And what a cathedral this Gothic curiosity of Utrecht is! Erected in the eleventh century upon the site of a former ecclesiastical edifice founded in 720, in its day it must have easily outclassed anything of its ilk in all the Netherlands. Now its back is broken, so to speak, beyond repair, for in 1674 a violent hurricane that bowled a spare with the church towers in the district, tore out the nave of the cathedral and left the tower and the choir completely disconnected. The site of the demolished nave now forms the center of the Cathedral Square, and is as much a thoroughfare as any street in the city. The interior of the church, like the interior of almost every church of any size in Holland, offers little of originality or interest. The walls are covered with many layers of unbecoming whitewash, and any pleasing effect that the columned interior might have originally had is lost, for a portion in the center is boarded up, like a bull ring with its barrier, segregating the inclosed space for the purpose of uninterrupted worship. The one redeeming feature of the whole place, aside from a few meritorious monuments, is a handsome oaken pulpit, elaborately carved by hand, so as to give the effect of a miniature cathedral in itself. After being a city of disabled and decrepit churches, Utrecht is a university town, and the seven or eight hundred students in attendance do their best to emulate the early ecclesiastics by trying to keep the place in a state of perennial siege, for it is to be remembered that the drudgery and frugality of university life in Holland is not what it is cracked up to be. In a way, a Dutch college education is a good bit of a farce. The student is under very few obligations except to himself. He does not have to appear in chapel; he does not even have to attend classes, and there are a large number of students in each of Holland’s three universities--young men of private fortune who take up a course in law or what not, with no intention of ever practicing, in order to avail themselves of the gaiety and freedom of university life--who never enter a lecture room from one term’s end to the other. Consequently, there is much hilarity and much extravagance, all of which is more or less resented by the thrifty, peaceful townspeople, and which sometimes places the two factions under strained relations. When a student does complete a course, having seen fit to relegate himself to the hard, honest work necessary to the attainment of a doctor’s degree, he deems it of such momentous occurrence that he forthwith has his thesis published in book form _de luxe_, and, hiring a carriage, which is manned by student initiates into his Corps, he drives in state to the residences of his several professors and intimate friends, leaving with each a copy of his work.