“Vat?”
It could do no harm to give my mother tongue a trial.
“A glass of water.”
“Eh!”
I tried a mixture of the two languages. For what is Dutch after all than a jumble of badly spelled English and German words with the endings lopped off?
“Ein glass of vater.” It was the open sesame.
“Vater?” shrieked the lady with such vehemence that the rooster in the back yard leaped sideways a distance of six feet. “Vater!”
“Ja, vater, bitte.”
A profound silence succeeded, a silence so absolute that one could have heard a fly pass by a hundred feet above. Slowly the lady placed a heavy hand on the intervening gate. A shadow passed over her face, as though she were mentally calculating the strength of resistance of the barrier against a madman. Then, with a bovine snort, she wheeled about and waddled towards the house. Close under the eaves of the cottage hung a tin basin. Snatching it down without a pause, the human steamship set a course for the family anchorage, stooped, dipped up a basinful of that selfsame weed-clogged water that flowed by in abundance at my feet, and tacked back across the yard to offer it to me with a magnanimous sigh of resignation. I quenched my thirst thereafter, in rural Holland, at roadside canals, after the manner of beasts of the field—and Hollanders.
Miles away from Haarlem appeared the great flower-farms for which this region is famous and, growing more and more frequent, continued into the very suburbs of the city itself. Across the ultra-fertile plain beyond, the broad highway to Amsterdam ran as straight as a geometrical line. From the city of tulips to where it disappeared in the fog of rising heat waves, the thoroughfare was thronged with vehicles, riders, and, above all, with wheelmen, who, refusing to swerve a hair’s breadth for my convenience, drove me ever and anon into the wayside ditch. The Hollander is, ordinarily, an obliging fellow, and in the main the humble workman or pedestrian is fairly treated. Yet that distinct line of demarkation between the “commoner” and the “upper class” is never obliterated. The American laborer may spend some time in the British Isles without noting this discrimination; he will not be long on the continent before the advantage of his status at home is shown forth in plain relief.