Riding, instead of driving, would seem with us a less effective method of developing the speed of a trotting horse, and it certainly appears to be a less comfortable one, but ride them they do in many parts of Holland. I can imagine only one reason for the prevalence of the custom, and that is that the trotting horses are so rotund and ponderous that the shafts of no sulky would fit them, and if it did, no driver could spread his lower limbs so far apart as to drive the horse from the sulky’s seat. Large and ample as Percherons are some of these North Holland and Friesland horses, with long, well-groomed tails and manes; but they have a faster gait than they might be given credit for when seen hitched to a cart or a farm wagon. Pads with knee braces, which serve the riders in place of saddles, are strapped to the horses’ backs, and they trot the course with but little less action than blue grass Kentuckians. A singular thing is that they seldom “break,” their weight apparently holding them to the trot. The express trains from Amsterdam to Leeuwarden make the run in just over three hours and a half, including the ferry passage of an hour and ten minutes across the neck of the Zuyder Zee from Enkhuizen to Stavoren. The line runs through Zaandam to Hoorn and thence to Enkhuizen through the richest farming district in North Holland. The farmhouses, somewhat more substantially built than those in the south, resemble what we rather ambiguously call “country residences.” They have their lawns and their gardens full of flowers, and each is surrounded with its little moat, bridged by a tiny archway which connects the house with the road at but a single point. Enkhuizen is the unfortunate victim of what its inhabitants must consider to be a depraved taste for salmon rather than herring. The Rhine salmon has taken the place of the humble herring on the Dutch menu cards, and the town of Enkhuizen has dwindled accordingly. Of its fleet of four hundred herring vessels and its population of 40,000 souls in the seventeenth century, not a single fishing smack and only 6,300 descendants of its earlier inhabitants remain. Aside from the magnitude of its one-time fishing industry, Enkhuizen courts the fickleness of fame by being the birthplace of Paul Potter. Born in 1625, he painted his most renowned canvas, “The Bull”--now in the Mauritshuis at The Hague--at the age of two-and-twenty, and died but seven years later--only another of the many instances where Death has chosen to lay his hand upon the shoulder of one so young and signally gifted in preference to an octogenarian dullard.