reason except to prevent boys sliding down. The faith that all material things should be made to serve the greatest good of the greatest number is surely as widely held in England as in Holland, and yet, here are the tops of these Dutch posts _culotté_, if I may say so, worn smooth and polished by the many generations of boys who have enjoyed leap-frog over them, while the British posts and banisters have given pleasure to no human being but Bumble from the day they were put up. But it was not of the Dutch posts but the Dutch boys that I intended to write, for they certainly struck me as differing in two particulars from our boys, thus. Two of the posts, as I have said, are so close to the lamp-posts that you can’t vault over them without coming full butt against the lamp-post on the other side. When the leader came to the first of them he did not pass it, as I expected, but just vaulted on to the top, and sat there while he passed his leg between the-post and the lamp-post, and then jumped down and went on to the next. Every one of the rest followed his example gravely and without a word; whereas, had they been English boys, there would have been a bolt past the leader as soon as he was seated, and a race with much shouting for the lead over the remaining pillars. I have been studying the Dutch boy ever since, and am convinced that he is the most silent and most “thorough” of any of his species I have ever come across; and the boy is father to the man in both qualities. On Whit-Monday this city was crowded, all the citizens and country-folk from the suburbs being in the streets and gardens; the galleries and museums, oddly enough, being closed for the day. Walking about amongst them the silence was really rather provoking. At last I took to counting the couples we met who were obviously just married, or courting, and ought at any rate to have had something to say to each other. Out of eleven couples in one street, only one were talking, though all looked quite happy and content. It is the same everywhere. As we neared the landing-place at the Hook of Holland, our steamer’s bows were too far out, and a rope had to be thrown from the shore. There were at least twenty licensed porters waiting for us, in clean white jackets,--one of these, without a word, just coiled a rope and flung it. It was missed twice by the sailor in our bows, and fell into the water, out of which the thrower drew it, and just coiled and threw it again without a word of objurgation or remonstrance, and the third time successfully. Not one of the white-jacketed men who stood round had uttered a syllable of advice or comment; but what a Babel would have arisen in like case at the pier-heads of Calais or Dieppe, or for that matter at Dover or Liverpool. No wonder that William the Silent is the typical hero of Dutchmen; there are two statues of him in the best sites in this city, and half a dozen portraits in the best places in the galleries. Hosea Biglow’s--