The Automobilist Abroad

by M. F. Mansfield

Schiedam, with its windmills, is well within sight of Rotterdam. We had all of us seen windmills before, but we never felt quite so intimately acquainted with any as with these. Don Quixote's was but a thing of the imagination, and Daudet's, in Provence, was but a dismantled, unlovely, and unromantic ruin. These windmills of Schiedam were very sturdy and practical things, broad of base and long of arm, and would work even in a fog, an ancient mariner-looking Dutchman with sabots and peg-top trousers told us.

The windmills of Holland pump water, grind corn, make cheese and butter, and have recently been adopted in some instances to the making of electricity. It has been found that with a four-winged mill, and the wind at a velocity of from twelve to thirty feet a second, four to five horsepower can be obtained with the loss of only fourteen per cent., caused by friction.

A plant has been constructed in Holland which lights 450 lamps, earning about twelve per cent. interest on the capital invested. Of course it is necessary to keep an oil-motor to provide for windless days or nights and also to keep a reserve of electrical power on hand, but this is but another evidence of the practicality and the extreme cleverness of the Dutch. The cows that browse around the windmills of Schiedam are of the same spotted black and white variety that one sees on the canvasses of the Dutch painters. If you are not fortunate enough to see Paul Potter's great Dutch bull in the gallery at The Hague, you may see the same sort of thing hereabouts at any glance of the eye—the real living thing.

From Rotterdam to Delft, all the way by the canal, allowing for the détour via Schiedam, is less than twenty kilometres, and the journey is short for any sort of an automobile that will go beyond a snail's pace.

Visions of blue and white delftware passed through our minds as we entered the old town, which hardly looks as though worldly automobilists would be well received. Delftware there is, in abundance, for the delectation of the tourist and the profit of the curio merchant, who will sell it unblushingly as a rare old piece, when it was made but a year ago. If you know delftware you will know from the delicate colouring of the blues and whites which is old and which is not.

Delft and Delftshaven, near Schiedam, in South Holland, have a sentimental interest for all descendants of the Puritans who fled to America in 1620. Delftshaven is an unattractive place enough to-day, but Delft itself is more dignified, and, in a way, takes on many of the attributes of a metropolis. Nearly destroyed by a fire in 1526, the present city has almost entirely been built up since the sixteenth century.

The old Gothic church of the fifteenth century, one of the few remains of so early a date, shelters the tomb of the redoubtable Van Tromp, the vanquisher of the English.

It was easy going along the road out of Delft and we reached The Hague in time for lunch at the Hôtel des Indes, where, although it is the leading hotel of the Dutch capital, everything is as French as it would be in Lyons, or at any rate in Brussels. You pay the astonishingly outrageous sum of five francs for housing your machine over night, but nothing for the time you are eating lunch. We got away from the gay little capital, one of the daintiest of all the courts of Europe, as soon as we had made a round of the stock sights of which the guide-books tell, not omitting, of course, the paintings of the Hague Gallery, the Rubens, the Van Dycks and the Holbeins.

The Binnenhof drew the romanticist of our party to it by reason of the memories of the brothers De Witt. It is an irregular collection of buildings of all ages, most of them remodeled, but once the conglomerate residence of the Counts of Holland and the Stadtholders.

The Binnenhof will interest all readers of Dumas. It was here that there took place the culminating scenes in the lives of the brothers De Witt, Cornelius and John. Dumas unquestionably manufactured much of his historical detail, but in the "Black Tulip" there was no exaggeration of the bloody incidents of the murder of these two noble men, who really had the welfare of Holland so much at heart.