world, and has a spirit superior to old-fashioned prejudices—she must have by way of crown, all to her four caps (one of precious metals), a straw bonnet, a huge, heavy, coal-scuttle, festooned with loops and streamers of gaudy ribbon, and thriftily guarded at the edge with a hem or barrier of stout and gaudy printed chintz. Thus canopied are the comely wives and widows (maidens, possibly dispensing with the bonnet), who shrieked, clapped their hands, and, with every other possible demonstration of offence, pursued the wearer of the Brown Hat in Friesland. On the habiliments of the male moiety of society, tediousness forbids that we should expatiate; the less, as something will thus be left to be treated on a future day, when the grave question of apparel may be more solemnly entered upon. Enough for the moment, to say that it suits the singularities of this critical land: a land in which a Swimming Lion is the ensign, and of which His Majesty Topsy-Turvy might be sovereign; a land in which there is hardly a crooked horizontal line to be found, save among the sand-hills; a land in which, with all its neatness’ care, scarce a building, be it church or market-house, palace or exchange, can be prevailed upon to stand perpendicular; a land in which for air you breathe extract of juniper, turf, tobacco, and stagnant waters, mixed; a land in which people eat cheese with their tea, and where a child that plucks a nest runs great danger of being whipped as an enemy to Church and State—guilty of trying to let in the republican ocean; a land where full-grown babies set up clockwork gentlemen and _papier mâche_ swans, by way of animating their garden, and the weedy ponds in the same; a land where full-grown men undertake and complete some of the most magnificent enterprises which science can contrive for industry to carry out; a land of teeming plenty and of high prices; a land of bad digestions and beautiful complexions. No, the men of this land—the shippers of Dordrecht, the potters of Delft, the gardeners of Broet, and the dairy farmers of Harlingen, decked out for fair or frolic—must be to-day left with all their uncouth and indescribable finery, undescribable, it may be, for some future parable.