“Since last writing you I have enjoyed a week (or more I fear) of rare incident and experience, my days being so full and my evenings so tired that I have failed again in my good intentions as to frequency of letters. “I hurried your last letter into the mail and am somewhat in doubt whether it reached the Queenstown post in time. Since that writing we (which means a party of Van Ingen, Willis, Roberts, McGrath, Dunthorne and myself) have visited successively Flushing, Rotterdam, The Hague, Dordrecht, Scheveningen, Amsterdam and Brussels. Of course our visit has been brief as the period of time represented has been but four days. The picture galleries have received most of our attention at these places, but at Dordrecht and Scheveningen we found the living pictures unmatched by any in the respective art exhibitions. Dort is a perfect treasure of a place, pictorially considered, and I shall live in hopes of revisiting it in the future more at my leisure and with an eye to ‘material.’ You would have been charmed with the quaintness of this old Dutch village with its Venice-like canals, its queer inhabitants, its hundreds of wind-mills and picturesque old boats. We hired a boat and guide and rowed for hours upon one of these meandering waterways--under arched bridges beneath which we had to stoop; beneath overhanging balconies bright with flowering plants and with an occasional saucy or coquettish face half disclosed between the Venetian blinds at the windows, occasionally with a giggle accompaniment or a handkerchief manœuvered in a manner which would have done credit to a French or Spanish coquette. The little Dutch ‘yongen’ or Deutscher ‘pups’ saluted us with questionable slang or with stones or what-not, at every private quay or alley-way opening on the canal and altogether our turnout with its noisy exclamatory cargo was a great center of attraction to contiguous neighborhoods whose windows were usually filled with curious spectators mostly on a broad grin of Dutch proportions and typical comeliness, and ’tis true occasionally relieved by a disclosure which our Scotch friend Roberts assured us was ‘bonny’ and which commentary I was pleased to verify, and which moreover was the signal of a chorus of ‘ah’s’ from our bateau that would have done credit to a West Brighton populace at the ‘busting’ of a rocket. Our trip was occasionally varied by a landing at some quaint quay or alley, and a rummaging visit to some musty old bric-a-brac den or junk shop. The streets were of the queerest in architecture and life--queer old women with brass headgear and huge sabots or wooden shoes, and voices like a fog-horn, peddling their green goods, their eggs, milk or whatever, their treasures suspended from yokes, and borne with apparent pleasure. I have bought one of their huge brass milk cans and a few other of their distinguishing paraphernalia for our front parlor over the mantel--(a part of the foregoing was