salutary freshness of spirit was favoured by the variety of people crowding in this centre: the hospitality shown to people of various religions, from the busy Jews, to the refugees of Antwerp and Flanders, created a rivalry of interests, benefiting trade in general. To this animation caused by commerce we must add the life brought into the town’s thoroughfares by the people’s domestic and social existence, which was in those days much more out-of-doors than it is now, just as there was also a much less marked separation between the various classes: housewives going to the markets, children playing in the streets, families reposing in or before their open street-doors, people of the lower classes seeking in the street what their narrow and close dwellings could not give them, travellers being seen off at the harbourside or on the canal-quays, costermongers praising their wares. There was, for example, the daily fishmarket behind the Dam, Amsterdam’s central square, of which the poet Brederode has left us such vivid pictures, bringing to our ears all the bargaining, shouting, and quarrelling of former days; there were numerous other markets necessitated, not only by the town’s trade, but by its every-day needs: the weekly market for butter and cheese, which until 1669 enlivened the Dam, where now electric cars circulate and a much less-varied traffic passes by; the apple- and fruit-market on the Singel, opposite the house where Rembrandt’s only son Titus passed the few months of his married life; the flower-market, where the middleclass people found the cheap floral decorations for their often gloomy interiors: the meat-market in the Nes: the Monday’s market, on the Singel, of small furniture and kitchen-utensils: the vegetable- and peat-market on the Prinsengracht, etc. That all good housewives, even those of middle and upper classes, made it a rule to frequent these markets is revealed to us not only by contemporary pictures but also by a passage in one of Huygens’s letters to the Prince of Orange, in which this refined diplomat from The Hague expresses his astonishment at seeing the wife of Admiral de Ruyter go daily to market « le panier au bras. » [Plate 24. The Star of the Kings. ] Plate 24. The Star of the Kings. Children before a street door on Epiphany-evening. After the drawing by Rembrandt, in the British Museum, London. Salting Bequest.