Windmills and Wooden Shoes

by Blair Jaekel

Leeuwarden’s structural curiosity is the Olde-Hove, an unfinished church tower of brick, leaning with all the abandon of Pisa’s Tower

The Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden contains also about the most valuable and comprehensive collection of old Delft, Chinese, and Japanese ware in Holland, tastefully cabineted in one of the large rooms on the ground floor. To the connoisseur in such matters this room is a treat that cannot be overlooked with impunity, for the character of its contents is unparalleled and its value indeterminable. Shelf after shelf there are of the most delicately tinted tea sets and table services, vases and urns of every description, and the wooden columns that support the floor above are hung with graduated festoons of plates and saucers, so that it would take the greater part of a week to inspect them all.

On the second floor are a number of tiled rooms furnished in authentic sixteenth and seventeenth century style, even to the sleeping bunks in the walls and the miniature ladders that once assisted in climbing into them. The models of these and most of their furnishings were found in Hindeloopen. To increase the realistic effect of these apartments the authorities have introduced groups of three or four stuffed figures attired in the costumes of the period, posed in front of the fireplace or about a center table, but they are so stiff and ludicrous-looking that they might well be dispensed with, and their costumes shown to better effect behind the glass of a cabinet. In the basement can be seen a few rooms finished and outfitted with the domestic and culinary implements of the same centuries.

In addition to all these there are two adjoining rooms on the second floor of the Museum containing old furniture and decorations bequeathed to the State by the artist Bisschop. The most conspicuous object in one of these rooms is an immense cabinet of beautifully carved oak, black and glossy with age, that would excite the envy of any lover of the antique. Built in 1610, it was purchased thirty-five years ago by Bisschop for something like twelve or fifteen dollars; to-day it has a valuation of $2,000. On its top stand two pieces of old Delft for which the artist originally gave as little as ten gulden.

The remaining rooms of the Museum contain collections of Roman and Frisian coins and medals, Roman curiosities found in the neighborhood, fine old silver plate and flagons, remarkably carved ivory hunting horns, and, since the early Frisians were alleged by some to be the first pipe smokers in Europe, an instructive conglomeration of pipes and tobacco pouches and all the accessory appurtenances necessary to the full enjoyment of the weed.

The Chancellerie, a large building just around the corner from the Museum, erected in the reign of Philip II and used originally as a law court, still serves the government by housing the national archives and the provincial library. With its handsome Gothic façade, this building is Friesland’s architectural masterpiece and one of the best preserved of ancient buildings in all Holland. In forceful contrast to it is Leeuwarden’s structural curiosity, an unfinished church tower of brick, called the Olde-Hove, one hundred and thirty feet in height and marking the western boundary of the city proper. Just when it will take it into its head to topple over is a problem of uncertain solution, but, judging from this Dutch Leaning Tower of Pisa’s utter disregard for the perpendicular, it looks as though it might bury a part of Leeuwarden’s pretty park under its débris almost any minute.

The city of Leeuwarden is entirely surrounded by the cobra-like coil of a wide canal, the quays of which afford loading and unloading facilities for the many boats that ply to and from Leeuwarden from and to almost every point in Holland. Along the north and west edges of this canal on the town side they have planted lawns and flower beds on the site of the old city bastions. And, speaking about flower beds, the largest geraniums I think I ever saw were growing in a little plot near the station in Leeuwarden; each cluster of blossoms seemed as great in diameter as the head of a small cabbage. Friesland is also the land of begonias, but in Groningen the plants seem to bear a larger flower than they do in Leeuwarden.

Distant as it is from the great centers of Dutch life and activity, Leeuwarden seems of more recent vintage than any city of its size you will have seen so far in the Netherlands; its types are fewer than in almost any town on the other side of the Zuyder Zee and its old buildings and churches are less numerous. Most of the former they have adapted to modern usage, and even the old weigh-house that stands severely alone beside the canal in the Waagsplein has been turned into a fire station. The canal that sweeps through the town from west to east is lined where the space permits with little colonies of shops on wheels, built of corrugated iron and capable of being closed at night against the mischievous pranks of young Holland—peripatetic shopping and marketing districts, offering anything and everything for sale that may be found in the permanent stores.

Hotel accommodations, however, are more provincial. In the dining-room everyone is seated at one long table, as in the smaller hotels in The Hague, so that an ordinary mealtime looks more like a banquet. The business and social phases of the hotel are conducted in one large room wherein the men gather after dinner to sit and smoke, read, or play chess. Here in a corner at a little desk holds forth the head waiter. Although he is the functionary who assigns you to your room and to whom you pay your bill, he is not so preëminent as the head waiters of most of the hotels in the south, for the proprietor usually shows a preference to manage the place according to his own ideas. As a general rule he will do his own marketing and, if conditions require it, he is not above helping to wait upon the table and making himself useful in many other ways.