Part 11

This is the place the eau de cologne habit started. There are over forty manufacturers who advertise themselves as “the original house” that first made this perfumed water. A few miles below here on the Rhine is the Apollinaris spring. I always supposed Apollinaris water came from the drug store, but there really is an original spring. It got its name from St. Apollinaris, who was a prominent church-worker a thousand years ago, and had his head chopped off by the heathen. The head is still preserved in a church and his name goes marching on with a label on the bottle. The highest cathedral I have seen in Europe is at Cologne, the top of the spire being 510 feet above the ground. It is a beautiful cathedral of Gothic architecture. The plans were made and a good part of the structure completed about eight hundred years before it was finished, the latter part of the job being done only a few years ago. The legend of the beginning of the cathedral is very authentic. The architect had spent several years on the drawings, but was not able to finish them satisfactorily to himself or the building committee. One night he had a dream, and in the vision saw just what had been lacking. But when he awoke he could not remember the design, and as is usual in such cases he said he would give anything to have it. The Devil promptly showed up and offered to reveal the wonderful plan if the architect would sign a contract to give in payment his own soul and also the soul of the first who should enter the church after it was completed. The architect tried to beat the Devil down on the price, but could not, and finally signed. The Devil lived up to his part of the contract, and the completed plans were so beautiful that the church authorities and the emperor and the city council were unanimous in declaring the architect the greatest man in his profession. As the church neared completion the architect began to worry. He took to drink, and went around carousing so that his friends thought he was crazy. Finally he confessed to the archbishop and it got into the newspapers, so the community was stirred up. No one was willing to be the first to go into the church, and yet if the great cathedral was to amount to anything, somebody must enter it. Finally a bad woman who was confined in jail sent word to the church board that she would be the victim. After due deliberation, and believing that she would go to the Devil anyhow, they accepted her offer. The day of dedication came. The people gathered from far and near. A carriage drove from the police station and backed up to the church door. Out of the wagon and into the building dashed a female form and the Devil in great glee grabbed, and broke its neck. But it was only a pig which the smart bad woman had fixed up in her clothes. So the Devil was cheated, the cathedral was dedicated, and all went right except for the architect, who was found with a broken neck and smelling of sulphur, for the Devil in his rage didn’t do a thing to him.

Cologne has over 300,000 inhabitants and is a very busy city. This morning we went to the market. The grocery stores in Cologne and in all the German cities I have visited practically never keep green groceries. Everything of that kind is bought at the public market, which is a very interesting sight. From all the country around come the farmers and the farmers’ wives with the produce of the garden, and from all over the city come the housewives or the maids, each with a big basket. The trading is brisk, and as it is nearly all done by women on both sides, there is some talk and the shopping habit is seen in all its glory. Then there is the fish market, the flower market, the poultry market, and even the old-clothes market. I am sure that in the big market-house and on the streets and the square in Cologne this morning there were two thousand vendors of goods, from potatoes to second-hand hats and from luscious fruit to old candle-sticks,—nearly everything conceivable that could be brought to the open-air market and sold. The market is still retained in a few old American towns, but to me it is a novelty with a never-fading charm, and in nearly every city where I have stopped the market has been a sight that I did not miss.

Next to the market the restaurant or beer- and wine-garden is the place to see the people. The Germans eat breakfast, dinner at noon, supper at 6 o’clock, and once more about 10 o’clock. From 7 o’clock to 10 o’clock the whole family sits in the public garden drinking beer or wine (not much, but long), listening to the music and getting hungry for the fourth meal of the day. There are restaurants everywhere—in the public buildings, the art galleries, the churches, on the sidewalks, and in the parks. I have not been to a German cemetery, but I would confidently expect to find there a garden with tables where one could get something to eat and drink.

