When he dons his dress suit for dinner, and bending over your shoulder asks, in his best English: "Mynheer, don't it now de feesh you haf?" you lose sight of Boughton's Dutchman and see only the cosmopolitan. The transformation is due entirely to continental influences--Dort being one of the main highways between London and Paris--influences so strong that even in this water-logged town on the Maas, bonnets are beginning to replace caps, and French shoes sabots. The guests that Johan serves at this inn of my good friend Boudier are as odd looking as its interior. They line both sides and the two ends of the long table. Stout Germans in horrible clothes, with stouter wives in worse; Dutchmen from up-country in brown coats and green waistcoats; clerks off on a vacation with kodaks and Cook's tickets; bicyclists in knickerbockers; painters, with large kits and small handbags, who talk all the time and to everybody; gray-whiskered, red-faced Englishmen, with absolutely no conversation at all, who prove to be distinguished persons attended by their own valets, and on their way to Aix or the Engadine, now that the salmon-fishing in Norway is over; school teachers from America, just arrived from Antwerp or Rotterdam, or from across the channel by way of Harwich, their first stopping-place really since they left home--one traveling-dress and a black silk in the bag; all the kinds and conditions and sorts of people who seek out precious little places like Dort, either because they are cheap or comfortable, or because they are known to be picturesque. I sought out Dort years ago because it was untouched by the hurry that makes life miserable, and the shams that make it vulgar, and I go back to it now every year of my life, in spite of other foreign influences. [Illustration: THE GOSSIPS LEAN IN THE DOORWAYS]