Upon the outskirts of the city are pleasant tea-gardens, often attached to club-rooms, where concerts are held Sunday evenings, attended by the upper classes. We walked through one, over the pebbled paths, and among the deserted tables, and then returned to see more of the town. It was Saturday night. All the little girls upon the street had their locks twisted up in papers so tight and fast that they could shut neither eyes nor mouth, but seemed to be in a continual state of wonderment. All their mothers were down upon their hands and knees, scrubbing the doorsteps and sidewalk, in preparation for the Sabbath. The streets were dirty and uninviting with a few exceptions, yet hardly more so than could be expected, when you remember that nearly the whole city is a line of wharves; but we felt no disposition to walk through it in our slippers, as the guide book in praising its cleanliness, says you may. What an advantage it would be to the world if the compilers of guide-books would only visit the places they describe so graphically! We spent a quiet Sabbath here--the fourth of July--with not so much as a torpedo to disturb its serenity or mark the day, attending church at the English chapel, and joining in the responses led by a clear soprano voice behind us, which we had some desire to locate; but when we turned, at the conclusion of the service, there was only a row of horrible chignons to be seen, to none of which, I am sure, the voice belonged. There is nothing to be seen in Rotterdam but its shipping. One great, bare church we did visit--"the Lord's barn;" for these cathedrals, stripped of altar, and image, and stained glass, and boarded into stiff pews, without the least regard to the eternal fitness of things, are ugly enough. There is somewhere here a collection of Ary Scheffer's works,--in the city I mean,--but we did not see it. It is less than an hour's ride by rail from Rotterdam to the Hague, with the same delightfully monotonous scenery all along the way--meadows smooth and green, and fields white for the harvest, separated by the almost invisible canals. No wonder the Spaniards held the Low Countries with a grasp of iron--the whole land is a garden. The Hague, being the residence of the court, is much after the pattern of all continental capitals, with wide, white streets, white stuccoed houses of regular and beautiful appearance, and fine, large parks and pleasure-grounds filled with deer, and shaded by grand old elms as large as those in our own land, but lacking the long, sweeping branches. A mile from the city is "The House in the Wood," the private residence of the queen of the Netherlands. The wood is heavy and of funereal air, but the little palace is quite charming within, though upon the exterior only a plain brick country-house. The rooms are small, and hung with rice-paper, or embroidered white satin, with which also much of the furniture is covered. The bare floors are of polished wood, with a square of carpet