When the Pilgrims stepped from the deck of their vessel upon the quays of Amsterdam, they felt that sad, aching sense of utter desolation which always smites exiled hearts in a strange country. But there was much about Amsterdam which tended to increase this natural homesickness, and to make the blood pulse still more coldly through their veins. Every thing was novel; the manners, the costume, the architecture, the language of the people. Their first steps were involved in an apparently inextricable maze; they were confounded by the bewildering confusion of land and water. Canals, crawled with their sluggish water, before them and behind them, to the right and to the left. Indeed, the town was so much interwoven with havens, that the oozy ground was cut up into ninety-five islands or detached blocks, connected with each other by two hundred and ninety fantastic bridges. The principal havens, called grachts, were from a hundred to a hundred and forty feet wide, and extended in semicircular curves one after the other through the town. In order to reach the interior of the city, it was necessary to cross a number of these broad harbors; and in making the necessary deflections in passing from gracht to gracht, all recollection of the points of the compass vanished from the minds of the bewildered Englishmen, so that they received the impression that they were wandering in a labyrinth from which it was impossible to escape by their own unaided efforts. The houses were built of brick, and were generally four or five stories high, with fantastic, pointed gables in front. Some of them were elegantly constructed; but the larger number of the citizens seemed desirous of making their dwellings look as like warehouses as possible. Almost every house had a piece of timber projecting from the wall over the uppermost window in the gable, and this was used for hauling up fuel or furniture to the top story. All the residences were erected upon piles of wood driven into the soft, marshy ground; but so insufficient was this precaution in giving stability, that many of the buildings leaned considerably from the perpendicular, and seemed as if about to topple over into the street or splash out of sight through the mud. The roadway between the houses and the water was so narrow, that in some of the finest streets a coach could not conveniently turn round. Such were some of the strange sights which greeted the wondering eyes of the Pilgrims as they hurriedly trod, on the day of their arrival, from the quay where they had landed, into the interior of the quaint old town in search of lodgings.