"A cathedral without a tower; a palace without a king; a bishop's house without a bishop; a girl without a lover," is the saying that Amsterdammers have about the dam; and I repeated it as we drove through, while my friends searched the verification of the saw. All was plain enough, except the "girl without a lover"; but when they learned that she was a stone girl on a pedestal too constricted for two figures they pronounced her part of the distich far-fetched.
Undaunted by all they had done that day, they would go out again after dinner, when Amsterdam was blue and silver and shining steel in the quiet streets, with a flare of yellow light in the lively ones, where people crowded the roadways, listening to the crash of huge hand-organs, or shopping until ten o'clock.
We supped at the biggest café in Europe; and then for contrast, since we were in a city of contrasts, I took them to the quaintest inn of Amsterdam—a queer little pointed-roofed house hiding the painted "Wilderman" over his low-roofed door, behind a big archway, in the midst of all that is most modern, but with an interior of a rich gold-brown gloom, lit by glints of brass and gleams of pewter which would have delighted Rembrandt.
Next day it was to his house, in the strange, teeming Jewish quarter that we went first of all; but Nell and Phyllis were heartsick to find the rooms, once rich in treasures, piled untidily with "curiosities" of no great beauty or value.
Then, by way of a change after the Old Town, and the harbor with its queer houses, like drunken men trying to prop each other up, I chose the Heerengracht, all the city has of the richest and most exclusive. But the tall mansions, with their air of reserve and their selfishly hidden gardens, struck the eye coldly; and not even my tales of tapestry, lace, old silver, and, above all, Persian carpets, to be seen behind the veiled windows, could arouse the ladies' curiosity. It was well enough to have built Amsterdam in concentric crescents, with the Heerengracht in the center, and to say arbitrarily that the further you went outwards, the further you descended in the social scale. That distinction might do for the townspeople; as for them, they would rather live in a black and brown house in the Keizergracht, with a crane and pulley in one of the gables, and white frames on the windows, than in this dull street of wealth and fashion.
"Even half a house, with a whole door of my own, like most middle-class Dutch houses, would be nicer," said Nell. "Yes, I could be happy in 'a boven huis,' with my little stairway and hall quite to myself."
But when I had shown her my favorite bit of Amsterdam, she became unfaithful to the Keizergracht, and its picturesque fellows.
To reach this bit, we turned from the roar of a noisy street, and were at once in the calm of a monastic cloister.
It was like opening a door in the twentieth century, and falling down a step into the seventeenth, to find Time lying enchanted in a spell of magic sleep.
What we saw was a spacious quadrangle with an old-fashioned, flowery garden in the midst, and ranged round it pretty little houses, each one a gem of individuality. There was a church, too, a charming, forgotten-looking church; and in the quadrangle nothing stirred but gleams of light on polished windows and birds which hopped about on the pavement as if it had been made for them.