Sees an amphibious world beneath her smile;
The slow canal, the yellow blossom’d vale,
The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail,
The crowded mart, the cultivated plain,
A new creation rescued from his reign.”
II
The Island of Walcheren
It must be because the province of Zeeland seems too fearfully close to be interesting that the average traveler through Holland, if he enter by Flushing—one of the little country’s two principal sea gates—hurries from deck to dock like a somnambulist, and fights for his compartment in the four-something a.m. train, bound for Amsterdam or The Hague. Perhaps, after being wakened most unsympathetically, if not rudely, at three-thirty in the morning, he feels disagreeable enough to take the first train out, no matter whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. But in so doing the aforementioned average sight-seer will make his first mistake—and a grave one—with regard to Holland. Part of the best of the country, scenically and historically, is just at the other end of the gangplank.
This business of the arrival at Flushing of the night boat from Folkestone at the unheavenly hour of four in the morning, ought in itself be sufficient excuse to go first thing to the bedroom steward the evening of embarkation and whisper unto him casually but firmly that the odds might run as high as ten chances to one his name would be Dutch for Dennis if he dared to rap you out of your bunk earlier than six. The steamship company reserves the privilege of putting you off the boat at seven, at any rate; so, to arise at six will just give you time to array yourself in the proper regalia, indulge in a hurried breakfast of ham and eggs on board (at a shilling an egg), and climb into the seven-seven train for that capital of quaintness, not to mention the province of Zeeland—Middelburg. The four-something train ignores Middelburg with a passing snort.