In my very best Dutch—my vocabulary consists of some three or four words—I asked the gentleman where on earth the waiter might be in hiding. In his very best English the gentleman replied politely that the place was a private club and not a public grogshop. Whereupon, I could have accomplished an exit through any convenient keyhole without the least pinching.
Near Zwolle, in a monastery on the Agnetenberg, reached after a drive of three or four miles from the town, lived and died Thomas à Kempis, the author of “The Imitation of Christ”—a work that has been translated into almost every tongue.
A short ride in the train from Zwolle brings you to Kampen, on the broad Yssel at its point of discharge into the Zuyder Zee. It is Holland’s home town of ancient gateways, no less than three of which, leading out into the park that has superseded the old fortifications, are in excellent state of preservation and worthy of study from an architectural point of view. Originally the town possessed seven of these gates, and there might have been fourteen, had the City Council listened to a learned one of its members who arose at a certain meeting and proposed that they double the original number; for, he argued, had not each of the seven gates contributed its 10,000,000 florins a year to the town treasury in the shape of taxes upon merchandise and produce passing through it? Therefore, it would be a simple matter to double the town’s revenue, for all they had to do was to double the number of gates.
But the rank and file of tourists that include Kampen in their itineraries come to view its Town Hall, a venerable building erected in the fourteenth century, restored after a devastating fire in 1543, and which may be numbered to-day among the most characteristic curiosities in the Netherlands. Among the features of its Gothic façade are six statues in stone, dating from the original building. From left to right these may be recognized as the effigies of Charlemagne and Alexander the Great and the characterizations of Moderation, Fidelity, Justice, and Neighborly Love. One of the windows of the weather-stained edifice still remains trellised with iron as in the days of Kampen’s olden time importance. The interior contains a medieval council room with magistrates’ seats of oak, handsomely carved, and a gigantic chimney piece, unfortunately overladen with ornaments.
Kampen stripped of its gateways and its Town Hall would scarcely be worth the time spent to reach it. The town itself seems to be given up to small manufacturing establishments, and its people made up of the class that keeps them in operation. But the fine architectural relics of its earlier days raise its instructive power to as high a degree as that of any town now within Holland’s tourist area.
From Kampen you may take a steamer out across the Zuyder Zee to the Island of Urk, inhabited by a colony of daring fishermen who are less spoiled, yet whose costumes and customs are less interesting, than those of the people of Marken. But you will have to hurry if you wish to pay it a visit, for Urk will soon go the way of Schokland, an island nearer to Kampen, the habitation of which has recently been forbidden by the government on account of the imminent prospects of total encroachment by the sea. To-day Urk is tussling for life with every tide; it may be merely a question of months, perhaps of weeks or days, before its people will be compelled to give up their homes and move to the less dangerous mainland.
Eighteen and a half miles south of Zwolle, still on the river Yssel, and just across the frontier of Gelderland, lies Deventer, noted commercially for a rather incongruous assortment of enterprises: iron, carpets, and honey cakes. A weigh-house, abnormally large for a town of Deventer’s size, having a great flight of steps ascending to its entrance from the Brink, the principal square of the town, has been converted into a gymnasium. Also facing the Brink are several handsome private houses of seventeenth century erection. Deventer, strange to say, seems to be most athletically inclined; it maintains no less than fifty different association football clubs, which strive with each other for the title of champion on the many athletic fields along the banks of the Yssel.
After years of study in Spain and other foreign lands, after a lengthy residence in Haarlem, and his experiences in the studio as co-worker with Franz Hals, to Deventer came Gerard Terburg, where he finally settled down and where he died in 1681 at the age of sixty-four. Unlike Rembrandt, Hals Holbein, and Jan Steen, Terburg took a lively interest in public and municipal affairs, and in his later years he served his adopted city as Burgomaster.
Queen Wilhelmina’s summer residence at Het Loo is the center of a large settlement of country homes and villas on the outskirts of Apeldoorn. The landscape gardening throughout the colony is the best to be seen in Holland