The valley of the Rhine for more than a hundred miles is one vast vineyard, and the word valley includes the hillsides. The hills are high. The vines begin close to the water’s edge, the vineyards being sometimes terraced and sometimes on a slope so steep that the men and women who cultivate them must wear climbers like telegraph linemen. It is a beautiful sight at this season of the year with the lofty heights clothed in green and pointing up into the blue sky, with brown old ruined taverns and castles and white châteaus and villas here and there among the green. One would wonder what could be done with all the grapes that must come from such a great vineyard if he did not look around him and see everybody drinking the juice and evidently endeavoring to keep pace with the production. At Coblentz the Moselle river joins the Rhine, and it is another charming valley full of history, poetry and grapes. Coblentz is old and quaint, with narrow streets, old-fashioned people, and the appearance of ancient days. On this trip I have seen a good deal of the German people. The class distinctions are about all that make them different from Americans. The poor folks always expect to be poor and do not move around with the aggressive action that ours do. I suppose I talked with a hundred, and every one of them wanted to come to America. Mechanics and artisans, very skillful, are not altogether satisfied with conditions, and they, too, talk America. But the great middle class of farmers and merchants are as full of patriotism and conceit as are true American citizens. They think Germany is the greatest nation on earth, and that all the countries will eventually admit the fact and take subordinate places. They don’t like America or England, and they expect sometime to have war with us unless we give up easier than they anticipate. The typical German is not slow or easy-going, as he is often painted, but is energetic, pushing and “chesty.” He thinks Germany can lick the United States with one hand tied behind, and is ready to have the work begin any time. In fact, Germans are just as offensively and ignorantly patriotic as are Americans, which is saying a good deal, for Americans in Europe nearly always go around with a chip on either shoulder, daring somebody to knock it off.

But the Germans are gentlemen. For the first time since I left Paris I saw men in the street cars give their seats to ladies. In Italy the rule is for the man to have first consideration. It makes American women furious when they meet Italian men on the narrow sidewalks to have to get off into the streets and let the gentlemen pass by. But they must do it or the men will simply walk over them. In Germany the women in the country work in the fields and in the cities they are in the shops and offices more than in the United States, but they are treated decently and politely. The German is in fact more polite than the Frenchman. He even tips his hat to his man friends. If I go into a store to buy a cigar the proprietor or clerk who waits on me will say “good-morning” and “good-by.” They do this with one another, and do not keep their company manners for strangers. German hotels are the best in Europe, and one of the customs is during the meal at hotel or restaurant for the proprietor to walk around and pleasantly greet his patrons, whether he knows them or not, on the comfortable theory that they are his guests. Germans are always willing to guide and advise strangers and they don’t take “tips,” at least not any more than in America. Germany is wealthy and prosperous as a nation and the Germans one meets when traveling are about the best folks you find in Europe.

In Germany a landlord advertises his hotel as “first-class” or “second-class.” The second-class hotels are clean and good, but they have some mighty funny names. I had learned in England not to get worried over the signs of “The Red Lion,” “The White Bull,” etc. But German hotel-keepers go still further. They name their places after animals of all kinds and colors, and often saints and imaginary creatures. The Golden Calf, The Winged Lion, The House of the Weaned Calf, The Wild Man, were some of the names, but at Heidelberg one extreme was reached by the “Hotel Jesus,” and at Worms the other extreme by the “Hotel of the Two Pairs of Drawers.” I suppose every name has a story or a legend behind it and the name is a valuable asset of the property. Speaking of names reminds me that here in Cologne the street that leads to the market-place is called “Kingdom of Heaven street,” and not far away is the “Grace of God street.” I can see how these names might be properly used in Kansas, but they are out of place in Cologne.

HOLLAND AND BELGIUM.

IN DUTCH LAND.

AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND, July 31, 1905.

The kingdom of Holland is a little bit of a country, but it has exerted a great influence in history. In size it is 12,650 square miles, not as large as the Seventh congressional district of Kansas, but it has over 5,000,000 inhabitants and is busy from one end to the other. The greater part lies below the level of the sea, which borders it on the west and has been literally reclaimed from the water by the energy and work of the people. The Hollanders are the Dutch, and they have a saying: “God made the sea, but we made the land.” The water is held back by immense dikes, and here in Amsterdam I look toward the sea and the great lot of shipping along the quay is higher than the tops of many of the houses; that is, the water is higher than the roofs in the town. The industry which has thus driven back and held back the sea has made little Holland a wealthy nation and Dutch capital has not only built up business at home, but it has gone into the farthermost parts of the earth, even to Missouri and Arkansas, constructed railroads, started factories and earned dividends or gone into the hands of receivers in large amounts. The country is covered with canals about as Kansas is with section-line roads. These canals are used for commerce, carrying freight cheaply, and for drainage, irrigation, and in place of fences. Every farm has its little canal leading to a main canal as a farmer’s road in Kansas goes out to the main traveled road. The farmer brings his stuff to town in a canal-boat, and a farm-wagon is almost as rare a sight in Holland as a canal-boat is in Kansas. In wet seasons the canals are used as drains and in dry seasons as irrigating-ditches. Canals are built above the level of the land, so that irrigation is easy, and for drainage the water is collected in ditches and pumped up into the canals. All of these facts I had read about, as has everyone else, but to actually see such a country was like a dream come true.

