He had the chauffeur slow down the car in a fascinating street, with quaint houses leaning back or sidewise, and bearing themselves as they pleased.
"Which way for the cheese market?" Mr. van Buren asked an old man with a wreath of white fur under his chin.
He asked in Dutch, but so many Dutch words sound like caricatures of English ones that I begin to understand now. Besides, I have bought a grammar and study it in the evenings. This pleased Mr. van Buren when I told him, and he says I have made splendid progress. I've got as far as "I love, you love, he loves," and so on. I think Dutch an extremely interesting language.
The old man told us which way to go, and turning up a street we should never have thought of, we came out in a huge market-place presided over by a statue of Coen, a man who founded the Dutch dominion in the West Indies, or something which Mr. van Buren thought important.
We have often wondered where the people of the towns hide themselves; but there was no such puzzle in Hoorn. The market-place looked as if half the population of North Holland might be there. The whole of the square was covered with cheeses, large shiny cheeses, yellow as monstrous oranges. They glittered so radiantly in the sunlight that you felt they might at any instant burst out into a flame. Between the great glowing mounds little paths had been left, and along these paths walked lines of solemn men inspecting the burning globes and bargaining with their possessors; while outside the huge, cheese-paved space there was a moving crowd, gay and shifting as the figures made by bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.
Solemn men inspecting burning globes, and bargaining with their possessors
We expected to create a sensation with the motor, but the cheeses were more interesting, and nobody had time for more than a glance at us. Suddenly, as we sat gazing at the scene, affairs in the market-place came to some kind of crisis. A stream of men appeared, dressed in spotless white from head to foot, and wearing varnished, hard straw hats of different colors. Soon, we saw it was the hats which determined everything. The blue-hatted men walked together; the red hats formed another party; the yellow hats a third; and so on. Each corps carried large yet shallow trays suspended from their shoulders—two men to a tray—and falling upon the piles of cheeses they gathered them up with incredible quickness. Then, when the trays were loaded with a pyramid of cheeses, off rushed the men to a wonderful Weigh House which Mr. van Buren says is famous throughout all North Holland. Inside were many men, busy as bees, weighing cheeses with enormous scales. Down dropped the trays; the weight was taken, and away darted the men bearing the yellow treasures to some neighboring warehouse.
We watched the weighing for a long time, until we were so hungry that we could feel no enthusiasm for anything except lunch. But as we drove through crowded streets to a hotel, it was interesting to pass warehouses where cheeses were being stored. The porters with the bright hats (worn to denote their ancient guilds) were standing on the pavement tossing up cheeses, like conjurors keeping a lot of oranges in the air. Men above, standing in open lofts, caught the golden balls as they flew up, and stored them among crowds of others that seemed to illuminate the dim background like half-extinguished lanterns glowing in the dark.