If you happen to have penetrated Holland as far as The Hague without having availed yourself of the steam tram method of conveyance between one town and another the trip by this means from The Hague to Leyden might be suggested as an excellent one with which to commence to develop the habit. The tram that operates on regular schedule between the Schenkweg in The Hague and the Groote Ryndyk in Leyden pierces a delightful country checkered by a labyrinth of canals, long and short, wide and narrow. Even every patch of humble cabbages appears to be surrounded with one, along which the truck gardeners pole their boats that bear the vegetables direct from soil to market. Tree crested dikes, straight as the shortest distance between two points, stretch away into the perspective in every direction. Villas and cozy country cottages come quickly into view and fade away again behind their groves of trees, giving the traveler just a flitting suggestion of the comfort their owners must find in them. In passing through the neat little brick-paved villages of Voorburg and Voorschoten the tram engine careens around through the streets as if it had developed a first-class state of intoxication. It aims directly for a kitchen door here and the walls of a church there, only to miss them by a few feet while making a dexterous turn to the other side of the road, twisting its diminutive train of two or three cars in its wake. Then out beside the dikes again it puffs and sputters on its seemingly remonstrative way to Leyden. Leyden is a quiet, curious old town, rich in history and effervescent with learning. With due respect to art, it was the birthplace of a dozen or more of the most illustrious Dutch painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Jan Steen, Gerard Dou, and last, but by no means least, the celebrated Rembrandt; but, strange to tell, it cannot boast of a single masterpiece of any of them. At its university, then renowned throughout the world, the future savants of the age came to pore over their books. Hugo Grotius was one of its earlier sons, and later, in 1755, at the age of twenty-seven, Oliver Goldsmith aspired in vain to the degree of Doctor of Medicine, afterwards conferred at Louwain, giving Leyden the first opportunity of being its donor. The town’s many museums--of ethnography, of natural history, of comparative anatomy, of physiology, of archeology--bespeak its hobby: the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Even many of the signs one reads in the town are in Latin. [Illustration: An excellent way to go from The Hague to Leyden is by steam tram, the curious engine of which is shown here]