There is more sky in Holland than anywhere else. The land is flatter than a Kansas prairie. The scenery would be absolutely nothing if it were not for the works of man upon the surface. There are no hills in Holland, no rushing streams, no picturesque bits of nature. Some of the land looks lower than the rest, but none looks higher, and the water from the big rivers that enter Holland on the east simply oozes through the soil and canals, without a perceptible current and really without river-beds or water-courses. The Rhine spreads out until it is fifty miles wide, but it is no longer a river,—merely a network of canals which it supplies with water, and its old channels are now made by dikes and drainage into farms and town-sites. The landscape thus becomes a flat, fertile country, mostly farmed in grass and pastured with cattle and sheep, a lace-work of canals in shiny streaks running in every direction, narrow red brick houses with white trimmings, and windmills which tower above everything else and stand like giant sentinels over the low and level country. These windmills are big, fifty to a hundred feet high, the lower part usually used as dwellings, constructed as strongly and stoutly as government buildings, and with four immense arms or sails which convert the Dutch zephyrs into horsepower. The windmills are used for grinding grain, sawing lumber and in all kinds of manufacturing, as well as to pump water from the low ground to the canals and into the sea. A Kansas windmill compared to a Dutch windmill would be like a straw beside an oak tree.

Very often in Europe I have been compelled to draw on my imagination to make the actual facts come within speaking distance of what had been written or promised about a country. Not so in Holland. Everything I have ever read about dikes, canals and windmills is true, and nothing you have been able to imagine is beyond the real existing condition and appearance.

Yes, there is one thing, and I wonder if other people would feel the same way. In the pictures and on the china the windmills, the cows and even the people have always been blue. Of course I knew better, but when I found that a Holland landscape was not blue and white, I felt as if I had been deceived. The sky is blue, but the windmills are browned with exposure, the cows are black-and-white, and the people are not any more blue in Holland than they are in Newton.

The ride from Cologne, Germany, to Amsterdam, down the valley of the Rhine, which is no longer picturesque or lined with castles and legends, gave me my introduction to Holland. Most of it is the kind of country in which a traveler can enjoy reading a good book. After the first enthusiastic demonstration over windmills,—and they are more numerous than telegraph posts along the Santa Fe,—and the excitement of watching canal-boats having died out, Holland is not a country that causes thrills. There is a strange effect created on seeing a canal-boat in a canal a little distance off. You see a sailboat or a steamboat apparently sailing right through a pasture. You can’t see the water, and the effect is as if ships were really gliding over the grass and fields.

The canals are generally at least fifty feet wide and at least six feet deep. There are many good-sized boats. The power used is of different kinds: steam, sails, horses, men, women. Steamboats are numerous. Sails are used on nearly all, at least to help. Very often a man is hitched to a rope and sometimes a woman, with a regular harness so that the pull comes on the breast and shoulders. Dogs are not used to haul canal-boats, but they are the usual motive-power in the towns for small delivery-wagons, milk-wagons and the like.

The people of Holland, especially outside the cities, stick to their old peculiar costumes better than do the people of any other country in Europe that I have seen. The originals of the quaint Dutch pictures are here and numerous. The women wear the foolish bonnets, funny short full skirts, woolen stockings and wooden shoes, and the men the odd hats, clothes that bag between the hips and knees, and the wooden shoes that turn up like sled-runners. The wooden shoes are not worn in the house, but shaken off as the person enters and a pair of cloth shoes substituted. I suppose that is a ground rule made by the Dutch housewives, whose propensity for scrubbing and cleanliness is well known. But in spite of the deserved reputation, I do not think that Holland is as clean a country as it is advertised. The canals are close to being stagnant water, and as all the dirt and sewage goes into them there is an odor about Holland that comes near the smell you get from old cheese. Especially in the towns and cities where the canals form the principal streets, I can’t escape the idea that they are a good deal like open sewers. The water is changed by pumping, but not often, and after it stands a while over the stuff thrown in one would think from the noticeable odor that it would breed sickness. They say it is not very bad, but it would cause a big kick in America—the newspapers would go after the city council a plenty for permitting such a nuisance.

