Twentieth century Utrecht is different. Its old-time importance as one of the foremost commercial cities of the Middle Ages was owing to its enviable position on the Rhine where the river wrenches itself into two branches--the Old Rhine and the Vecht. The former percolates, according to the will and calculations of the Dutch engineers, into the North Sea at Katwyk, and the Vecht empties into the Zuyder Zee, near Muiden. The city’s commercial importance and activity have dwindled piteously into a weekly cattle market held in the Vreeburg, Utrecht’s great central square, occupying the site of a castle built in 1517 by Emperor Charles V. [Illustration: Utrecht’s Cathedral, erected in the eleventh century upon the site of a church founded in 720] With the break of day on Saturday the farmers from the surrounding country, “_klomped_” in more varied styles of wooden shoes than you will find in any other single town in Holland, begin to arrive with their stock at the Vreeburg. In the night a conglomerate collection of little side-show tents and canvas-covered stalls for the sale of almost everything, has sprung up like a bed of mushrooms on the outskirts of the market place, so that the cattle dealer, after he has negotiated a substitution of stock for its equivalent in the coin of the realm, may want for neither amusement nor a convenient place to purchase the hundred and one articles that his better seven-eighths has cautioned him not to come home without. Singularly enough, the same methods obtain in bargaining for cows in Utrecht that are prevalent while dickering for cheeses in Alkmaar. There is the same placid composure on the part of the seller, the same minute examination on the part of the buyer; there is the same Captain John Smith pose; there is the same whacking of hands; there is the same general exodus from the market place, after the ceremonies, to the more blithesome lunchrooms and halls of frivolity. I wish I might have followed up the case of a cattle dealer whom I saw in a certain café after the market, making a lunch of the uncertain mixture of a glass of beer and a dish of currants. The notation of the after effects of the combination might have been of value to materia medica. Utrecht’s famous old churches have been pillaged and desecrated to a great extent by the elements and the changes wrought by time and tide. Once, long ago, when the followers of the various creeds were all at sixes and sevens, the Munsterkerk, the Pieterskerk, the Janskerk, and the cathedral itself, no doubt, with their cloistersful of clergy, were walled in and moated, and patronized as much as asylums of refuge as for worship. To-day they are simply tolerated. A coffeehouse does a land office business in the archbishop’s palace, and the tramcar company has tunneled through the vaulted archway of the great detached cathedral tower rather than go to the trouble of laying the tracks around it.