As he said this, he held in his breath, and endeavoured, with all his might, to diminish his size; while the Frenchmen, as if anxious to strain a point in his favour, tightened the cord round him, till he almost became black in the face.
“C’est ça” said one of the officers, smiling blandly as he took off his hat; “Monsieur peut continuer sa route.”
“All right,” said I, “you may come in, Mr. Moriarty.”
“‘Tis civil people I always heard they wor,” said he; “but it’s a sthrange country where it’s against the laws to grow fatter.”
I like Holland;—it is the antipodes of France. No one is ever in a hurry here. Life moves on in a slow majestic stream, a little muddy and stagnant, perhaps, like one of their own canals, but you see no waves, no breakers—not an eddy, nor even a froth-bubble breaks the surface. Even a Dutch child, as he steals along to school, smoking his short pipe, has a mock air of thought about him. The great fat horses, that wag along, trailing behind them some petty, insignificant truck, loaded with a little cask, not bigger than a life-guardsman’s helmet, look as though Erasmus was performing duty as a quadruped, and walking about his own native city in harness. It must be a glorious country to be born in. No one is ever in a passion; and as to honesty, who has energy enough to turn robber? The eloquence, which in other lands might wind a man from his allegiance, would be tried in vain here. Ten minutes’ talking would set any audience asleep, from Zetland to Antwerp. Smoking, beer-drinking, stupifying, and domino-playing, go on, in summer, before, in winter, within, the cafés, and every broad flat face that you look upon, with its watery eyes and muddy complexion, seems like a coloured chart of the country that gave it birth.
How all the industry, that has enriched them, is ever performed—how all the cleanliness, for which their houses are conspicuous, is ever effected, no one can tell. Who ever saw a Dutchman labour? Every thing in Holland seems typified by one of their own drawbridges, which rises as a boat approaches, by invisible agency, and then remains patiently aloft, till a sufficiency of passengers arrives to restore it to its place, and Dutch gravity seems the grand centre of all prosperity.
When, therefore, my fellow-passengers stormed and swore because they were not permitted to land their luggage; when they heard that until nine o’clock the following morning, no one would be astir to examine it; and that the Rhine steamer sailed at eight, and would not sail again for three days more, and cursed the louder thereat; I chuckled to myself that I was going no where, that I cared not how long I waited, nor where, and began to believe that something of very exalted philosophy must have been infused into my nature without my ever being aware of it.
For twenty minutes and more, Sir Peter abused the Dutch; he called them hard names in English, and some very strong epithets in bad French. Meanwhile, his courier busied himself in preparations for departure, and the “Honourable Jack” undertook to shawl the young ladies, a performance which, whether from the darkness of the night, or the intricacy of the muffling, took a most unmerciful time to accomplish.
“We shall never find the hotel at this hour,” said Sir Peter, angrily.
“The house will certainly be closed,” chimed in the young ladies.