“Where shall I find a fairly cheap lodging-house?” I asked him.
“Try the Cawstle Inn h’over there,” replied “Bobby,” grandly waving his Sunday gloves toward the place I had just left.
“But that place is not clean,” I objected.
“Not clean! Certainly it is clean! There’s a bloomin’ law makes ’em keep ’em clean,” shouted Bobby, glaring at me.
I entered another inn facing the square, but was thankful to escape from it to the one I had first visited. Here I paid for my lodging, and passed into the main room. It was furnished with benches, tables, and several cook-stoves.
Men were crowded around these stoves, getting their own supper. Water, fuel, and dishes were furnished free to all who had paid their lodging. On the stoves were sputtering or boiling many kinds of cheap food, tended by tattered men who handled frying-pans with their coat-tails as holders, and cut up cabbages or peeled potatoes with knives that had half-inch layers of tobacco on their blades. Each ate his mixture with the greatest enjoyment, as soon as it showed the least sign of being cooked, often without giving it time to cool, as I could tell by the expression on the faces about me.
CHAPTER III
IN CLEAN HOLLAND
Three days later I took passage to London, and that same afternoon sailed for Rotterdam. At sunrise the next morning I climbed on deck, and found the ship steaming slowly through a peaceful canal. On all sides were flat plains, stretching as far as the eye could see. Far below us were clusters of squat cottages with the white smoke of kindling fires curling slowly upward from their chimneys. Here and there a peasant, looking very tiny from our high deck, crawled along over the flat meadows. In the distance clumsy windmills were turning slowly in the morning breeze.
Our canal opened out into the busy harbor of Rotterdam. A customs officer asked me where I was going, slapped me on the back in a fatherly fashion, and warned me in German to look out for the “bad people” who lay in wait for seamen ashore.
I quickly tired of the city, and turned out along the broad, flat highway to Delft. The road ran along at the side of a great canal, and at times crossed branch waterways half hidden by boats, filled with cargo, toiling slowly by on their way to market and by empty boats gliding easily homeward. On board, stout men bowed double over the poles they use to push their craft along. On the bank, along the gravel path, women strained like oxen at the tow-ropes around their shoulders.