Both Nicol and I were up betimes in the morning, that we might get the coach for Leyden, which started almost from the door of our inn. I solemnly set down my testimony that the ale in that same house is the most villainous in the world, for it made us both dismal and oppressed, a trouble which did not leave us till we had taken our seats in the diligence and the horses were starting. Of the events of that day’s journey how shall I tell? Leyden is a day’s length from Rotterdam to the north, through a land flat as a girdle-cake. The horses were lumbering, sleepy brutes, and the driver scarce any better, for every now and again he would let them come to the walk for long distances, and then, suddenly awaking to the fact that he must get to his destination before night, get up and shout wildly, and feebly flick their backs with his whip. I had much ado to keep Nicol from trying to take the reins from his hands, and, certainly, if that firebrand had once taken them, we should have awakened the quiet countryside, and, God helping us, might even have awakened the driver. I knew nothing of the country, and heard but vaguely the names shouted out by the guard of the coach; yet, somehow or other, the name of Ryswick clung to my memory, and I remembered it well when, long after, at that place the treaty was signed which closed the war. But at that time the great duke was plain Master Churchill, and there was no thought of war between our land and France. The place was so new to my eyes that I rebelled against its persistent flatness and dull, dead water-courses; but soon I came to acknowledge a kind of prettiness in it, though ’twas of a kind far removed from the wild loveliness of Tweedside. The well-ordered strips of trees, the poplars like sentinels around the homesteads, the red-roofed homesteads themselves, with their ricks and stables, had a homely and habitable look, and such of the folk as we saw by the roadside were as sleek and stolid as their land. I could not think of the place as a nursery of high and heroical virtues, but rather of the minor moralities of good-sense and good-nature. It was late in the afternoon when we came to Leyden, and rattled down the rough street to the market-place, which was the stopping-place of the coach. This was a town more comely and conformable to my eye than the greater city of Rotterdam. For here the streets were not so even, the houses not so trim, and the whole showing a greater semblance of age. There were many streams and canals crossed by broad, low bridges. It was a time of great mildness, for the season of the year. The place had all that air of battered age and historic worth which I have observed in our own city of Edinburgh. Even as I looked on it my mind was full of memories of that terrible siege, when the folk of Leyden held out so stoutly against the black Spaniards, till their king overthrew the dykes and saved the town by flooding the land.