"The inn at Broek was another example of the same neatness. Here we took a little refreshment before going into the village. We walked of course, for no carriage, not even a wheelbarrow, appeared to be allowed any more than in a gentleman's parlor. Everything about the exterior of the houses and gardens was as carefully cared for as the furniture and embellishments of the interior. The streets (or rather alleys, like those of a garden) were narrow and paved with small variously colored bricks forming every variety of ornamental figures. The houses, from the highest to the lowest class, exhibited not merely comfort but luxury, yet it was a selfish sort of luxury. The perpetually closed door and shut-up rooms of ceremony, the largest and most conspicuous of all in the house, gave an air of inhospitableness which, I should hope, was not indicative of the real character of the inhabitants. Yet it seemed to be a deserted village, a place of the dead rather than of the living, an ornamental graveyard. The liveliness of social beings was absent and was even inconsistent with the superlative neatness of all around us. It was a best parlor out-of-doors, where the gayety of frolicking children would derange the set order of the furniture, or an accidental touch of a sacrilegious foot might scratch the polish of a fresh-varnished fence, or flatten down the nap of the green carpet of grass, every blade of which is trained to grow exactly so. "The grounds and gardens of a Mr. Vander Beck were, indeed, a curiosity from the strange mixture of the useful with the ridiculously ornamental. Here were the beautiful banks of a lake and Nature's embellishment of reeds and water plants, which, for a wonder, were left to grow in their native luxuriance, and in the midst a huge pasteboard or wooden swan, and a wooden mermaid of tasteless proportions blowing from a conchshell. In another part was a cottage with puppets the size of life moving by clock-work; a peasant smoking and turning a reel to wind off the thread which his 'goed vrow' is spinning upon a wheel, while a most sheep-like dog is made to open his mouth and to bark--a dog which is, doubtless, the progenitor of all the barking, toy-shop dogs of the world. Directly in the vicinity is a beautiful grapery, with the richest clusters of grapes literally covering the top, sides and walls of the greenhouse, which stands in the midst of a garden, gay with dahlias and amaranths and every variety of flowers, with delicious fruits thickly studding the well-trained trees. Everything, however, was cut up into miniature landscapes; little bridges and little temples adorned little canals and little mounds, miniature representations of streams and bills.