After a short struggle, my thirst overcame my lethargy, and I summoned enough energy to push a convenient electric button. No response. A second, and then a third push at the button. Still no response. As a drastic last resort, I arose with no little effort, and wended my angry way into the building to ascertain the cause for such delinquent service. I was approached by a gentleman who, having observed my impatience, had come to my rescue from his little secluded corner in the reading room. [Illustration: The best of Kampen’s gateways, of which architectural features the town originally possessed seven] In my very best Dutch--my vocabulary consists of some three or four words--I asked the gentleman where on earth the waiter might be in hiding. In his very best English the gentleman replied politely that the place was a private club and not a public grogshop. Whereupon, I could have accomplished an exit through any convenient keyhole without the least pinching. Near Zwolle, in a monastery on the Agnetenberg, reached after a drive of three or four miles from the town, lived and died Thomas à Kempis, the author of “The Imitation of Christ”--a work that has been translated into almost every tongue. A short ride in the train from Zwolle brings you to Kampen, on the broad Yssel at its point of discharge into the Zuyder Zee. It is Holland’s home town of ancient gateways, no less than three of which, leading out into the park that has superseded the old fortifications, are in excellent state of preservation and worthy of study from an architectural point of view. Originally the town possessed seven of these gates, and there might have been fourteen, had the City Council listened to a learned one of its members who arose at a certain meeting and proposed that they double the original number; for, he argued, had not each of the seven gates contributed its 10,000,000 florins a year to the town treasury in the shape of taxes upon merchandise and produce passing through it? Therefore, it would be a simple matter to double the town’s revenue, for all they had to do was to double the number of gates.