As he said this, he held in his breath, and endeavoured, with all his might, to diminish his size; while the Frenchmen, as if anxious to strain a point in his favour, tightened the cord round him, till he almost became black in the face. “_C’est ça_” said one of the officers, smiling blandly as he took off his hat; “_Monsieur peut continuer sa route_.” “All right,” said I, “you may come in, Mr. Moriarty.” “‘Tis civil people I always heard they wor,” said he; “but it’s a sthrange country where it’s against the laws to grow fatter.” I like Holland;--it is the antipodes of France. No one is ever in a hurry here. Life moves on in a slow majestic stream, a little muddy and stagnant, perhaps, like one of their own canals, but you see no waves, no breakers--not an eddy, nor even a froth-bubble breaks the surface. Even a Dutch child, as he steals along to school, smoking his short pipe, has a mock air of thought about him. The great fat horses, that wag along, trailing behind them some petty, insignificant truck, loaded with a little cask, not bigger than a life-guardsman’s helmet, look as though Erasmus was performing duty as a quadruped, and walking about his own native city in harness. It must be a glorious country to be born in. No one is ever in a passion; and as to honesty, who has energy enough to turn robber? The eloquence, which in other lands might wind a man from his allegiance, would be tried in vain here. Ten minutes’ talking would set any audience asleep, from Zetland to Antwerp. Smoking, beer- drinking, stupifying, and domino-playing, go on, in summer, before, in winter, within, the _cafés_, and every broad flat face that you look upon, with its watery eyes and muddy complexion, seems like a coloured chart of the country that gave it birth. How all the industry, that has enriched them, is ever performed--how all the cleanliness, for which their houses are conspicuous, is ever effected, no one can tell. Who ever saw a Dutchman labour? Every thing in Holland seems typified by one of their own drawbridges, which rises as a boat approaches, by invisible agency, and then remains patiently aloft, till a sufficiency of passengers arrives to restore it to its place, and Dutch gravity seems the grand centre of all prosperity. When, therefore, my fellow-passengers stormed and swore because they were not permitted to land their luggage; when they heard that until nine o’clock the following morning, no one would be astir to examine it; and that the Rhine steamer sailed at eight, and would not sail again for three days more, and cursed the louder thereat; I chuckled to myself that I was going no where, that I cared not how long I waited, nor where, and began to believe that something of very exalted philosophy must have been infused into my nature without my ever being aware of it.