On our return we met groups of little girls, whose short petticoats, and protuberances on all sides, looked very grotesque. Many of the Dutch girls of the lower order wear twenty or thirty yards of flannel tied round their hips. In the village is a pauper house for the poor and aged, founded in 1614. On a week day, the road from Scheveling is more characteristically gay, being covered with fishwomen running and singing to the Hague, under loads of soles, cod, turbot, &c. to which place I returned, highly delighted with my excursion. In the neighbourhood of that city are several fine flower-gardens. The passion of the Dutch for flowers is well known. M. Dutens, in his very entertaining and interesting Memoirs of a Traveller in Retirement, says, that at the kermis or fair held at the Hague in the month of May, “I was witness to a circumstance I could not otherwise have believed, respecting the price of flowers in Holland; I saw four hundred and seventy-five guineas offered and refused for a hyacinth. It was to be sure the most charming flower that ever was seen: it belonged to a florist at Haarlem, and _another florist offered this price for it_. The reason which the owner gave me for refusing the offer was, that his hyacinth was known to all the amateurs of Europe, and that he sold the bulbs every year for more than the interest of five hundred guineas. These bulbs produced the same sort of flower in all its beauty.” This singular passion has not subsided: at Haarlem fine narcissuses and jonquils sell for an immense price, and parties are made every summer to visit the roses, which grow in great perfection at Noordwyk.