We headed down the road to the sea, by the Huis-ten-Bosch (the House in the Wood), the summer palace of Dutch royalty, for the Monte Carlo of Holland, Scheveningen. It has all the conventional marks of a Continental watering-place, a plage, a kursaale, bath houses, terraces, esplanades, chic hotels and restaurants, and a whole regiment of mushroom chairs and windshields dotting its wide expanse of North Sea sand.
In the season the inhabitants live off of the visitors, and out of season live on their fat like the ground-hog, and do a little fishing for profitable amusement. It is a thing to see, Scheveningen, but it is no place for a prolonged stay unless you are a gambler or a blasé boulevardier who needs bracing up with sea air.
There are good hotels, if you want to linger and can stand the prices, the best of which is called the Palace Hotel, but we had another little black coffee on the gayest-looking terrace café we could find, and made wheel-tracks for Leyden, twenty kilometres distant.
The distances in Holland are mere bagatelles, but there is so much that is strange to see, and the towns of historical interest are so near together, that the automobilist who covers his hundred kilometres a day must be a scorcher indeed.
We passed the night at the Gouden-Leuw, which a Frenchman would call the Lion d'Or, and an Anglo-Saxon the Golden Lion. It was a most excellent hotel in the Breestraat, and it possessed what was called a garage, in reality a cubby-hole which, on a pinch, might accommodate two automobiles, if they were small ones.
Leyden is a city of something like fifty-five thousand people. It has grown since the days when they chained down Bibles in its churches, and books in the library of its university. The chief facts that stand out in Leyden's history, for the visitor, are those referring to the exile of the Puritans here, fleeing from persecution in England, and before they descended upon the New World.
The famous university was founded by the government as a reward for the splendid defence made by the city against the Spaniards in 1574. It was a question as to whether the city should be exempted from future taxation or should be endowed with a university. The citizens themselves chose the latter dignity.
Leaving Leyden and following the flat roadway by the glimmering canals, which chop the polders, and tulip gardens off into checker-board squares, one reaches Haarlem, less than thirty kilometres away.
The country was becoming more and more like what one imagines Holland ought to be; the whole country practically a vast, sandy, sea-girt land of dykes and canals, and dunes and sunken gardens.