I have always believed that duty and beauty should ever go hand in hand in our churches. To me there is nothing too rich in tone, too luxurious in color, too exquisite in line for the House of God. Nothing that the brush of the painter can make glorious, the chisel of the sculptor beautify, or the T-square of the architect ennoble, can ever be out of place in the one building of all others that we dedicate to the Creator of all beauty. I have always thanked Him for his goodness in giving as much thought to the flowers that cover the hillsides as He did to the dull earth that lies beneath; as much care to the matchings of purples and gold in the sunsets as to the blue-black crags that are outlined against them. With these feelings in my heart I have never understood that form of worship which contents itself with a bare barn filled with seats of pine, a square box of a pulpit, a lone pitcher of ice water, and a popular edition of the hymns. But then, I am not a Dutchman. Besides this town of Dort, filled with queer warehouses, odd buildings, and cobbled streets, and dominated by this majestic cathedral, there is across the river--just a little way (Peter rows me over in ten minutes)--the Noah's Ark town of Pappendrecht, surrounded by great stretches of green meadow, dotted with black and white cows, and acres and acres of cabbages and garden truck, and tiny farmhouses, and absurdly big barns; and back of these, and in order to keep all these dry, is a big dike that goes on forever and is lost in the perspective. On both sides of this dike (its top is a road) are built the toy houses facing each other, each one cleaner and better scrubbed than its neighbor, their big windows gay with geraniums. Farther down is another 'recht--I cannot for the life of me remember the first part of its name--where there is a shipyard and big windlasses and a horse hitched to a sweep, which winds up water-soaked luggers on to rude ways, and great pots of boiling tar, the yellow smoke drifting away toward the sea. And between these towns of Dort, Pappendrecht, and the other 'recht moves a constant procession of water craft; a never-ceasing string of low, rakish barges that bear the commerce of Germany out to the sea, each in charge of a powerful tug puffing eagerly in its hurry to reach tide water, besides all the other boats and luggers that sail and steam up and down the forked Maas in front of Boudier's Inn--for Dort is really on an island, the water of the Rhine being divided here. You would never think, were you to watch these ungainly boats, that they could ever arrive anywhere. They look as if they were built to go sideways, endways, or both ways; and yet they mind their helms and dodge in and out and swoop past the long points of land ending in the waving marsh grass, and all with the ease of a steam yacht. * * * * *