And there is no real change in fifteen years. Its old trees still nod over the sleepy canals in the same sleepy way they have done, no doubt, for a century. The rooks--the same rooks, they never die--still swoop in and out of the weather-stained arches high up in the great tower of the Groote Kerk, the old twelfth-century church, the tallest in all Holland; the big-waisted Dutch luggers with rudders painted arsenic green--what would painters do without this green?--doze under the trees, their mooring lines tied to the trunks; the girls and boys, with arms locked, a dozen together, clatter over the cobbles, singing as they walk; the steamboats land and hurry on--"Fop Smit's boats" the signs read--it is pretty close, but I am not part owner in the line; the gossips lean in the doorways or under the windows banked with geraniums and nasturtiums; the cumbersome state carriages with the big ungainly horses with untrimmed manes and tails--there are only five of these carriages in all Dordrecht--wait in front of the great houses eighty feet wide and four stories high, some dating as far back as 1512, and still occupied by descendants of the same families; the old women in ivory black, with dabs of Chinese white for sabots and caps, push the same carts loaded with Hooker's green vegetables from door to door; the town crier rings his bell; the watchman calls the hour. Over all bends the ever-changing sky, one hour close-drawn, gray-lined with slanting slashes of blinding rain, the next piled high with great domes of silver-white clouds inlaid with turquoise blue or hemmed in by low-lying ranges of purple peaks capped with gold. * * * * * I confess that an acute sense of disappointment came over me when I first saw these gray canals, rain-varnished streets, and rows of green trees. I recognized at a glance that it was not my Holland; not the Holland of my dreams; not the Holland of Mesdag nor Poggenbeck nor Kever. It was a fresher, sweeter, more wholesome land, and with a more breathable air. These Dutch painters had taught me to look for dull, dirty skies, soggy wharves, and dismal perspectives of endless dikes. They had shown me countless windmills, scattered along stretches of wind-swept moors backed by lowering skies, cold gray streets, quaint, leanover houses, and smudgy, grimy interiors. They had enveloped all this in the stifling, murky atmosphere of a western city slowly strangling in clouds of coal smoke. These Dutch artists were, perhaps, not alone in this falsification. It is one of the peculiarities of modern art that many of its masters cater to the taste of a public who want something that _is not_ in preference to something that _is_. Ziem, for instance, had, up to the time of my enlightenment, taught me to love an equally untrue and impossible Venice--a Venice all red and yellow and deep ultra-marine blue--a Venice of unbuildable palaces and blazing red walls.