He also notes the peculiar custom of breakfasting and dining in bedrooms. “At the country box of one of the most respectable tradesmen in Holland,” he writes, “I dined with his family in the principal room, which had beds concealed behind parts of its wainscoting.” This was in Rotterdam. He says: “At the end of this garden stood a pretty little summer residence, among whose lower apartments was a kitchen with furniture that displayed all the brightness and neatness for which the culinary arrangements of the Dutch have been celebrated, and above which was a large bay windowed room in which we dined. A natural inquiry respecting bed-chambers was here answered by opening parts of the wainscot, behind which were concealed canopies of the master, mistress and their children.” The homes of Holland changed little during the century, and the cottages, farmhouses and homes of the peasants may be said to have changed not at all. Take, for instance, the fishing village of Maarken, in the Zuyder Zee, of which Esquiros writes: [Illustration: PLATE LVII.—_In Bruitlaen, by Artz._ ] “Most frequently the same room serves at once as bedroom, kitchen and storehouse for the fishing utensils. Some houses, however, have a second and separate room, called here the saloon, in which furniture and clothes are kept, but that is almost aristocratic luxury. The rooms which are flush with the ground have no ceiling, and communicate with the garret, over which the tile or thatch roof rises at right angles. The houses are equally deficient in chimneys as a rule, but before the principal window there is a large flat stone surrounded by a row of bricks. A piece of iron is fastened at the back of this stone, against which the fire is kindled. An opening in the roof allows exit to the smoke, which, before emerging, spreads through the loft, where the nets are dried. Only thirty houses are remarkable for possessing chimneys. Several times a year the interior is cleaned and whitewashed. A table surrounded by very low chairs, an old _escritoire_ loaded with pretty china, an eight-day clock, milk tubs whose copper rings shine like gold, produce in the houses of the island an alliance of facts rarely found among other races, namely, of cleanliness with poverty. This taste for china, old glass, curtains and flowered counterpanes is a delicate feature in the Batavian character. Art sits down by the side of Misery at the fireside, which it enlivens with a consolatory beam.”