and built a series of flood gates across it. By closing these gates at high tide they were enabled to exclude the inrush of water from the ocean, and by opening them again at low tide, they permitted the accumulated waters of the river to flow out into the ocean at the rate of 50,000 cubic feet per minute. Thus was the Haarlemerpolder, seventy-two square miles in extent, reclaimed from what used to be the Haarlemermeer.
The tram line from Leyden to Katwyk passes first through the village of Endegeest, the home and workshop of Descartes for a number of years, and then through Rynsburg, the former residence of that grandfather of modern philosophy, Spinoza, born of Jewish parents in Amsterdam in 1632. The little places are so shady, so peaceful, so still, that anyone having been brought up within their solitudes might very naturally develop the pastime of philosophizing without half trying.
The latter part of April or the first part of May is the proper time of year to visit Haarlem and its vicinity. Then the tulips, crocuses, lilies, and hyacinths are in the halcyon days of their bloom, swaying languidly to and fro in the gentle breeze and diffusing a delicious perfume that is wafted over the country for miles. Fields and fields of them there are—a sweetly scented “crazy quilt” of superlative sheen and luster; for Haarlem, the greatest flower garden in the world, exports bulbs of all varieties to every civilized country.
Whether the Dutch or the Portuguese became the first European tulip fanciers is a moot question. The flower originally came from the East, its name being derived from the Persian toliban, or turban. Suffice it to say that by 1636 bulb culture in general and tulip culture in particular had developed into a veritable mania in and about Haarlem. Bulbs became then as much an item of speculation as shares of mining stock are at the present day—and just as uncertain. Fortunes were made and lost in the open market. Generally speaking, everybody in Haarlem, whether or not he professed to be anything of a floriculturist, dickered through the brokers in bulbs. One speculator in Amsterdam netted almost $35,000 in four months. Prices went up steadily until, at the height of the boom, the bulb of a “Viceroy” brought $2,000, an “Admiral Liefkens” slightly more, and a “Semper Augustus” was sold for $6,000.
Then came the panic. The bottom dropped out of the bucket of bulbs. The government forbade the gambling, and between suns the price of an offshoot of the “Semper Augustus” dropped to fifty florins, or approximately twenty-two dollars.
After a century of quiet, somebody started a short-lived palpitation in hyacinths, but the highest price paid for a single hyacinth bulb was not more than $800.