lack-lustre eyes, and old-fashioned dress,
known to them only in pictures. I
recal, too, with uncomfortable feelings,
the late Rip Van Winkle's awakening
on the mountain side, with the incident
of the rusty gun and tattered garments,
all wrapt in a certain Dutch mistiness,
together with faint echoes coming from
afar, of the old Bishopian chaunt—trolled in
ancient roystering days—showing how
Mynheer Van Dunck, though he never was
drunk, sipped brandy and water gaily. How,
without being apparently the worse for it, he
would quench his thirst with two quarts of
the first to a pint of the latter, daily. With
which is linked inseparably that other
strain, said to embody the history of the
earliest attempt at applying the cork-tree
to mechanical uses, and the alleviation of
human infirmity, all to an unfeeling ri-too-ra-
loo burden. All the world has long since
learnt the story, and felt pity for the hapless
trader: Who, every morning, said, I am, the
richest merchant in Rotterdam; with a
toor-ral, loor-ral, loor-ral, loor-ral, liddle-toll-
loor-ral, RIGHT tol loor-ral lay!

These dispiriting images come upon me with
singular force, as I sit waiting the order of
release, in a roomy glass-house on a certain
continental railway, the debatable land
between two distinct states. For, here there
is a junction—grand junction—and from the
windows of the glass prison-house I can look
forth, alternately, on the pleasant German
wooding, and flat Dutch campaign. To put it
Byronically, a smiling valley and a swamp on
either hand. This is the grand junction
between the Rhenische Eisenbahr and the
Rijks Hollandische Spoorweg; threshold of
the Dutch latitudes. With a toor-ral,
loor-ral, I find myself chaunting softly, with
thrumming accompaniment on the window-
pane, as the durance begins to grow irksome.
For the green house doors are fastened up
close under Politzei lock and key, and there are
many voyageurs of first and second degree all
imprisoned together. Not, however, without
some solace, for here is to be found
restauration or grand feeding opportunity,
wonderful alleviator for the incarcerated, who
are all at work on the cotelettes, unripe
fruits and neat wines of the country. Of a
sudden there is a rumbling sound outside,
betokening the arrival of the Dutch, and
presently doors are unsealed, and all are
bidden to go forth. There is a general
uprising, and a hasty, unaudited settlement,
cruelly to the advantage of the Buffet
proprietor. Forthwith we are driven out of pen,
as it were, a disorderly flock, and given over
to the keeping of new masters.

There is waiting here for the wayfarer a
curious contrast, and even at this early stage
he gathers some faint comprehension of the
great liddle-toll-loor-ral mystery. For, as he
casts about uneasily for the carriage suited to
his order, he will be miserably perplexed at
having to elect between Tweede, Derde, and
Erst Klasse.

What is Tweede? and what does it
prefigure? What does the cabalistic Derde?
Aided by a benevolent and intelligent guard,
he may light on the Corinthian vehicle
he had destined for himself—which, though
rusty, and of ancient mail-coach aspect,
with an unwholesome dampness about the
cushions, has still some significance of the
old-established type. Which, Bezonian?
does he seem to say to the official, with
mute, inglorious, and most wistful aspect.
Comforting it is, however, to turn from the
hieroglyphics round him— announcements
relative to Spoorweg Rijks, or Royal Spoorweg,
Rijks Stoomboot, and such jargon, to an
oasis in the desert, shaped as a little brass
plate on the great green dragon that is to
draw him on his journey, whereon he reads,
in his own vernacular, that Sharpe and Sons,
Atlas Works, Manchester, are with him in
that stranger land. Grateful as the fountain
to thirsty traveller, as the sign of Entertainment
for Man and Beast to the weary
traveller on lonely high-road, is the homely
apparition of those cuneiform characters,
Sharpe and Sons, Atlas Works,
Manchester.

Given over, then, bodily to Hollanders—to
the mercies of new guards: rough and ready
men with white and tallowy faces, with loose
slouching garments hanging about them, very
different to the trim springy little beings on
the other side of the glass house—he is
assisted into one of the decayed mail-coaches.
The Hollander officials—who are decidedly
unclean of person, with old battered bugles
slung about them—make signal for departure
in two curious flourishes; one of which proves
an utter fiasco, or miss-fire; the other a loud
but crazy blast: the first a mistake, corrected
by the second.

The way proves to be long, the wind
cold; and, though the traveller was neither
infirm nor old, he could have wished that the
Atlas engines had been put to the full speed
they were capable of in their own country.
By-and-by the country begins to open on him
—a vast expanse of green, rather ochreish in
tone, stretching away for miles, chequered
pleasantly with patches of tiling—good red
tiling—that stands out warmly upon the
green ground, with a file of slim trees, so
often likened to the Noah's Ark pattern,
straggling off to right and left, and cutting
up the prospect most exactly into four
quarters; with dull bluish riband running away
for miles under shelter of that Noah's Ark
vegetation, until lost finally at the edge of
the horizon, with just room in the foreground
for a figure in scarlet coat, periwig, and
jack-boots, on a dappled Wouverman's
quadruped, pointing with his whip to patch of
red tiling in the distance. The famous
landscape, sir, in the Berghem manner! It was
to be seen—to be had a bargain—from the