Suddenly, on approaching the prow of the ship, where were the third-class passengers, I made a most agreeable discovery. Here was a group of peasants, men and women, dressed in the costume of Zealand--I do not remember of which island, for the costume differs in each, like the dialect, which is a mixture of Dutch and Flemish, if one may so speak of two languages that are almost identical. The men were all dressed alike. They wore round felt hats trimmed with wide embroidered ribbons; their jackets were of dark cloth, close fitting, and so short as hardly to cover their hips, and left open to show a sort of waistcoat striped with red, yellow, and green, which was closed over the chest by a row of silver buttons attached to one another like the links of a chain. Their costume was completed by a pair of short breeches of the same color as the jacket, tied round the waist by a band ornamented by a large stud of chiselled silver,--a red cravat, and woollen stockings reaching to the knee. In short, below the waist their dress was that of a priest, and above it, that of a harlequin. One of them had coins for buttons, and this is not an unusual practice. The women wore very high straw hats in the form of a broken cone, which looked like overturned buckets, bound round with long blue ribbons fluttering in the wind; their dresses were dark-colored, open at the throat, revealing white embroidered chemisettes; their arms were bare to the elbow; and two enormous gold earrings of the most eccentric shape projected almost over their cheeks. Although in my voyage I tried to imitate Victor Hugo in admiring everything as a savage, I could not possibly persuade myself that this was a beautiful style of dress. But I was prepared for incongruities of this sort. I knew that we go to Holland to see novelty rather than beauty, and good things rather than new ones, so I was predisposed to observe rather than to be enthusiastic. If that first impression was not very pleasant to my artistic taste, I consoled myself by the thought that doubtless all those peasants could read and write, and that possibly on the previous evening they had learned by heart a poem of their great poet, Jacob Catz, and that they were probably on their way to some agricultural convention of which the programme was in their pockets, where with arguments drawn from their modest experience they would confute the propositions of some scientific farmer from Goes or Middelburg. Ludovico Guicciardini, a Florentine nobleman, the author of an excellent work on the Netherlands printed in Antwerp in the sixteenth century, says that there was hardly a man or woman in Zealand who did not speak French or Spanish, and that a great many spoke Italian. This statement, which was perhaps an exaggeration in his day, would now be a fable, but it is certain that amongst the rural inhabitants of Zealand there exists an extraordinary intellectual culture, far superior to that of the peasants of France,