Holland is a beautiful country, one of Nature's daintiest creations, where the sun and the moon and the sky seem to take the greatest delight in revealing their manifold charms, where the green fields and the clear-cut trees and the rushing rivers and the sluggish canals all seem to have been put in their place to conform to an artistic landscape design—for, truly, Holland is a vast picture. Its cattle are picture cattle, its myriad windmills seem to stand as alluring models to attract the artist, its sunsets, the haze that rests over its fields, its farms, its spick and span houses, its costumes—all seem to belong to the paraphernalia of pictorial art. It is a paradise for motorists who behave themselves, and do not rouse the ire of the Dutchman. The regulations are exceedingly lenient, but the laws against fast speeding must not be disregarded, and the loud blowing of horns, on deserted streets in the middle of the night, is entirely forbidden.
When tourists have scaled every peak and trodden every pass, let them descend once again to the lowlands and see if they cannot find pleasurable profit in a land whose very proximity to the borders of the sea gives it a character all its own. This is Holland, and this is the attitude with which a party of four faced it, at Breda and planned the tour outlined in the following pages.
We stopped at Breda to take breath and to reconnoitre a little. Breda has a population of twenty thousand, and a good hotel, "Der Kroon," which knows well how to care for automobilists. Breda to Dordrecht is perhaps twenty-five kilometres in a straight line, but by the highroad, via Gorinchem it is sixty-eight. Since there are no amphibious automobiles as yet, and there are no facile means of crossing the Hollandsch Diep, the détour must be made.
A stroll round Breda, to brush up our history of the siege, a view of the château inside and out, including the reminders of Count Henry of Nassau and William III. of England, and we were on the road again by three in the afternoon.
Dordrecht and its Hôtel Belle-Vue, on the Boomstraat saw us for dinner that night. The trip had been without incident, save for the eternal crossing of canals by high-peaked donkeytack bridges which demanded careful driving till you found out what was on the other side of the crest, and the continual dodging from one side of the road to the other to avoid running over children at play. Clearly Holland, in this respect, was not far different from other countries.
Dordrecht is delightful and is as nearly canal-surrounded as Amsterdam or Venice, only it is not so large, and automobilists, must look out or they will tumble overboard when taking a sharp corner.
You may eat, if you like, on the balcony of the Hôtel Belle-Vue, and you may watch the throng of passers-by strolling through the courtyard of the hotel, from one street to another, as if it were a public thoroughfare. The only objection to it is that you fear for the safety of the loose things which you left in your automobile, but as you pay a franc for housing it the responsibility falls on the proprietor. No one ever heard of anything going astray, which argues well for the honesty of the people of Dordrecht.
The distant view of Dordrecht, with a few spotted cattle in the foreground, might well pass for a tableau of Cuyps, but as all Dutch landscapes look more or less alike, at least they all look Dutch, this description of Dordrecht perhaps does not define it very precisely.
Of course Dordrecht itself is typically Dutch; one would not expect anything else of a place with a name like that. The tree-covered wharves and the typical Dutch crowds, the dog-drawn little carts and the "morning waker," are all there. Above all, almost in Venetian splendour, looms the great lone tower of the church of St. Mary, the Groote Kerk of the town. For six hundred years it has been a faithful guardian of the spiritual welfare of the people, and the ruggedness of its fabric has well stood the test of time, built of brick though it is.