Hotel accommodations, however, are more provincial. In the dining-room everyone is seated at one long table, as in the smaller hotels in The Hague, so that an ordinary mealtime looks more like a banquet. The business and social phases of the hotel are conducted in one large room wherein the men gather after dinner to sit and smoke, read, or play chess. Here in a corner at a little desk holds forth the head waiter. Although he is the functionary who assigns you to your room and to whom you pay your bill, he is not so preëminent as the head waiters of most of the hotels in the south, for the proprietor usually shows a preference to manage the place according to his own ideas. As a general rule he will do his own marketing and, if conditions require it, he is not above helping to wait upon the table and making himself useful in many other ways. Not far from Leeuwarden, in the village of Dronrijp, was born, in 1836, one of Holland’s most eminent modern artists, although a naturalized subject of Great Britain since 1873--Sir Laurens Alma Tadema, some noted examples of whose work are to be seen in the Mesdag Museum in The Hague. Another town, Marssum, a few miles distant, is famous as the center of the cattle district, and dealers and breeders come to some of the large farms in the vicinity from all over the world, including America, to purchase blooded Frisian stock. Indeed, all along the thirty-three miles of railway between Leeuwarden and Groningen the pastures are dotted with fine, healthy-looking black and white cows. Each field being surrounded by a small canal eight or ten feet in width, the cattle may be segregated, one herd from another, by simply closing the gates on top of the narrow hills that lead across the intervening canal from one pasture to its neighbor; thus the labor and expense of building fences is saved. As much as North Holland is noted for its cheese, just so much is Friesland famed for its butter, and between 130,000,000 and 140,000,000 pounds of it are churned annually. The conditions of the trade are exceptionally sanitary and at all times under government inspection. Here and there through Friesland--in fact, through almost any part of the Netherlands--you will see a high wooden tripod topped with the usual cartload of débris that constitutes a stork’s nest; for the stork, be it remembered, is the national bird of Holland, and if the farmhouse offers no suitable place, such as a chimney pot, for example, for the stork to build its summer home, the farmer is wont to court the luck that a nesting stork about the place is thought to be sure to bring, and builds a nesting place for it.