A good deal has been said and written in the United States of recent years in regard to the “emancipation of women.” The extension of civil and legal rights to persons of the female sex has been properly the subject of general congratulation. The club movement has done a great work in forcing a recognition of the work of women equally with the work of men. Prior to coming to Europe I had supposed that the women of the United States had made more progress along these lines than those of any other country. But I was mistaken. The women of Europe are far ahead of the women of America in the equality of the sexes. A women in continental Europe not only has the right to go out in the field and labor, but she can work on the roads, and she can engage in any business that a man can. In Italy I saw women harnessed alongside of dogs and in Holland I find them harnessed to canal-boats, the same as men. If there is any kind of work in Europe that a man can do in which women cannot and do not engage I have not discovered it, except the occupation of wearing military uniforms. The mercantile and shopkeeping business is almost entirely given over to women, and the right to carry trunks, shine shoes, sell papers and act as porters is not denied them. The men seem to be perfectly willing to let the women do the work, and the emancipation seems to have been accomplished without trouble of any kind.

The Dutch language is more like the English than like the German, with which it is classed. With my little knowledge of German I can read the Dutch signs and make a stagger at the newspapers, for there is more English than German in the written words. But the Dutch as a spoken language is like neither the German nor English. When two Dutchmen have a social, quiet chat it sounds like a buzz-saw. I can usually make a Dutchman understand me, but when it comes to my grasping the meaning of his talk I had as soon try to interpret the remarks of a file. It is ridiculous the way you have to change language every few hours’ ride in Europe. But I quit trying when I came to the Dutch. They will have to talk English or make signs in order to get my money; and again I am brought to the conclusion that no matter what is the language of the country, “money talks.”

THE DAM DUTCH TOWNS.

THE HAGUE, HOLLAND, Aug. 2, 1905.

Before leaving Amsterdam we took a trip through several little Dutch villages and to the island of Maarken, where the fisher-people continue to wear their eighteenth-century costumes in the progressive, stylish twentieth century. As a very pleasing incident of this journey we happened to reach Maarken at the same time with Queen Wilhelmina, so we not only got to see a live queen but in the excitement in the village escaped the attention usually given to American tourists by a thrifty people who have curios to sell. Queen Wilhelmina was a disappointment. I had been prepared to see a charming girlish sovereign, and I guess I was looking for something like a bright American girl with her hair hanging down her back. The queen is only 24 years old, but she looks 30. She wore a cheap-looking white suit which probably cost 30 cents a yard, American money. Her face was faded and so was her hat. She has large feet, wears coarse shoes, and her stockings wrinkled around the ankle like a fisherwoman’s. The stolidity of the Dutch was too much for me. The queen walked through the village, and while everybody turned out to see her there was not a cheer. When she passed the little group of a half-dozen Americans we took off our hats and gave a loud hurrah, just to show our friendship. She didn’t smile or look around, and we felt as cheap as she looked. In appearance she is sad and uninteresting. In America a governor or a president would have smiled and spoken cheerfully. But the queen of Holland does not have to run for reëlection, and I suppose that has a salutary effect on American statesmen. I will confess right now that my observations of European nobility have been made at a distance. I have not been mingling with the dukes and counts, but have received most of my impressions from the hotel clerks, the hackmen, the store-keepers and the workingmen. They are always glad to talk or make signs to Americans, and I have not met one laboring man who did not say he wanted to come to America. In the smoking-rooms and around the hotels I have talked some with the so-called “upper classes.” They don’t like America or England. I think the rulers of continental Europe and all the lords and valets are afraid America and England are going to combine with Japan and rule the world. The leading newspapers are full of that kind of talk, and while it is laughable to find that they think the American people are planning an invasion of Europe, it has a satisfactory side in the fact that it shows they think we could do it if we tried. The ruling classes are hostile politically to America. On the other hand, the working people are very friendly. The kings and nobles know that their jobs would not last long under American ideas. And the workingmen think that America means a chance to earn more than a mere living. Both classes have instinctively taken a position on the American question, and I don’t blame them.