Leeuwarden is the most important town in Friesland; therefore its capital. Also it is the only place in the province that is really worth a protracted visit. On the way from Stavoren you may wander up the coast a short distance to Hindeloopen, once famed for its highly decorated furniture and the many-colored costumes of its natives; you may stop off at Sneek and see its _stadthuis_ and its _waterpoort_, better examples of which you will have already seen in North Holland; you may journey over to the coast town of Harlingen--a much less interesting fishing port than Volendam--breaking the trip at Franeker to see the wonderfully ingenious astronomical model of the workings of the solar system which took one of the more inventive citizens of the place, Eise Eisenga by name, seven years to construct; but all of these especial features, and more, can be seen and studied in Leeuwarden. When you enter the interior of Friesland you will be penetrating one of the three or four provinces of Holland that are not overrun with tourists. Even in its capital an American is more or less of a curiosity and he may expect to be stared at until the people stumble over each other, almost, in their well-meaning efforts to divine his nationality; but he may console himself in the thought that they will be just as curious, if not as humorous, to him as he is to them. Before the time of the terrific geographical convulsion responsible for the formation of the Zuyder Zee, there had been but one Friesland, stretching over much of the entire territory later known as that of the Dutch Republic, including Holland. Its inhabitants, the Frisians, were renowned throughout Europe for their physical prowess. Imbued with an unquenchable love for political independence, they had shaken off the yokes of the imperial counts and had formed the league of the seven “Sea Lands” in the eleventh century. After being subjugated for a time by Charlemagne, they suddenly rebelled, and in 1256 defeated and put to death the German king, William II of Holland. When the German ocean rolled in over the land, engulfing considerably more than a thousand Frisian villages, it separated kindred peoples, creating not only a geographical but a political chasm between them. West Friesland became absorbed in Holland, but East Friesland continued its career as a confederation of independently governed maritime provinces, until Saxony, hard pressed for funds, sold its sovereignty to the house of Austria for a paltry 350,000 crowns.